The Syrian civil war also created another kind of precedent. For the first time, one side in a conflict deliberately made international institutions and humanitarian aid workers a central focus of their war propaganda. The fire hose of falsehoods, Kremlin-backed writers disguised as journalists, and thousands of social media accounts familiar from other campaigns were repeatedly used to discredit the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was investigating the Syrian use of sarin gas and other chemicals, in order to claim that film or evidence of those attacks was fake or
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