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RU disinfo campaign can only use "X" for disinfo because it's the only one that doesn't remove Russian created content
John Sipher
A Russian disinfo campaign disclosed by the FBI argued that Twitter/X, had become “the only mass platform that could currently be utilized” in the United States."... because it was the only one that didn't remove Russian created content.
3:30 PM · Sep 30, 2024
A Russian disinfo campaign disclosed by the FBI argued that Twitter/X, had become “the only mass platform that could currently be utilized” in the United States."... because it was the only one that didn't remove Russian created content.
3:30 PM · Sep 30, 2024
Foreign Affairs (archived) - The Lies Russia Tells Itself
The Country’s Propagandists Target the West—but Mislead the Kremlin, Too
By Thomas Rid
September 30, 2024
In early September, the infamous Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger hit the news again. Doppelganger—a scheme to disseminate fake articles, videos, and polls about polarizing political and cultural issues in the United States, as well as in France, Germany, and Ukraine—was first exposed in 2022 and widely covered in the Western press. The project cloned entire news organizations’ websites—complete with logos and the bylines of actual journalists—and planted its own fake stories, memes, and cartoons, luring casual Internet users to the sites via social media posts, often automated ones.
Tech companies and research labs had carefully traced, documented, and often removed some of Doppelganger’s online footprints, and even exposed the private Moscow firm mostly responsible for the campaigns: the Social Design Agency (SDA). But the disinformation campaigns persisted, and on September 4, in a move to counter them, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32 Internet domains behind the Doppelganger campaign—and published an unprecedented 277-page FBI affidavit that included 190 pages of internal SDA documents likely sourced by American spies. Then, 12 days later, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that, in late August, it had received from an anonymous source, large amounts of authentic internal SDA documents. A day before the FBI released its affidavit and the accompanying files—some of which overlapped with the leaked ones—Süddeutsche Zeitung asked me to comment on the leak for its investigation, because I have researched and written about disinformation and political warfare for almost ten years. I inquired if its source might allow me to have the entire 2.4 gigabytes of leaked SDA documents, and the source agreed.
Until these recent disclosures—comprising more than 3,000 individual files—observers could mostly just speculate about the goals, specific methods and tradecraft, and bureaucratic procedures driving contemporary Russian disinformation campaigns. The FBI affidavit and the European media leak offered something unprecedented: a glimpse into the planning of one of the most notorious disinformation efforts in the post–Cold War era. Disinformation operators taking advantage of the Internet to disseminate propaganda to gullible users had been a major concern since at least 2015, when the efforts of a St. Petersburg troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency to inflame latent conflicts was exposed in the press, and Russian military intelligence deployed creative disinformation operations to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
Yet never had so many internal documents leaked from a major disinformation player. The recently disclosed material contains project plans, proposals, budgets, daily output targets, key performance indicators and quotas, progress reports, measures of effectiveness, private emails from disinformation operatives to government officials, the minutes of meetings held by the SDA’s overseers in the Kremlin, hundreds of media monitoring reports from target countries, thousands of archived fake stories, ideas for more fakes, and even a splashy promotional video it prepared for Russia’s Presidential Administration. Crucially, the leak contains not just final documents but works in all stages of progress. The granular operational insight that such documents offer is usually possible only decades after operations conclude, when declassified proposals and memos show up in intelligence archives or when ex-operators write memoirs.
/snip
The Country’s Propagandists Target the West—but Mislead the Kremlin, Too
By Thomas Rid
September 30, 2024
In early September, the infamous Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger hit the news again. Doppelganger—a scheme to disseminate fake articles, videos, and polls about polarizing political and cultural issues in the United States, as well as in France, Germany, and Ukraine—was first exposed in 2022 and widely covered in the Western press. The project cloned entire news organizations’ websites—complete with logos and the bylines of actual journalists—and planted its own fake stories, memes, and cartoons, luring casual Internet users to the sites via social media posts, often automated ones.
Tech companies and research labs had carefully traced, documented, and often removed some of Doppelganger’s online footprints, and even exposed the private Moscow firm mostly responsible for the campaigns: the Social Design Agency (SDA). But the disinformation campaigns persisted, and on September 4, in a move to counter them, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32 Internet domains behind the Doppelganger campaign—and published an unprecedented 277-page FBI affidavit that included 190 pages of internal SDA documents likely sourced by American spies. Then, 12 days later, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that, in late August, it had received from an anonymous source, large amounts of authentic internal SDA documents. A day before the FBI released its affidavit and the accompanying files—some of which overlapped with the leaked ones—Süddeutsche Zeitung asked me to comment on the leak for its investigation, because I have researched and written about disinformation and political warfare for almost ten years. I inquired if its source might allow me to have the entire 2.4 gigabytes of leaked SDA documents, and the source agreed.
Until these recent disclosures—comprising more than 3,000 individual files—observers could mostly just speculate about the goals, specific methods and tradecraft, and bureaucratic procedures driving contemporary Russian disinformation campaigns. The FBI affidavit and the European media leak offered something unprecedented: a glimpse into the planning of one of the most notorious disinformation efforts in the post–Cold War era. Disinformation operators taking advantage of the Internet to disseminate propaganda to gullible users had been a major concern since at least 2015, when the efforts of a St. Petersburg troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency to inflame latent conflicts was exposed in the press, and Russian military intelligence deployed creative disinformation operations to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
Yet never had so many internal documents leaked from a major disinformation player. The recently disclosed material contains project plans, proposals, budgets, daily output targets, key performance indicators and quotas, progress reports, measures of effectiveness, private emails from disinformation operatives to government officials, the minutes of meetings held by the SDA’s overseers in the Kremlin, hundreds of media monitoring reports from target countries, thousands of archived fake stories, ideas for more fakes, and even a splashy promotional video it prepared for Russia’s Presidential Administration. Crucially, the leak contains not just final documents but works in all stages of progress. The granular operational insight that such documents offer is usually possible only decades after operations conclude, when declassified proposals and memos show up in intelligence archives or when ex-operators write memoirs.
/snip
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