Russia and China have “clearly” colluded in propaganda and disinformation about the war in Ukraine, and the United States and the West have not invested enough over the years to counter that disinformation, a senior State Department official said Monday, according to CNN.

“The United States as a country, the West as a society, have been slow to accept and realize the extent to which China and Russia have made operations in the information space an integral part of their national goals,” the official told reporters.

The official said China and Russia have “spent tens of billions of dollars” on disinformation over the years, and “I think we barely realize it as a country and as a society.”

“I think it’s been talked about, but I don’t think we’ve put the resources and energy into it that we should have. And that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried,” the official said, adding that only in “recent years have we all seen the dark side of communications revolutions in digital technologies.”

“Meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese, in particular, were working on this dark side,” the official said.

A U.S. official noted that the war in Ukraine helped awaken the West to the issue, saying that “when democracies are awakened, as was the case with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, democracies showed their strength last year.”

“According to last year’s results, autocracies are weaker. Therefore, I think that when they are awakened, we will succeed, but we were not vigilant enough,” the official said.

They described Moscow and Beijing as an “echo chamber” and “feedback loop” to spread false narratives about the war and said they were “trying to gain more attention by exchanging narratives.”

The official suggested that these disinformation efforts were de facto state-sponsored because “in Russia and China, we generally believe that the major media operations are well coordinated by their governments.”

The official added that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which is responsible for countering foreign disinformation, published a report several years ago that found the Russian government “spreads disinformation at the highest levels of government” and that “the Chinese propaganda system operates at the highest levels of government.” .

The official said the head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) will travel to Eastern Europe “where there are operations that replicate and spread Russian disinformation” and talk to governments about how to “shut them down, mitigate or limit them.” ”, and not “wait for these people to repeat and publish them”. (photo: Dreamstime)

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