French youtuber and science writer Leo Grasset revealed su Twitter in mid-May to have received a strange proposal. A marketing agency had offered him a considerable amount to publish a themed video, with a very specific delivery: to show, numbers in hand, increased mortality among people who received Pfizer’s vaccine in France.
In the same period, the German scientific influencer Mirko Drotschmann receives an email with a similar offer to that of Grasset. The same influencer marketing agency (his name is Fazze) asks him to post a video on his channel from nearly 1.5 million followers which demonstrates the danger of the Pfizer vaccine compared to that of AstraZeneca.
The agency brief looks like it came out of a Disinformation Handbook targeted: the agency asks to start from an article published in Le Monde concerning the hacking of the servers of the EMA, the European Medicines Agency, and to link the fact (which actually happened) to a table with data on the mortality of patients obtained from different sources, taken out of context, e artfully aggregated to demonstrate the danger of the Pfizer vaccine. The all-too-obvious purpose is to suggest a link between the data theft and that table.
As soon as Drotschmann and Grasset unveil the offer of Fazze, the articles reported by the agency to the two youtubers disappear from the Web. Only that of Le Monde, used as an involuntary bridgehead, remains available online. Meanwhile 4 other influencers between France and Germany follow the example of their colleagues and publicly reveal that they have received the same proposal.
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Two youtubers accept the offer
In Europe the campaign jumps, but it hits the mark in India and Brazil: the German journalist Daniel Laufer, investigating Drotschmann and Grasset’s reports for Netzpolitik, he discovers the videos of the youtubers Everson Zoio and Ashkar Techy, who usually do not share any kind of scientific content. In two videos released in mid-May, they both come out of their character to show followers the data that Fazze was trying to spread on the channels of German and French influencers. In both cases, they do not reveal in any way that they have been paid or the real origin of those data. Just as Fazze had asked Drotschmann and Grasset to do, inviting them de facto to violate German and French laws on covert advertising.
The keystone of the whole operation is the table with the number of deaths related to vaccinations that Ashkar Techy and Everson Zoio show in the videos. According to the data relating to the Germany, those that Fazze had sent to Drotschmann, out of a million doses of Pfizer vaccine there would have been 29.9 deaths, compared to 6.5 deaths recorded among those who had received a vaccine AstraZeneca. Contacted by Laufer, the two youtubers did not respond and promptly deleted the offending videos.
No correlation
According to Paul Ehrlic Institute, a German body that deals with vaccine regulation, the data in the table are crude and misleading: “The figures for Germany, which are apparently based on data provided to the public by the Pei since the beginning of April, do not say how many people have died as a result of vaccination, as the headline claims, but only how many people died within 40 days of vaccination”Laufer explained in the investigation.
The numbers, in essence, they show no direct correlation between the vaccine and deaths registered by the German institution. As illustrated by the Pei, among the recorded deaths the average age was over 80 years and almost all were at high risk for their medical history. In other words, those deaths in the table are people who died within 40 days of vaccine administration, but generally from natural causes, illness or accidents. So why that stark difference in the number of deaths between Pfizer and Astrazeneca? Simple, because as it shows the graph below (which comes from Impfdashboard.de) in Germany, BioNTech / Pfizer’s Comirnaty is by far the most widely used vaccine.
In short, another gimmick from the textbook of disinformation: the numbers are real, but they are presented in a misleading way to get to create a fake news starting from concrete facts, but completely disconnected from each other.
Who is behind it
Fazze, the agency of influencing marketing who ran the campaign is actually just a facade of an operation that has clear links with Russia. The address of the London office in Fazze, 5 Percy Street in the Fitzrovia district, belongs to a so-called corporate mailbox, that is, a virtual office to which hundreds of companies are connected. A search with Google Street View shows the Company Formation Advice (formerly Company Advice) plaque at the address: the company, according to a BellingCat report on international recycling, has registered hundreds of Ltd with links to Russia in the UK, including many companies dealing with gambling, trading and forex, and other suspicious activities in general.
From the website of the British Company Register, where Fazze is not registered, however, it turns out that at the same address it was also founded in 2014. another marketing company, AdNow Llp. In the course of his investigation for Netzpolitik, Laufer discovered that the link between AdNow and Fazze is not that difficult to detect: many of the domains from which the agency operates, in fact, refer to Web properties that belong to AdNow, and so also emails sent to Fazze addresses.
Here the links with Russia become even more evident: AdNow was founded by an Englishman and the Russian Stanislav Fesenko in 2014. One of the employees, Vyacheslav Usoltsev, was listed on a LinkedIn profile now removed as the CEO of Fazze. Not only that: until 2018 the director of the Russian division of AdNow was Yulia Serebryanskaya, a veteran of political campaigns and marketing manager for United Russia, the majority party that supports Putin. Serebryanskaya, as illustrated by a RadioFreeEurope surveyhe also founded and directs an organization called the Russian Initiative, which aims to “promote the culture of Russia and represent its traditions and social achievements, rather than tolerate a distorted idea of the motherland”.
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The unknown client
What is the ultimate goal of this campaign, despite these obvious links with Russia, can only be speculated, because there are no direct traces of a involvement of other institutional principals. The most accepted theory is that the initiative is part of a series of operations aimed at promote the Sputnik V vaccine, given that some data from the Fazze campaign are curiously similar to the official materials for the promotion of the Russian-made drug. Meanwhile, the French and German authorities have launched independent investigations to try to understand who the AdNow client who commissioned the entire operation is.
What we already know is that the campaign that involved the two European youtubers is only the tip of the iceberg. There Google video platform and other social networks have now become the perfect targets all over the world for large-scale paid disinformation operations, and not just those focused on Covid vaccines. A market that according to security experts and analysts has exploded in recent years, thanks to a growing number of companies and international agencies capable of conducting global campaigns that were once the prerogative of spy agencies.
Bribing influencers and buying visibility on social networks for divisive positions or to spread targeted disinformation is just one of the tactics. There are the bot networks on Twitter, the fake accounts on Facebook, the anonymous interventions on Reddit, in a trend whose genesis, according to many experts in the sector, can be traced back to scandalo Cambridge Analytica The real difference between the pro-China campaigns in Taiwan, for example, or the pro-French or pro-Russian disinformation in the Central African Republic and the Fazze campaign is that so far few have tried to involve heavyweights of the caliber by Drotschmann and Grasset. A gross mistake for an experienced disinformation group, but one that inevitably leaves a question open: in how many other cases has the same tactic been successful and nobody noticed?
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