Disinformation – 99 Youtubers Vs Anti Vaxxers
A crazy story has come out recently after a marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinformation about Covid-19 Vaccines. However, it went south after the influencers went public with the attempt to recruit them.
A German and journalist YouTuber called Mirko Drotschmann, said that it started with an email. He usually ignores offers from brands asking him to use his audience to advertise their products to his 1.5 million audience. The sponsorship he received however was a bit different.
Spreading Disinformation
The influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay Mirko to promote what they claimed was leaked information about the Pfizer vaccine. That it had a death rate almost 3 times that of AstraZeneca. The information that was provided to him was not true. He was being asked to spread disinformation to undermine public confidence in vaccines.
“I was shocked,” Mirko told the BBC, “then I was curious, what’s behind all that?”
It was not just in Germany, in France, science YouTuber Léo Grasset had received a similar offering. The agency offered him 2000 euros to take part in the scheme. Fazze claimed that they were acting for a client who had asked to remain anonymous. Léo told the BBC that this alone was a red flag.
Both the YouTubers were appalled. However they pretended to be interested in order fo find out more. They were then given detailed instructions about what they should say in the videos.
Brief
The brief instructed them to act like you have passion and interest in the topic. Not to mention that it was a sponsor and to pretend as if they were giving out advice, out of concern for their viewers.
In stilted English, the brief instructed them to “Act like you have the passion and interest in this topic. Social media platforms have rules in place which mean that influencers have to state when their content is sponsored. In France and Germany it is also illegal not to state something is sponsored when it in fact is.
Fazze’s brief told the influencers to share a story in the French newspaper Le Monde. Regarding a data leak in the European Medicines Agency. The story was genuine, however, it didn’t;t include anything about vaccine deaths. Yet in the context it would give the false impression that the statistic had in fact come from the leak.
Out of Context
While the data the influencers were asked to share was information that came from many different sources and taken out of context.
It presented the number of people who had died in several countries some time after receiving the different COVID vaccines. Though just because someone dies after having a vaccine it doesn’t mean they died as a result of the vaccine.
In the countries that the statistics were from, a greater number of people had received the Pfizer vaccine at the time. So the number of those dying after having a Pfizer jab was to be expected.
“If you don’t have any scientific training, you could just say, ‘oh, there are these numbers, they are really different. So there must be a link.’ But you can make any spurious correlation as you want really,” Léo told the BBC.
Both the influencers were given links to share with their audience. The articles all used the same dubious sets of data which implied that the Pfizer vaccine was dangerous to humans.
Exposure
Both Léo and Mirko exposed the campaign from Fazze on Twitter. All of the articles that they were asked to share, disappeared from the web. The only one that remained was the article in Le Monde. The exposure lead to 4 other influencers in Germany and France going public about Fazze’s attempts to spread disinformation.
Daniel Läufer, a German Journalist has however, identified two influencers who may have taken up Fazze on the offer.
Indian YouTuber Ashkar Techy who creates jokey videos about cars and dating and Brazilian prankster Everson Zoio.
Daniel discovered that each of them had posted seemingly uncharacteristic videos in which they pushed the same message that was asked of Léo and Mirko. Both of them had also participated in previous Fazze promotions.
Daniel contacted them and both YouTubers removed their videos, but didn’t answer any of his questions.
Digging deeper.
The BBC tried to email those who approached Mirko and Léo. The emails bounced back from a company called AdNow. Fazze is a part of AdNow. AdNow is a digital marketing company that is registered in the UK and Russia.
The BBC tried to contact AdNow by phone, email and a letter to their Moscow headquarters, but to no avail.
The BBC did however, manage to contact Ewan Tolladay. He is one of two directors of the British arm of AdNow. Mr Tolladay said he had very little to do with Fazze. He said that Fazze was a joint venture between him and a Russian man called Stanislav Fesenko – and another person whose identity he didn’t know.
Ewan told the BBC that he hadn’t been a part of the disinformation campaign. He didn’t even know that Fazze had taken on the contract and couldn’t tell the BBC who the mystery client was. Ewan told the BBC that they were going to do the “responsible thing and shutting down AdNow here in the UK”. He also said that Fazze was also being shut down.
The BBC tried to get Mr Fesenko to talk to us but had no success. Since the story broke the French and German authorities were launching investigations into Fazze’s approach to influencers. The client remains unclear.
Russia
There were speculation that there was some Russian connection to the scandal. The interests of the Russian state in promoting it’s own vaccine. Sputnik V. Omid Nouripour, the foreign policy spokesman for the German Green party, suggested that they should be looking to Moscow for the motivation behind the Fazze campaign.
He said: “Bad-mouthing vaccines in the West undermines trust in our democracies and is supposed to increase trust in Russia’s vaccines, and there is only one side that benefits and that is the Kremlin.”
But in a statement the Russian embassy in London said: “We treat Covid-19 as a global threat and, thus, are not interested in undermining global efforts in the fight against it, with vaccinating people with the Pfizer vaccine as one of the ways to cope with the virus.”
Fazze’s campaign failed but Léo Grasset believes it won’t be the last time someone attempts to use influencers to spread disinformation.
“If you want to manipulate public opinion, especially for young people, you don’t go to TV”
“Just spend the same money on TikTok creators, YouTube creators. The whole ecosystem is perfectly built for maximum efficiency of disinformation right now.” said French YouTuber Léo Grasset.
(BBC)
Disclaimer:
This is not about whether or not you should take the vaccine for covid 19 but more about the potential manipulation of the audiences of high profile content creators.
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