The Ministry of Defense will have a special structure that will monitor misinformation on the Internet and the media. This is done with the completely new organizational regulations for the activities of the Information Center at the department, which has already been promulgated in the State Gazette.
The information center will monitor and analyze “hybrid information attacks and disinformation campaigns directed against the military and against national security and defense policy.”
The observation will be on “classic” and modern media.
The center will provide daily, weekly and monthly reports on how DoD policy has impacted target audiences. The director of the information center, Vladimir Milenski, assured the deputies from the defense commission that the activity will not lead to censorship, BNR reported.
At the beginning of his mandate, Defense Minister Todor Tagarev said that the low interest in the military profession was also due to disinformation campaigns.
Before the turnaround committee, the minister recalled that he had submitted to the Council of Ministers a concept for the implementation of an information policy in defense. We are looking for modern solutions, he said and specified that the monitoring will be done with software.
BSP MPs in the defense committee expressed concern that the new activities in the ministry imply and “temptations … for a depoliticized structure such as the army to become an instrument of political influence”.
The ministry assured that the “Bulgarian Army” newspaper will not be closed with the changes. And employees of the stinking channel will work “several things at the same time” or “radically different things”.
For weeks, however, there have been unofficial reports of intense tension among the center’s staff.
