Nearly two months after this blog post was published, I was contacted by Zachary Fishman of NewsGuard, who wanted to let me know the following:
Dear Alexandra,I'm Zack Fishman, and I'm a reporter with NewsGuard, a service that reviews news and information websites for credibility and transparency. These reviews, which include a written summary and a checklist of nine criteria, are intended to help readers have more context for the news they read online.I'm currently updating our review of ForbiddenKnowledgeTV..com, and I wanted to ask you for comment on a recent article that appears to contain false claims, and whether you plan to correct the article.Specifically, the March 2022 article "Horrifying Russian Report: Ukrainian Biolabs Creating Special Bioweapons for Ethnic Cleansing" quoted Ariyana Love claiming that there are U.S.-run labs in Ukraine developing biological weapons, and that some being developed are ethnically targeted. "“So, one of the things they were doing in these biolabs was they figured out a way to selectively target specific ethnic groups,” the article said, quoting Love. “They can makes these weapons more lethal or less lethal to ethnic groups.” The article didn't challenge her claims. But there is no evidence that the U.S. is developing biological weapons in Ukrainian labs, although the Kremlin and Russian state-sponsored media have been making such claims since 2016. (NewsGuard has a thorough explanation on why it's not true on this page, under "MYTH: The U.S. has a network of bioweapons labs in Eastern Europe.") Moreover, experts say that biological agents are simply not capable of targeting specific groups based on their ethnicity. In a comment to the U.K.-based Science Media Centre, Oliver Jones, head of biosciences and food technology at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia, said: "This claim belongs purely in the realm of science fiction! Humans are just too genetically similar to find something that would affect only certain people and not others.… There is no way to make any sort of agent, biological or otherwise, that could affect one ethnic group and not others. It is just not going to happen.” (Other experts' reactions can be found here.)As a heads up, we incorporate quotes from our correspondences into our published reviews, so this conversation should be considered on the record.Thank you,--