I’ve been quoted recently in articles at The Verge and the Daily Beast. Both have to do with the chemical weapons being used in Syria.
There is a lot of disinformation being floated by Russia and its allies about both the Skripal poisoning and the Douma attack. Russia and Syria are now preventing international inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons from visiting the Douma site and taking samples. Russia has, of course, complained that proper samples haven’t been taken so nothing is proved about who used the chemical weapons. But no, you can’t come and take samples. That’s only one of their tactics. They throw multiple garbage stories out to confuse the issue. They’re doing it in the United Nations and conflate the Skripal poisoning and the Douma attack (spoiler: the UK did them both).
It’s a lot of work to refute them all, but Adam Rawnsley at the Daily Beast decided that this one was being used generally enough that it deserved debunking. His article also appears at Bellingcat, with different pictures.
Update (already!): Here’s a long thread that investigated Russian disinformation on the Skripal poisoning.
I downloaded recent tweets for the hashtag #Novichok, which started seeing significant traffic March 12th. This yielded 15371 tweets from 10668 accounts. I classified the top 50 accounts by retweet volume (74% of tweets in the set) based on their attribution of the attack. pic.twitter.com/EtpUWbmBYf
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) March 15, 2018