Russia is flooding Europe with disinformation. The U.S. elections are next.

[yardwork]

Gift article, no firewall: https://wapo.st/4bBT1Gi

With European parliamentary elections coming in June, Moscow has jumped into action.




In 2022, European monitors who track Russian disinformation spotted an ambitious online influence operation they called Doppelganger. The Moscow-run effort cloned the websites of legitimate newspapers, magazines and news services, including Britain’s Guardian and Germany’s Bild, posted replicas under similar domain names and filled them with Kremlin propaganda.


The campaign was not shocking, given Russia’s kitchen-sink efforts to manipulate Western public opinion. More surprising is that, at least two years after they were detected, Doppelganger’s phony sites continue popping up around the internet like mushrooms after a cloudburst, despite ongoing efforts to close them down.
The sites’ persistence reflects the flood of Russian interference — and the near-impossibility of monitoring it, let alone stopping it — ahead of elections next month for the European Parliament.

They’re also a foretaste of what Americans can expect in the fall’s presidential contest, in which Moscow will try to amplify the venomous clamor of U.S. politics.



Social media has made the distribution of disinformation and propaganda almost free. Now generative AI has slashed the cost of producing it in the run-up to the E.U. parliamentary voting between June 6 and 9, when some 200 million voters across the bloc’s 27 member states are expected at the polls.

[Irish_Dem]

1. Putin is desperate. He is going to fight hard to throw the election.

He is running out of options.

[MadameButterfly]

2. I wish desperation made him ineffective

All he has to do is shift elections a few percentage points and when your life depends on it....

Putin's attacks on western elections is an invasion. I wish we could treat it as such instead of just hoping his guy doesn't win.

[bdamomma]

7. Putin

wants revenge on everyone. He's a war criminal too. He wants to smear it in our faces, let's not let that happen.

[Irish_Dem]

8. Sociopaths are much more dangerous when cornered and desperate.

Yes Putin doesn't have to work that hard or spend much money to throw the election.

I agree, MB, I have been saying the same thing for some time now.

Putin and Xi are waging a brutal war against the US, a psy-ops war.

And we just ignore it and don't seem to care.

Putin and Xi installed Trump once into the WH, they can do it again.

[dalton99a]

3. Kick

[oldsoftie]

4. Next? They're already doing it in DROVES on twitter. I see it every day.

Just like they do with the UKR war

[Cha]

5. So Many EVIL FORCES Against Democracy! Both

ends of the Spectrum.

Link to tweet

[Scrivener7]

6. No question.

[lostnfound]

9. But in some ways, the distribution of INformation is NOT free

We are told repeatedly that ‘SOMEONE has to pay for it” — the production of news — and therefore subscriptions are needed, and basic information is hidden behind paywalls.
Yet MISinformation and propaganda are “almost free”.
Individuals may ask, “why trust anything?”

In the 60s and 70s, we paid nothing for the networks nor for the shows — one just needed the equipment (the TV and an antenna), yet we got news from Walter Cronkite and we weren’t charged a dime.