Authors: Sadia Afroz and Vibhor Sehgal.
On February 24, a conspiracy theory emerged that Russia attacked Ukraine to destroy a clandestine U.S. weapons program. This narrative, started by a QAnon follower on Twitter, quickly became one of the “official” reasons for invading Ukraine. The Russian Embassy in Sarajevo posted on Facebook about it. Since then, media networks in other countries – including China, India, and the US – started boosting the Biolabs conspiracy theory to millions of internet users. With the flurry of disinformation coming from Russia, the EU banned Russian government-backed websites.
