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Satan and disinformation: a profitable alliance in times of coronavirus

2020-06-01T12:23:29.163Z


An EU group specialized in hoaxes detects for the first time the repeated use of the devil to denounce world conspiracies


Summoning the demon and the symbolism that represents it, such as number 666, to denounce a hidden conspiracy that tries to dominate the world has allowed Fort Russ News , a pro-Russian website created by Serbian experts and hosted on American servers, to improve by 400% the traffic to its website since last March, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, as investigated by EU vs Disinformation. It is the first time that the European Union team specialized in combating the lies of Russian propaganda detects a repeated recourse to the religious idea of ​​Satan to misinform.

The allusions to the devil, in its Judeo-Christian meaning of prince of angels rebelling against God and embodiment of the spirit of evil, are "a rare guest in the disinformation database." According to the European expert group, of the 8,500 cases they have studied in the last five years, there are three mentions of "Lucifer" and seven of the "devil". One of the most famous is the claim that the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in April 2019 was the work of a "satanic ritual." But beyond these isolated examples, the use of the devil has not been detected until now insistently as the "driving force" of a plot of conspiracy.

In the past two months, Fort Russ News has looked for satanic symbols in the American elite, especially in the marriage between Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation is the second largest WHO donor after the United States — Donald Trump announced last Friday that it was withdrawing Washington from the World Health Organization because of its proximity to China. On May 13, according to UE vs Desinformación, the website published an article about the jewelry Melinda Gates had worn in a round of interviews. "Why exactly does he carry a crucifix upside down satanic?" Asked the publication, which explicitly stated that "people who currently run the United States worship various kinds of expressions of Satan."

Fort Russ News was until a few months ago a publication with secular content. His interest in allusions to the devil as the driving force behind America's ills coincides with the launch of his campaign against Microsoft founder Bill Gates, according to the analysis of EU vs. Disinformation. Hashtags like #Satanism, # Satanic, or # 666 (referring to the "number of the Beast" mentioned in the Book of Revelation ) are now frequent in Fort Russ News posts , which spread all the news about the Gates with the tag # GatesofHell (Gates of Hell). Fort Russ News has come to see the fiendish figure of 666 in Microsoft's patent number for a new sensor-based crypto mining system that converts physical or mental activity into energy for the computer. And even in US legislation, from which it appears, according to this website, that Washington intends "to create a unitary and totalitarian world government."

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"We live in a moment of informational chaos, with a lot of noise and few certainties," says Carme Colomina, expert in disinformation and global policies and researcher at CIDOB (Barcelona Center for International Affairs), who last Monday presented the monographic Disinformation and Power: the crisis of intermediaries. "Mark Thompson, the former BBC director, claimed that conspiracy theories need credulous readers," recalls Colomina, who claims that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic is a paradigm as a time of maximum uncertainty. And in the face of the prevailing "intermediary crisis" - governments, political parties, union liaisons or journalists are not trusted - a conspiracy theory "makes us feel safe, even more so if we think we think like the majority" .

As extravagant as it may be, such as attributing to the devil the origin of a supposed plot to dominate the world, this type of theories can be very “gratifying”, considers the professor of philosophy Daniel Innerarity, coordinator with Colomina of the CIDOB monograph on disinformation. "Conspiracy theories are successful because they reduce the world in a very simple way: it is easier to understand that there is an evil behind what is happening than to understand that it responds to a complex chain of concatenated errors," maintains the also director of the Institute of Democratic Governance (Globernance).

And there is no one and nothing more evil than Satan. It doesn't matter if Fort Russ News believes in the existence of hell and the devil. The data of this online publication , which since last March has multiplied its page views by four, show that resorting to the incarnation of evil works in times of maximum uncertainty.

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Source: elparis

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