FBI defuses Kremlin fake news factory
In September, the infamous Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger was in the news again.
Doppelganger is a project aimed at spreading fake articles, videos, and polls on polarizing political and cultural issues in the United States, as well as France, Germany, and Ukraine that was first exposed in 2022.
The project cloned entire news organization websites, including logos and titles of real journalists, and inserted them in its own fake articles, memes, and cartoons, luring casual Internet users to the sites through often automated social media posts.
At the heart of this disinformation enterprise is SDA, the social design agency based a stone’s throw from the Kremlin.
The disinformation campaigns continued and to counter them, the US Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32 Internet domains that were behind the Doppelganger campaign and released a 277-page FBI document that included 190 pages of internal SDA documents believed to have come from US spies.
(MH with FM/Source: Foreign affairs/Photo: Mike Mac Marketing via wikiCommons under license Creative Commons CC BY 2.0.)