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Tag: disinformation

  • Laura Loomer Is MAGA at Its Most Extreme—and She’s Closer to Donald Trump Than Ever

    Laura Loomer Is MAGA at Its Most Extreme—and She’s Closer to Donald Trump Than Ever

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    Loomer’s links to the Trump campaign in 2020 appeared to run deeper than just an endorsement. Mediaite reported at the time that the Trump campaign was using Loomer’s email list to solicit donations, and a Trump campaign fundraising email sent in January 2020 sent from ‘2020 Illoominate Media,’ a media firm owned by Loomer.

    Loomer also ran for Congress again in 2022 in a different Florida district—this time without Trump’s endorsement—but failed to win her Republican primary.

    In April 2023, the New York Times reported that Trump had tried to hire Loomer to be part of his reelection campaign team, but the idea was ditched following outrage from some of the former president’s biggest supporters. Several months after the New York Times report was published, Loomer posted a video of herself with Trump on X, captioned: “Best President Ever. I love him so much.” Trump reciprocated, calling Loomer “terrific” and “very special,” adding: “You are a very opinionated lady, I have to tell you that. And in my opinion, I like that.”

    Not everyone in Trumpworld hates her, either. In October, Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller appeared on Loomer’s show on Rumble, and said to her: “I love what you’re doing.” Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign advisor, also praised Loomer, writing on X: “Laura is a great journalist and a great American.”

    In November, Donald Trump Jr. said he would “love to see” Loomer appointed as his father’s press secretary “just to watch DC just explode.” Loomer responded by saying she would “gladly accept” and that “nobody will fight for President Trump harder or defend him against the fake news media harder than I will.”

    A few months later, Loomer traveled on Trump’s plane when he visited Iowa on a campaign stop in early January. Her associations with Trump didn’t stop her conspiracy-addled posts: while there, she claimed the attack on the Capitol was an “inside job” and wrote on X, “Personally, I think J6 should be a national holiday in which we celebrate the bravery of American patriots who protested a stolen election.”

    Trump’s support of Loomer is well documented, even by Loomer herself. The official Trump campaign website has shared articles from Loomer’s own site on multiple occasions, including several articles attacking the judges overseeing Trump’s various criminal trials. When Loomer posted a video of her badgering Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s campaign challenger, the former president shared it. He shares a lot of what she writes, including her false claim that she obtained a copy of Harris’ birth certificate that does not say the vice president is American or Black. “Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been,” Loomer wrote in a post on Truth Social, which Trump shared on the platform.

    “Every time President Trump sees me, he always says, ‘You’re so smart. I love your site so much. You’re so intelligent. I love your articles. … I read your website every day,’” Loomer said on her Loomer Unleashed podcast.

    Unlike a lot of other far-right figures in Trump’s orbit, Loomer does not appear to be playing politics. She doesn’t couch her hatred in coded language to appear more mainstream, and though this has led to her being ostracized by many right wing figures, Trump has stayed loyal.

    “She was largely a joke among the far right, who saw her antics as cringe and over done,” Joan Donovan, an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University tells WIRED. This is exactly what Trump wants, Donovan says: “She is willing to say the quiet part out loud. She is known for the kind of incendiary and bigoted rhetoric that Trump is told by political strategists would sink his chances of winning.”

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  • Here’s What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Talked About in Tenet Media Videos Allegedly Financed by Russia

    Here’s What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Talked About in Tenet Media Videos Allegedly Financed by Russia

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    In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.

    Using closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:

    The content of these videos was described by prosecutors as “consistent” with Russia’s aims to sow political discord in the US. Among the areas covered: free speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, supposed racism toward white people, and Elon Musk.

    While an indictment unsealed earlier this week does not name Tenet, WIRED and other outlets were able to identify it because prosecutors gave its motto as that of a business identified as “U.S. Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of the state-backed Russian network RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Tenet and its parent company $9.7 million to produce and distribute videos supporting Russian aims. The vast majority of that money allegedly went to Tenet’s network of popular influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.

    The influencers—who have not responded to requests for comment (Johnson, Pool, Rubin, and fellow talents Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen issued statements denying awareness of the alleged Russian influence scheme and portraying themselves as its victims)—are not accused by the government of wrongdoing. Prosecutors say that right-wing personality Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who founded Tenet—the two, who have not been charged with any crime, go unnamed in the indictment, but are tied to the business through corporate records—were aware they were working with Russians and failed to register “as an agent of a foreign principal, as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who were not indicted, did not inform the influencers or other Tenet employees about the source of their funding.

    Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, using fake personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting by [Tenet] of hundreds of videos,” the indictment says. The indictment does not identify specific videos as allegedly influenced by the RT employees, but prosecutors say they were intimately involved in Tenet’s editorial process: “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

    To determine what specifically the Russian government is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 longform videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you can access the file here—and used natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts represent nearly every longform video available on the channel. We were not able to analyze approximately 1600 YouTube shorts before the channel was removed from the site. We analyzed the data looking for the most frequently occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in each video, excluding words like “um” that don’t carry much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)

    This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine war—the word “Ukraine” appears in the transcripts 67 times, about as often as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like “Trans Widows Are A Thing And It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Biological But Gender Isn’t???” The word “trans” appears 152 times, and “transgender” 98.

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  • DOJ: Russia Aimed Propaganda at Gamers, Minorities to Swing 2024 Election

    DOJ: Russia Aimed Propaganda at Gamers, Minorities to Swing 2024 Election

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    The documents show that the orchestrators of the campaign targeted existing divisions within US society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to target supporters of former President Donald Trump.

    ​​”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”

    The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color.” It adds that white middle class people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”

    And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.

    The ‘Good Old USA’ plan openly admits that “none of the significant American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so rather than focus its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the US should be focusing its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gas prices.

    “It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Old USA Project planning document reads. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

    As well as getting Trump elected, the campaign’s secondary goals included increasing the percentage of Americans who believe the US is doing too much to aid Ukraine to 51 percent, and reducing the percentage of Americans who have confidence in President Joe Biden down to 29 percent.

    The plan lists a variety of audiences the campaign specifically wants to target, including residents of swing states, American Jews, “US citizens of Hispanic descent,” and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan.”

    The document describes this category of gamers and chat room users as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet.” In recent months, the Trump campaign has embraced many of the most influential figures within these communities, including many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric on a regular basis.

    To spread their narrative, the plan called for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content as well as other viral videos (“music, humor, beautiful girls etc,” according to the documents) in order to appear at the top of search results for “US elections.”

    Meanwhile, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to create community groups of Trump supporters, with one sample name given as “Alabama for America the Great.” The document also reveals that the Russians planned to use Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it is a platform “free from democratic censorship.”

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  • How Israel Is Exploiting Google Ads to Discredit a UN Aid Agency

    How Israel Is Exploiting Google Ads to Discredit a UN Aid Agency

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    What Kronenfeld says truly worries her is that Americans are being exposed to Israel’s propaganda while trying to understand UNRWA’s role in the ongoing crisis. Beside the search ads, Israel has aired video ads in the US through Google that say “UNRWA is inseparable from Hamas” and that it “keeps employing terrorists.” Public misunderstanding could further jeopardize support from the US government, which until the war had been the largest donor to UNRWA.

    “There is an incredibly powerful campaign to dismantle UNRWA,” Kronenfeld says. “I want the public to know what’s happening and the insidious nature of it, especially at a time when civilian lives are under attack in Gaza.”

    Google spokesperson Jacel Booth tells WIRED that governments can run ads that adhere to the company’s policies and that users and employees are welcome to report alleged violations. “We enforce them consistently and without bias,” Booth says of the rules. “If we find ads that violate those policies, we take swift action.”

    The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York acknowledged but did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story over the past four months.

    UNRWA Takes Action

    Using nearly $1.5 billion annually in donor support, UNRWA employs about 30,000 people to educate, feed, and provide care for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza and neighboring areas. UNRWA supporters say Israel doesn’t like that the agency preserves Palestinians’ refugee status, which arguably gives them a better shot at reclaiming occupied land someday.

    Israel for decades has accused UNRWA of standing in the way of lasting peace by protecting Hamas and enabling the US-designated terrorist organization to indoctrinate generation after generation with hateful ideology.

    The agency has acted in response to Israel’s accusations. UNRWA this year has fired 13 employees, including nine whom an oversight body determined may have been involved in last year’s Hamas attack based on evidence provided by Israel. The US has paused funding to UNRWA since January, while other countries that cut off dollars to the agency this year, including Germany and Switzerland, pledged to reopen the spigot.

    UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has said that his organization plays a neutral and vital role in the region and that it engages in screening and training to keep Hamas sympathizers out of its ranks.

    Kronenfeld, who is Jewish, says Lazzarini’s transparency and good-faith efforts have left her feeling comfortable about her role. She joined UNRWA USA in 2020 because her grandfather had escaped Nazi Germany and instilled in her that no one should be brutalized ever again based on where they were born. Among her initiatives was ramping up online advertising, with the aim of bringing in at least $3.90 for every $1 spent.

    Driven by the war, the return on investment has been $25 on every $1 spent this year, but the competition from Israel on Google has meant UNRWA USA is winning fewer advertising auctions and likely getting its message shown to fewer users.

    After Kronenfeld and colleagues complained to Google in January about Israeli ads featuring headlines such as “UNRWA for Human Rights,” they say a company representative told them, without providing a reason, that the ads in question had been removed. Google’s Booth says there was no policy violation.

    By May, per screenshots seen by WIRED, Israel was back to promoting the same content but with tweaked verbiage—“UNRWA Neutrality Compromised,” “Israel Unveils UNRWA Issues,” and “Israel Advocates for Safer, Transparent Humanitarian Practices”—that more clearly previewed what users would get if they clicked.

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  • A Russian Propaganda Network Is Promoting an AI-Manipulated Biden Video

    A Russian Propaganda Network Is Promoting an AI-Manipulated Biden Video

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    Among the prominent accounts sharing the video was Russian Market, which has 330,000 followers, and is operated by Swiss social media personality Vadim Loskutov, who is known for praising Russia and criticizing the West. The video was also shared by Tara Reade, defected to Russia in 2023 in a bit for citzenship. Reid alsoaccused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993.

    The video, researchers tell WIRED, was also manipulated in a bid to avoid detection online. “Doppelganger operators trimmed the video at arbitrary points, so they are technically different in milliseconds and therefore are likely considered as distinct unique videos by abuse protection systems,” the Antibot4Navalny researchers tell WIRED.

    “This one is unique in its ambiguity,” Fink said. “It’s maybe a known Russian band, but maybe not, maybe a deepfake, but maybe not, maybe has reference to other politicians but maybe not, In other words, it is a distinctly Soviet style of propaganda video. The ambiguity allows for multiple competing versions, which means hundreds or articles and arguments online, which leads to more people seeing it eventually.”

    As the Kremlin ramps up its efforts to undermine the US election in November, it is increasingly clear that Russia is willing to utilize emerging AI technologies. A new report published this week from threat intelligence company Recorded Future highlighted this trend by revealing that a campaign, which has been linked to the Kremlin, has been using generative AI tools to push pro-Trump content on a network of fake websites.

    The report details how the campaign, dubbed CopyCop, used the AI tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the content with a right-wing bias, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic Review that purport to be staffed by over a 1,000 journalists—all of whom are fake and have also been invented by AI.

    The topics pushed by the campaign include errors made by Biden during speeches, Biden’s age, poll results that show a lead for Trump, and claims that Trump’s recent criminal conviction and trial was “impactless” and “a total mess.”

    It is still unclear how much impact these sites are having, and a review by WIRED of social media platforms found very few links to the network of fake websites CopyCop has created. But what the CopyCop campaign has proved is that AI can supercharge the dissemination of disinformation. And experts say, this is likely just the first step in a broader strategy that will likely include networks like Doppelganger.

    “Estimating the engagement with the websites themselves remains a difficult task,” Clément Briens, an analyst at Recorded Future tells WIRED. “The AI-generated content is likely not garnering attention at all. However, it serves the purpose of helping establish these websites as credible assets for when they publish targeted content like deepfakes [which are] amplified by established Russian or pro-Russian influence actors with existing following and audiences.”

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  • ISIS Created Fake CNN and Al Jazeera Broadcasts

    ISIS Created Fake CNN and Al Jazeera Broadcasts

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    The Islamic State has created fake videos mimicking the look and feel of mainstream news outlets CNN and Al Jazeera, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shared exclusively with WIRED.

    Launched in early March, the campaign was orchestrated by War and Media, a pro–Islamic State media outlet that typically creates long-form videos pushing the group’s ideology and history. The Islamic State, or ISIS, is a UN-designated terror group that perpetrated a genocide of the Yezidi population in Iraq and conducted multiple terrorist attacks, including the 2015 attacks in Paris that left 131 people dead; it has also promoted videos of its members beheading journalists and soldiers.

    Central to the campaign were two YouTube channels. One was falsely branded as CNN and pushed English-language videos, and the other was branded with the Al Jazeera logo and pushed Arabic-language videos. The videos featured the logos of the real news outlets, and in the case of CNN, the videos also featured a real-time ticker along the bottom of the screen which changed to match the content being shown. The campaign also deployed a network of social media accounts branded to look like they were affiliated with news outlets, in what appears to be an effort to push ideology to new audiences.

    In total, the campaign created eight original videos, four in each language, that discussed topics like the Islamic State’s expansion in Africa and the war in Syria.

    One video also focused on the deadly attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow in March. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and the video attempted to combat a disinformation narrative promoted by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not the Islamic State, was accountable.

    “It was essentially fake news to debunk fake news,” Moustafa Ayad, the executive director for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED.

    Ayad also believes the campaign was a test run to ascertain how successful it would be in circumventing censorship efforts on mainstream Western platforms.

    “It’s the first time we’ve really seen a concerted effort by an Islamic State outlet to create this fake ecosystem of news that isn’t branded as something that’s affiliated with the Islamic State,” says Ayad. “It was very much a test of the system and now they know where there are weaknesses in their strategy.”

    The videos remained on YouTube for a month and a half before they were removed by the company, but during that time, the videos were also downloaded and republished by Islamic State supporters on their own accounts. Some of those videos are still circulating online today, because they have not been added to the hash-sharing database that platforms use to coordinate the takedown of terrorist content.

    “What they did was essentially build this entire little fake ecosystem of social media channels that are doppelgängers of news outlets,” Ayad says.

    Each of the videos on YouTube racked up thousands of views, and while none of them went viral, it was “enough for the group to get some traction in circles outside where they would normally get [traction] and saw real people commenting under the videos,” says Ayad.

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  • US Leaders Dodge Questions About Israel’s Influence Campaign

    US Leaders Dodge Questions About Israel’s Influence Campaign

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    Federal lawmakers in the US have dodged repeated inquiries over the past week about a covert operation ordered by the Israeli government to artificially boost support among Americans for its war in Gaza. At the same time, senior White House officials charged with advising president Joe Biden on matters of national security are claiming to have no knowledge of the operation—first disclosed publicly more than four months ago.

    The operation, formally tied to the Israeli government by a New York Times reporter last week, kicked off in October 2023 following the surprise attack by Hamas in southern Israel. Researchers internationally began work to expose the campaign in February, identifying a flood of “suspicious accounts” on US-based social networking apps, most masquerading as Americans avowing support for the Israeli military response.

    In addition to eroding support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides assistance to 5.6 million Palestinian refugees, researchers say a chief aim of the Israeli operation was to sway the opinions of Black Americans. Per the Times—which cited four current and former Israeli officials in confirming their government had commissioned the campaign—its primary targets included the account of US congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House, among others who are “Black and Democratic.”

    Accounts tied to the operation—many of which, at time of writing, remain active on X, despite being suspended on other platforms—promoted a Black Lives Matter hashtag and shared images of Martin Luther King, Jr. alongside fabricated quotes. A website created for the operation included articles with titles such as “The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and their Support of Jewish People and Israel.” Several examples of accounts used in the operation, many of which were created weeks prior to the Hamas attack on October 7, which killed an estimated 1,200 people, advertised themselves as “Christian.”

    Got a Tip?

    If you have information about the work of the intelligence community or its congressional overseers, contact Dell Cameron at [email protected] or via Signal at dell.3030.

    Multiple inquiries placed with senior members of Jeffries’ staff, including his communications director, Andy Eichar, have gone unacknowledged for nearly a week. WIRED has attempted to resolve whether Jeffries ever received notification of the operation from US intelligence while Congress was in the midst of debating $14 billion in funding to supplement Israel’s war effort.

    Israeli forces have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians since Hamas’ October 7 attack, according to Gaza health officials’ estimates, including dozens last Thursday at a United Nations school compound, where the Israeli military is accused of making “improper use” of a US-made bomb.

    With the exception of the White House’s National Security Council, which claimed Thursday to have no knowledge of the operation, and Senate Intelligence chairman Mark Warner, whose office told WIRED it planned to request a briefing on the matter, press inquiries concerning Israel’s attempts to secretly influence US opinion on the war have been met with a stonewall.

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  • Propagandists are using AI too

    Propagandists are using AI too

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    OpenAI’s adversarial threat report should be a prelude to more robust data sharing moving forward. Where AI is concerned, independent researchers have begun to assemble databases of misuse—like the AI Incident Database and the Political Deepfakes Incident Database—to allow researchers to compare different types of misuse and track how misuse changes over time. But it is often hard to detect misuse from the outside. As AI tools become more capable and pervasive, it’s important that policymakers considering regulation understand how they are being used and abused. While OpenAI’s first report offered high-level summaries and select examples, expanding data-sharing relationships with researchers that provide more visibility into adversarial content or behaviors is an important next step. 

    When it comes to combating influence operations and misuse of AI, online users also have a role to play. After all, this content has an impact only if people see it, believe it, and participate in sharing it further. In one of the cases OpenAI disclosed, online users called out fake accounts that used AI-generated text. 

    In our own research, we’ve seen communities of Facebook users proactively call out AI-generated image content created by spammers and scammers, helping those who are less aware of the technology avoid falling prey to deception. A healthy dose of skepticism is increasingly useful: pausing to check whether content is real and people are who they claim to be, and helping friends and family members become more aware of the growing prevalence of generated content, can help social media users resist deception from propagandists and scammers alike.

    OpenAI’s blog post announcing the takedown report put it succinctly: “Threat actors work across the internet.” So must we. As we move into an new era of AI-driven influence operations, we must address shared challenges via transparency, data sharing, and collaborative vigilance if we hope to develop a more resilient digital ecosystem.

    Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on the CyberAI Project. Renée DiResta is the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. 

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  • Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes

    Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes

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    With European Union elections underway, Germany is the EU country most under attack by Russian disinformation campaigns, a spokesperson for the European Commission tells WIRED.

    The warning comes days before Germany votes in EU elections on Sunday and during a campaign season marred by a string of violent attacks against German politicians.

    “Most cases in our database are related to Germany, which means it is the country in the EU which is most targeted by disinformation,” says Peter Stano, the European Commission’s lead spokesperson for foreign affairs and security policy.

    Numerous instances of Russian disinformation targeting Germany are listed on the public disinformation database run by the EU’s diplomatic service. One example references an April case where fake news articles purporting to be published by German magazine Der Spiegel spread on the social platform X. When users clicked on the articles, which criticized the German government, they were taken to the website Spiegel.ltd instead of the magazine’s official domain, Spiegel.de. Although the links no longer work, at least two accounts that shared the fake articles are still online. X did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

    “What we are fighting and defending ourselves against is this foreign interference and information manipulation coming from Russia,” Stano says of the threats facing the EU election this weekend. These disinformation campaigns, Stano says, can be linked to Russia because they either link or refer to Russian state media that is controlled by the Kremlin.

    Germany “is the biggest member state of the EU by population, and in the public perception it’s the one that drives policymaking in the EU,” says Stano. Russia is attempting to exacerbate divisions that already exist in Germany, he adds, such as the economic differences between east and west, as well as the country’s “Putinversteher,” or Putin-sympathizers, a term used to describe sections of Germany’s political class who express sympathy with the Russian president.

    Fact-checkers working for the independent media group Correctiv have also identified videos on Tiktok that falsely claim Germany is preparing to enter the war in Ukraine, and another video on Telegram and Facebook falsely claiming to show protesters clashing with police in Mannheim after a police officer was stabbed and killed last week.

    Tensions are already high in Germany ahead of the election. Earlier this week, a politician from the far-right AFD party was stabbed in the city of Mannheim. Last month, a candidate from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left SPD party was hospitalized after he was attacked while putting up posters. A Green Party candidate was also verbally and physically assaulted.

    On Thursday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to counter political violence, whether it comes from the far left or far right. “Security is the cornerstone of our freedom, our democracy, and our rule of law,” he said in a speech in Berlin. Germany’s foreign office did not reply to a request for comment on the impact disinformation was having on the election campaign.

    The European Commission has a team of around 40 people who are tracking online disinformation. They have a budget of around €20 million to track Russian activities across platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram and flag their findings to EU member states.

    Compared to Russia, their budget is nothing, says Stano. “We assume they are spending €1 billion on disinformation,” he added, explaining that the European Commission had come to this estimate based on publicly available data about allocations in Russia’s state budget for state-run media and communication activities.

    The EU has also been closely tracking how social media companies respond to Russian attempts to manipulate discussion on their platforms. In April, the bloc’s regulators launched a formal investigation into Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to see whether the platform was complying with its obligations to prevent the dissemination of disinformation campaigns. “We suspect that Meta’s moderation is insufficient,” top commission official Margrethe Vestager said at the time.

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  • Russians Love YouTube. That’s a Problem for the Kremlin

    Russians Love YouTube. That’s a Problem for the Kremlin

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    Milov stresses that YouTube isn’t just a one-way service: Because it allows users to comment and chat anonymously, it provides an extraordinary chance for regular Russians to express themselves without fear of censorship.

    “The amount of our feedback is enormous,” he says. “Just myself, alone, I literally get messages, every day, from at least hundreds of people from across the country. When something serious happens? Thousands.” Sometimes, Milov says, his first indication that something terrible has happened in Russia is seeing just how many unread messages he has in his YouTube inbox.

    Milov says this feedback reinforces the idea, supported even by Kremlin-approved pollsters, that opposition to the war in Ukraine is growing. But it also provides some important details and nuance. “So this is like, I would say, an enormous focus group, with which you can also communicate. You can ask them questions back.” He chuckles, thinking of the notorious Russian security and intelligence agency: “You know, the FSB would kill for this kind of information.”

    “Obviously, the question is, why didn’t Putin shut down YouTube?” Milov says. “It’s easier said than done.”

    In recent years, Moscow has deployed an array of strategies to cow and kill independent media and the open internet in Russia. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have been blocked altogether. Independent media like Meduza, TV Rain, and The Insider have been declared “undesirable” or labeled “foreign agents.”

    Through it all, YouTube has survived.

    Milov says the Kremlin was too slow to move on YouTube. By the time Moscow was banning other popular Western platforms, the Google-owned video platform had become indispensable to everyday Russians. “They kind of let the genie out of the bottle,” Milov says.

    “YouTube is mommies showing cartoons to kids, teenagers are watching music videos, people are watching comedians, elderly folks watching old Soviet movies, which are widely available there, and so on,” he says. “And you shut it all down? So you have these empty evenings now, from this point on.”

    Unable to disrupt YouTube, the Kremlin tried desperately to compete with it.

    Moscow had high hopes for Rutube, a long-suffering YouTube clone which was relaunched in 2020 after a merger with the media arm of state-controlled energy giant Gazprom. If the site’s “top videos” section is to be believed, it hasn’t worked—some had racked up view counts in the mid-thousands.

    VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook, has fared slightly better with its video-sharing platform, and it is rife with pro-Kremlin broadcasters. But even its most popular channels have just a tiny fraction of the biggest Russian-language YouTube accounts.

    “It’s like a big room, but it’s empty,” Milov says of these Kremlin-backed alternatives.

    Having failed to compete with his online critics, Milov believes Putin opted for a more direct strategy. Just days before I arrived in Vilnius, thugs appeared outside the home of Leonid Volkov, former chair of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Nalvany chief of staff. Armed with hammers, they savagely beat him. Lithuanian intelligence believe the men arrested were operating on orders from Russia. A week after the attack, Volkov was back on YouTube, his arm in a sling, “I am not going to stop—although I will gesticulate less in the coming weeks,” he said.

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