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Long as fuck article so here’s a summary provided by GPT-4:
The article “The Lies Russia Tells Itself” by Thomas Rid discusses the Russian disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger, which targets Western countries with fake news and misinformation. The campaign, orchestrated by the Social Design Agency (SDA), creates cloned websites of legitimate news outlets to spread pro-Russian narratives. The U.S. Department of Justice seized 32 domains associated with this campaign and released extensive internal documents revealing its operations
Key insights
- Tactics and Methods: Doppelganger uses fake articles, videos, and social media to manipulate public opinion, often exploiting existing societal tensions
- Self-Deception: The SDA’s reports exaggerated its impact, misleading both its funders and itself about the effectiveness of its campaigns
- Western Response: Despite being exposed, the campaign continued, partly because exposure increased its perceived effectiveness among Russian bureaucrats
Key Numbers and Facts
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Document Leak: The leaked documents from the Social Design Agency (SDA) comprised more than 3,000 individual files detailing their disinformation strategies and operations.
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Fake Websites: Between November 2023 and August 2024, the Doppelganger campaign produced over 700 fake websites, marking it as one of Russia’s largest known disinformation factories.
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Social Media Activity: The SDA pushed out 3,161 social media comments promoting its fake articles on Bild and 3,277 links to fake Daily Mail stories between mid-May and mid-July 2022.
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Views of Fake Websites: The investigation by Bavarian intelligence revealed that Doppelganger achieved just over 800,000 views of its 700 fake websites across all its campaigns during the specified period.
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Target Audience Engagement: The majority of views came from France and Germany, with the SDA’s fake websites targeting Americans receiving fewer than 180,000 clicks.
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Performance Metrics: The SDA kept extensive records of its social media interactions, logging hundreds of thousands of comments in spreadsheets to track their perceived impact.
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Ambitious Goals: One internal document set key performance indicators for a disinformation campaign in Germany, aiming to increase support for the right-wing Alternative for Germany party and sow “fear of the future” among the German public.
It has its own wikipedia that you might have already seen. I don’t have time this morning, but I’ll look later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelganger_(disinformation_campaign)
Looked at it just now, but unfortunately the sources only have derivative articles and papers from various leaks. While its all pretty credible, so far even looking at all of the sources…well they don’t have many leads to the actual leaks. Oh well, so my search continues.