The Russian doppelganger propagandising in the West

Improbable news disguised as authoritative journalistic sources. Artificial intelligence systems used on a massive scale to manipulate data and readings of reality. It is through the digital work of dozens of companies with an extremely varied profile that Moscow's strategy to support anti-Ukrainian positions in Western public opinion is being carried out.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - On Western websites and news agencies one often finds sensational and totally false news, such as NATO wanting to send Ukrainian soldiers to France to suppress protests against pensions, the Germans increasing medical insurance for the elderly at the behest of the US, or Volodymyr Zelenskyj admitting that he is preparing a biological weapon. These reports appeared to be published in authoritative media, such as Le Parisien, Der Spiegel and The Washington Post, but were actually generated by Dvoinik, the virtual ‘doppelganger’ created by the Russians to invade the enemy's press, using fake domains of the same newspapers.

As a report in Novaja Gazeta Evropa explains, the programme used by the Russians for parallel reality is called by the German term Doppelgänger, ‘Sosia’, in Russian Dvoinik, and it seems to be very effective. It is a grotesque system of disinformation that has been in operation since 2010 and has been increasingly perfected, which is being revived on Russian TV programmes by the most ardent propagandists such as Vladimir Solov'ev and Margarita Simonyan, who emphatically repeat the fake news created by the Doppelgänger. These deceptions are even repeated in the press releases of the Ministry of Defence and other official channels, counting on the superficiality of the public, especially the less informed and uneducated part of the population.

For the Kremlin, the focus today is increasingly on the average Western public, which cannot be easily tamed by repression and censorship. Russians do not have the opportunity to influence the political life of their own country, whereas Germans, Frenchmen or Americans protesting in the streets will then go to the polls and actually choose between different candidates and parties; and Russia has a great interest in guiding these choices, especially in positions concerning the war in Ukraine. In order to fuel Euroscepticism among voters in various countries, Russia invests hundreds of thousands of Euros in Facebook and X ads, trying to insert itself into chats and discussions with an endless series of ‘look-alikes’ who advocate anti-Ukrainian or other views.

Increasingly using artificial intelligence systems, comments of ‘experts’ appear on the websites of ministries and various international institutions, spreading completely false statistics and analyses by accessing the most authoritative databases and servers, bending them to a different image of reality. It is a de-centralised infrastructure that is very difficult to identify, affiliated with dozens of companies with completely different profiles, which use robots to hack into the accounts of social networks. The first to notice these activities were the members of the EU think-tank DisinfoLab in September 2022, publishing a report on the fact that a ‘coordinated operation’ had entered the western segment of the internet to spread anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western narratives, cloning the sites of many influential media outlets.

For these characteristics, DisinfoLab applied the title of Doppelgänger, also referring to the RRN (Recent Reliable News) campaign, which has been given particular attention since the meddling scandal in the 2016 US presidential election, also considering the current contradictory pre-election season in the US. Of course, no confirmation of Dvoinik's existence comes from Moscow, whose term is also carefully avoided in the official press. It is thought that as of today the Dvoinik manages to reach at least 1.6 million people a day, occupying 5% of the advertising space on social media.

So when one reads that Macron, or Biden, have ‘lied to the people, it's time for a change - read the details here’, or if one is looking for information on LGBT rights and is directed to mypride.press, it is quite likely that we are talking to a Putin impersonator. Of which it is thought there may be a few flesh-and-blood examples, but there are certainly thousands of less material and far more harmful ones roaming the news networks.

Photo: Kremlin.Ru