MOSCOW, September 27. /TASS/. Volunteers of the Safe Internet League in recent days have found 4.2 million false stories on the Internet about Russia’s partial military mobilization and almost 2 million bogus reports about the referendums for the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to join Russia, Yekaterina Mizulina, the league’s director and a member of the Russian Civic Chamber, said on Tuesday.
"According to the results, [since September 22] 4.2 million false stories about the partial mobilization and 1.9 million bogus reports about the referendum have been discovered," she said.
For example, she said information is being spread that the Emergency Situations Ministry, in order to meet the mobilization plan, is calling up all firefighters, and there will be no one left to extinguish fires in the country.
"There is also misinformation that railway cars have been set ablaze in Donbass, killing Russians that had been called up. That’s not true: All those who were mobilized are on the territory of Russia," Mizulina said.
In addition, she continued, a falsehood is spreading that in the Pskov Region people are served call-up notices at traffic police outposts, and in the Belgorod Region the armed forces of Ukraine allegedly killed mobilized troops from Lipetsk.
"There is also a bogus report that following mass protests in Dagestan, partial mobilization has been canceled," Mizulina said.
In addition, she added, fake stories appeared that all subway drivers were called up in Moscow, hemostatic agents disappeared in pharmacies, and in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, men are allegedly handed call-up papers after they vote.
Mizulina said that a video made in Kyrgyzstan in 2017, where pens with disappearing ink are used at a polling station, has reappeared and "now it purports to show voting in Mariupol."
The Safe Internet League director highlighted that bogus reports are also spread by foreign politicians. For example, Mizulina said that the German foreign minister asserted that referendum participants are shot at, raped and vote at gunpoint.
"One gets the impression that by spreading such falsehoods, they simply consider everyone to be idiots," Mizulina said.
She also said that rabble-rousers are trying to exploit the ethnic agenda in Russia. For example, Mizulina said disinformation is actively being spread in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Buryatia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Yakutia, and among the Crimean Tatars in Crimea. "Tension is being whipped up in the area of interethnic and interreligious relations. The website of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Republic of Dagestan was hacked yesterday, and an alleged appeal by the commissioner to the people of Dagestan was posted that said the mobilization was genocide of the people of Dagestan and called for protests. The commissioner immediately denied that as fake," Mizulina said.
According to her, extremist calls for arson, protests, and murder are being very actively propagated.
"That brings up a lot of questions to the moderators of some platforms about why these calls are in the public domain," Mizulina said.