- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
New court documents reveal that Russia is keeping a very, very long list of influencers to spread its propaganda.
The Russian disinformation plot revealed in a Justice Department indictment this week may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to newly unsealed court documents.
On Wednesday, the DOJ announced it would seize 32 internet domains linked to a larger Kremlin scheme to promote disinformation and influence the 2024 election. The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, uses AI-generated content to create “fake news” boosted through social media with the aim of electing Donald Trump.
…
Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.
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The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.
Well, why not? Name and shame all of them. Normal political ads are required to tell you who paid for them (even if they only do it in the fine print). There’s no reason not to hold these schmucks to the same standard just because it’s TikTok vids or whatever instead of magazine or TV ads.
Not a lawoligist, but I suspect they plan on pressing charges ;-)
This is a list of people “to monitor and potentially groom”. You can’t exactly charge someone with “being monitored”.
Not to say collaboration isn’t happening—it sounds like it absolutely is, but this is not the list of collaborators.
Fair point. In my defense I hit a paywall and just kind of gave up, did a bit of assuming there 😅
Wont be in time for the election though, so the damage will be done
I feel like they already got their money’s worth on interfering with elections.
They nabbed up several former Soviet republics and then publicly humiliated the states with the 2016 American election.
Say what you want about Putin, be he’s a helluva spy.
Say what you want about Putin, be he’s a helluva spy.
He’s so good that when he got intel that Kiev would fall in 3 days, he didn’t bother to check the validity of that info and instead went on confidently to…not take Kiev at all.
So: I’ll say what I want about Putin. He’s a monster, a liar, a thief, an unimaginative, uncreative leader, a terrible commander, and a shit spy. Putin lucked out on a saving roll. Period. Don’t elevate him any higher than the mud he walks on.
The 2015 propaganda campaign was a thing to watch though. I expected it to be more of a historical landmark by now. Instead, we’re still living it.
Guaranteed they are all over the Fediverse and probably hosting their own instances.
Yes but… Fediverse has more moderators and even server level bans where we can fight back.
It’s a different political makeup here on the Fediverse. It’s not like the Russians can hand money to just one or two CEOs and suddenly all of the moderators we trust here turn to the other side.
We need to keep our wits about us here. We came to Lemmy (and Fediverse) because centralized commercial control of our discussion spaces led to perverse incentives.
I only consider this political situation to be yet another test of the Fediverse. We have to survive it. But I also believe we moved to the Fediverse because we all believe we can do more about disinformation or malicious actors here on the Fediverse than on… Reddit or Facebook.
There are a few obvious ones around but it’s against the rules to even suggest that they could be shills or bots. Hopefully this news will get the mods to start taking action against the most blatant ones.
I, for one, will not return to allowing that particular guy back on my feed.
Where are my republican “there is no Russian influence in the election” now?
And centrists will imagine that all of it is localized entirely on lemmy, in the form of anyone to their left.
terrifying scale
barely a percentage point compared to the fossil fuel industry’s war on Green Energy
I suppose you could reasonably argue that Rex Tillerson and Vladimir Putin were already joined at the hip. But the US advertising and influencing industry is vast - $515B annually and growing. The Russians aren’t even in the top ten of foreign influence peddlers. FFS, the Saudis bought golf.
Yes, what about this thing that has nothing to do with the subject of Russia influencing elections?
What’s terrifying about buying off a couple of podcasters? The scale is dwarfed by any number of other countries.
Well Russia is part of that fossil fuel industry too, and they also hire lobbyists to push fossil fuels
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it
Saudis aren’t trying to get Trump elected and directly meddle in the election.
And sure, the Saudis whitewash themselves and try to make us forget about Jamal. But Russia influence is really bad.
I’m not necessarily against foreign influence. Ukrainians have a right to make their case to us for example. But the Russian style disinfo is leading to conspiracy theories and a degeneration of our society.
Lol yes they are. They’re part owners of Twitter, which became a pro-Trump cesspool. That alone is orders of magnitude bigger than this Russian thing.
Saudis aren’t trying to get Trump elected
The Israelis are, though.
But Russia influence is really bad.
US business interests have more influence over Russian foreign policy than Russians have on the US.
Russia is quite sanctioned, and the remaining US Business interest in Russia was looted / stolen by the Russians.
The business connection between USA and Russia is basically gone. Most (IE Elon Musk) are now making huge moves towards China now.
What remains are RT and other Russian disinfo groups
The business connection between USA and Russia is basically gone.
Clearly not, or Russians wouldn’t be able to slide cash into the pockets of social media influencers so easily.
Clearly not, or Russians wouldn’t be able to slide cash into the pockets of social media influencers so easily.
They didn’t. They got caught by the FBI and now we have massive news articles proving Russian influence. They literally just got caught, despite their best efforts at hiding.
Now comes the hard work at figuring out which of these 2800 influencers are fucking traitors… and which ones were just caught up in the mess. But someone in there had to have known that Russian money was part of this scheme.
They got caught by the FBI
After paying off the podcasters
Yes. That is how crimes work. The crime happens and then the FBI looks at you afterwards.
Are you… American? This crap is taught at grade school level.
barely a percentage point compared to the fossil fuel industry’s war on Green Energy
That’s not really relevant in this context, though, is it? Maybe a better comparison would be 2024 election spending by foreign-connected PACS. According to opensecrets.org, the “nearly $10 million” allegedly distributed by RT employees is equivalent to the sum of all other foreign pac money donated to the GOP this cycle. It’s certainly not “dwarfed by any other country” as you spuriously claimed.
Saudi sportswashing and other shenanigans are also cause for concern. That in no way lessens the severity of this problem.
That’s not really relevant
It’s illustrative of a system of “influencing” that Americans drown in daily. Russian propaganda peddlers are peeing into the sewer.
The panic is over the “Russian”-ness of this media. But the machine that manufacturers consent is merely on loan.
Why now, FBI?
I don’t know how we are supposed to just think “oh what a co-inky-dink”. Maybe I’m missing some timeline stuff here but I keep seeing DOJ action based on unsealed FBI stuff. Great, but when was it sealed? They probably have sealed documents that say the sky is blue too.
Edit: ok then. It’s just asking why we see action now when we’ve all know it for a long time. Carry on.
☝️ Found one
Nice pitchfork.
About damn time. Could have used this 8+ years ago. Might have stopped Drump’s term in office.
The only person who did anything helpful got sent to jail (reality winner)
still haven’t got used to that being her actual name.
To me, this is the most interesting bit of the article
They targeted gamers and chatroom users, who they described as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet,” [ … ]
We can kind of keep tabs on X or Facebook, but what goes down in Discord gamer chats is largely out of sight. I wish someone could drag more of this content out into the light of day where we could all see it.
You think Microsoft can’t keep tabs on what’s said in discord servers?hmm nevermind, looks like that purchase did not go through. Still, they can absolutely monitor discord chat, and even voice chat. It is relatively common these days to have voice recordings transcribed automatically into text files, saved, and searchable. Even video games do that these days. Overwatch in particular does this for certain because they announced so with the release of Overwatch 2. I would assume all Blizzard games do this by now.Oh, sure, whatever corporate overlords are involved have unfettered access, but they’re unlikely to analyze that data from a public safety perspective. Unhinged players are addicted to their products and no interest in making anything public that could cut into their profits.
You absolutely don’t want to see half the shit said in discord.
It’s all awful.
That’s why I want someone to summarize a sanitized version for me … so I have some sort of heads up on the next trend in stochastic terrorism without having to pluck my eyes out.
a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes
It is despicable but remember that they only paid right wing trolls to do what they were already doing. This is how modern corruption works. Conservative and reactionary talk radio all across the US works like this. The only reason the GOP is so successful in rural areas is they are doing the exact same shit Russia is doing. Fund extremists to continue their bullshit. You don’t need a “Quid Pro Quo”, you just need to pick the right weirdos to boost.
And if you think this is terrifying, think of not just what leftists think of this inside the US, think of what people all around the world think of the US election interference. For decades and decades the US has interfered and overthrown democracies. They did in Euromaidan too.
So yeah, fuck Russia, just realize many countries rightfully think the same about the USA.
I would say election interference still mostly works in the “all the world trying to somehow affect US” way as opposed to “US interfering with some country’s elections”.
Simply because affecting the power balance in the metropoly is much more rewarding.
Russia is a scarecrow.
First, it’s not new and even USSR during fscking Cold War would fund and influence the so-called progressive youth (not what’s called progressive now) and parts of the Democratic Party. I guess that Biden guy stopped being a Soviet asset long before being elected president, but he definitely was at some point.
Second, Russian meddling is not even comparable to Israeli, Turkish, Saudi meddling. The problem is that they seem to agree with each other and often cooperate these years.
Third, it’s not even a big deal, we know that politics involve such meddling. They wouldn’t think the same about the USA if it would show some responsibility. Restore Iraq after fscking it up. Investigate war crimes and give some justice to their victims after that invasion. Protect Georgia against Russia. I guess the Marshall plan was for white Europeans only (it’s funny BTW, people in ex-USSR in 1991 apparently expected that something like that will be attempted, but USA worked to cement the ex-Soviet elites and to help them neuter actual grassroots movements instead), but at least fixing things that wouldn’t be broken without USA seemed logical.
Restore Iraq after fscking it up. Investigate war crimes and give some justice to their victims after that invasion. I guess the Marshall plan was for white Europeans only (it’s funny BTW, people in ex-USSR in 1991 apparently expected that something like that will be attempted, but USA worked to cement the ex-Soviet elites and to help them neuter actual grassroots movemen
Uh… the US tried to restore Iraq, it didn’t go well. Nation building is hard and the US isn’t particularly good at it. Calling on the US to do more nation building probably isn’t a good idea.
Protect Georgia against Russia.
Currently weakening the Russian military in Ukraine. Do you want to broaden the war?
guess the Marshall plan was for white Europeans only (it’s funny BTW, people in ex-USSR in 1991 apparently expected that something like that will be attempted, but USA worked to cement the ex-Soviet elites and to help them neuter actual grassroots movements instead), but at least fixing things that wouldn’t be broken without USA seemed logical.
Are you saying the Eastern Europeans aren’t white? Or that no money was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq? There’s a difference between rebuilding allies and rebuilding while engaging in combat with a a resistance.
It doesn’t seem to be a lot of thought in this particular “US bad” narrative. There are real criticisms to be made of US foreign policy but you’re missing them all by a longshot. Maybe consider that the US isn’t some nation of supermen that is capable of solving all of the world’s problems but it just doesn’t want to. It’s more accurate to say the US isn’t actually capable of solving many of the problems in the world, and tends to make a lot of messes by misunderstanding other countries and it’s own capabilities.
You’ve skipped half or more of what I wrote. Especially about not putting in jail people who committed war crimes in Iraq and about supporting people like Putin against everyone else in the ex-USSR in the 90-s.
I’m not talking about nation building under American control, but killing a million of a country’s population warrants reparations, international courts, official apologies (real ones) …
Currently weakening the Russian military in Ukraine. Do you want to broaden the war?
In 2008, not currently.
It doesn’t seem to be a lot of thought in this particular “US bad” narrative. There are real criticisms to be made of US foreign policy but you’re missing them all by a longshot. Maybe consider that the US isn’t some nation of supermen that is capable of solving all of the world’s problems but it just doesn’t want to. It’s more accurate to say the US isn’t actually capable of solving many of the problems in the world, and tends to make a lot of messes by misunderstanding other countries and it’s own capabilities.
Yes, if you replace what I said with weird imagined things.
It doesn’t take to be a nation of supermen to stop arming Turkey, Israel, Azerbaijan, put sanctions on them and forget they are of the same species.
And it seems to actually be close to “some nation of supermen” when supporting the bad guys. There’s definitely some beef to US’s capabilities when it wants to fuck something up and arm cannibals.
It’s not that hard to not act. The problem with the US is that it does bad things, not that it doesn’t do good things. But if it just can’t play hegemon differently, then it could at least try to clean up sometimes.
Somebody should take a long look at 🦚CNBC as well
What a completely idiotic right wing Trumper comment
Laughs in AIPAC
