Sometime disinformation proceeds by suppressing the truth. According to the Intercept, Shutterstock seems to be the latest company to knuckle under to Chinese government demands that it block searches for items including, but not limited to, "Taiwan flag," "dictator," or "yellow umbrella."
The UK will hold its general elections this Thursday. Campaigns are being roiled in the last week by the documents Labour brandished to accuse the Conservatives of planning to sell the National Health Service to the US, which seems unlikely, to say the least. Or, put somewhat more plausibly, the documents are said to show that the Tory Government was planning to offer effective control of the NHS's place in the healthcare market to a set of US firms, the goal being, they say, to sweeten Britain’s offer during negotiation of a new UK-US trade deal.
Labour's leader Jeremy Corbyn is hanging tough, saying it's an important issue the Prime Minister has yet to address, and that, as the Guardian reports, Labour won't reveal where the documents came from. Besides, even if accusations that the documents were planted in Reddit by Russian operators. ZDNet has a useful account of what Reddit found, and it certainly walks and quacks like a katchka. Reddit found that the source of the documents was connected to a known Russian disinformation operation. "As a result of this investigation," Reddit said, "we are banning 1 subreddit and 61 accounts under our policies against vote manipulation and misuse of the platform." The disinformation campaign to which the accounts and subreddit were connected is known as "Secondary Infektion." Facebook took a swing at the same operators back in May.
But, says Labour and the Guardian, no one has yet made the case for the documents' inauthenticity. The Washington Post points to the incident with glum alarm as a "stark warning" for the US 2020 elections, if only because, as the Post puts it, "politicians are not exactly serving as a deterrent right now to would-be adversaries." So the week will prove interesting.