Youtubers and influencers have announced in several countries that a British agency has offered them money to criticize the Biotech vaccine. Traces lead to Russia.
Mistrust of vaccines is a global problem in the fight against the corona pandemic. In several EU countries, including Germany, it has now been announced that a London PR agency is said to have offered influencers and other social media personality’s money in order to sow doubts about the Pfizer Biotech vaccine in videos and posts.
Precise instructions on what to say in posts and videos
The French youtuber Léo Grasset, known as Dirty Biology, and the German youtuber Mirko Drotschmann, known as MrWissen2Go, published excerpts from letters from a PR agency called Fazze, which also gave detailed instructions on what to say.
All content should not be labeled as paid advertising by the influencers, but rather presented to the viewers as personal advice. Due to the lack of labeling, influencers in Germany would have violated the Telemedia Act – and could be warned.
EMA hack should be presented as a source
According to the French news site “Numerama “and the British “Guardian “, the influencers were supposed to point to a hacking attack on the European Medicines Agency (EMA) as the source for their supposedly exclusive information.
There was actually a hack on the EMA – ZDFheute also reported about it in mid-January. However, the documents released by hackers at the time did not contain any information on deaths after vaccination.
Evidence quickly disappeared from the web
A table of deaths from different vaccines, allegedly created and leaked by AstraZeneca, should also be shown. The Fazze instructions included links to various social media sites where this table was posted in the past few days.
Noticeable: the account that published the graphic on the Reddit platform, for example, was brand new. Since the Fazze agency began reporting, several of these posts linked in the instructions, including the one on Reddit, have been deleted. The agency has also switched off many of its online presences or made them private.
It is therefore possible that the agency or other people are working with falsified documents or deliberately providing false information about the real EMA hack in order to convince people of the authenticity of their information. After they became known, they tried to cover up digital traces.
Who is behind the agency in London?
The Fazze agency contacted him earlier with advertising inquiries, for the first time in September 2019, says Mirko Drotschmann ZDFheute. However, it was never about sensitive issues such as vaccines. Drotschmann reports that Fazze employees could only speak broken English during his most recent interaction.
On their website, Fazze gave an address in the London borough of Fitzrovia. On Facebook, she gave an address in a slightly dilapidated office building in the eastern part of Barking. The company is not officially registered in the UK Companies House. A Facebook page has existed since spring 2020.
Various people who identify themselves as Fazze employees on the LinkedIn career page have connections to Russia or live there. The majority of them named the Russian marketing agency AdNow Media as previous employers.
In contrast to Fazze, about whose previous projects virtually no information is available online, AdNow is a large company with several international locations. The “Wall Street Journal ” reports that Fazze identified itself as a subsidiary of AdNow on a Russian job platform.
What is the campaign strategy?
For Jakub Kalensky, an expert on disinformation at the Atlantic Council think tank, Fazze’s approach is similar to previous disinformation campaigns by the Russian state. However, there is still no solid evidence of interference by the Russian state.
“There is evidence that they work with bloggers and influencers – but so far mostly in countries that border closer to Russia,” says Kalensky ZDFheute. It wouldn’t be the first time the Kremlin has tried a strategy in its neighborhood and then exported it. “Their strategy is to blur the sources of information. Using hacked or leaked data is also one of their tactics.”
For success it is enough to sow doubts
According to Kalensky, actually convincing people of such misinformation and disinformation is not the primary goal: “In the end, the target group of such operations usually says: ‘Everyone says something different, I will never find out the truth.’ This is the best possible result for information aggressors. “
In response to the revelations in France, French Health Minister Olivier Veran told BFM-TV on Tuesday: “This is pathetic, it is dangerous, it is irresponsible and it will not work.”
