Prague, June 9 (CTK) – Governments and democratic parties must explain their steps to the public, otherwise people would start seeking other solutions and succumbing to populist parties under the influence of propaganda, Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said at a seminar on disinformation campaigns today.
The seminar was organised by the Interior Ministry in the Senate, the upper house of parliament.
“A pen is sometimes much more powerful than a sword, and propaganda is in fact the sword of the present time,” Chovanec (Social Democrats, CSSD) said.
He said a Centre for Terrorism and Hybrid Threats will start operating within the Interior Ministry as of next year, with the task to fight the spreading of untrue information.
Chovanec gave Islamic State’s campaigns as an example of a hybrid threat.
A part of the new centre’s 30-strong staff could focus on analysing disinformation from open sources including social networks, and their refuting.
Senator and former interior minister Frantisek Bublan said the goal of propaganda is to challenge order as well as historical facts and then come up with its own ideology.
Nevertheless, the fight against propaganda must not swell excessively and lead to a situation where “we would monitor and ban everything,” Bublan said.
Jakub Janda, from the European Values NGO that has assisted in the national security audit initiated by Chovanec, presented 11 recommendations of how to enhance security, including the establishment of the above centre, the protection of free media and the withdrawal of licences and accreditations from propagandist foreign media.
It is also necessary to work on uncovering those behind particular disinformation projects and make them untrustworthy by confronting them with facts, Janda said.
He said some 40 disinformation websites actively operate in the Czech Republic.
