Responding to the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’: Foreign information influence activities in Europe and national countermeasures
On Friday 18 June 2021, we organized a workshop in which practitioners and scholars discussed the inception of a new research project on foreign influence campaigns in Europe related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The workshop was hosted by Joachim Koops (Professor Security Studies and Scientific Director of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University), Sophie Vériter (Associate Fellow at our program and Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University), Senior Fellow Dennis Broeders and Postdoctoral Researcher Monica Kaminska.
The objective was to gather feedback on a series of national reports before incorporating our findings into policy-oriented and academic publications, as well as stimulate interdisciplinary work on the topic of influence activities. Corneliu Bjola (Oxford University), Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer (IRSEM), Elsa Hedling (Lund University), Tamás Peragovics (ELRM), Péter Kállai (ELTE) and Semir Dzebo (CEU) presented findings from their national reports on France, United Kingdom, Hungary, Serbia and Sweden, which were then discussed during various feedback rounds with a group of invited experts from academia, think tanks and policy.