GIOR Editor: Shift in Russia/China Reporting to Primary Sources

Octo­ber 6, 2022 The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) would like to announce a major shift in how we will report on Russian/Chinese influ­ence oper­a­tions. Until now, we have been over­whelmed with the flood of open source intel­li­gence on these sub­jects, par­tic­u­lar­ly since the advent of the war in Ukraine. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we nev­er devel­oped clear selec­tion cri­te­ria for decid­ing on which of this intel­li­gence to report, and we believe that the result has been too eclec­tic for our tastes. Accord­ing­ly, in the future, the GIOR will con­cen­trate less on sec­ondary sources such as aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies and think tank reports and more on pri­ma­ry sources, usu­al­ly defined as “a first-hand or con­tem­po­rary account of an event or top­ic.”  It is an exper­i­ment, but we are excit­ed about the pos­si­bil­i­ties and hope the result will make our Russia/Chinese cov­er­age more unique­ly valu­able for fol­low­ers of these cat­e­gories. Please let us know what you think by using the Con­tact Form. (If you don’t want such com­ments pub­lished for some rea­son, indi­cate that in your mes­sage, and we will respect your wishes.).