RUSSIA The Russian double who makes propaganda in the West

Implausible news disguised as authoritative journalistic sources. Artificial intelligence systems used on a large scale to manipulate data and read 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 () – Sensational and completely false news is often found on Western websites and news agencies, such as that NATO wants to send Ukrainian soldiers to France to suppress protests against pensions, that the Germans are increasing health insurance for the elderly at the behest of the United States, or that Volodymyr Zelenskyj admits he is preparing a biological weapon. These reports seemed to have been published in authoritative media outlets, such as Le Parisien, Der Spiegel and The Washington Postbut they were actually generated by Dvoinik, the virtual “double” created by the Russians to invade the enemy’s press, using fake domains of the same newspapers.

As a report by New European News AgencyThe program used by the Russians for the 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 operating since 2010 and has been increasingly perfected, and is revived on Russian television programs 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 repeated even in press releases of the Ministry of Defense 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 is increasingly on the middle Western public, which cannot be easily tamed by repression and censorship. Russians have no opportunity to influence the political life of their own country, while Germans, French or Americans protesting in the streets will later go to the polls and actually choose between different candidates and parties; and Russia has a vested interest in guiding these elections, especially regarding positions regarding the war in Ukraine. To fuel Euroscepticism among voters in various countries, Russia invests hundreds of thousands of euros in ads on Facebook and X, trying to insert itself into chats and debates with an endless series of “doubles” defending anti-Ukrainian or other opinions.

Using more and more artificial intelligence systems, comments by “experts” appear on the websites of ministries and various international institutions, spreading completely false statistics and analysis by accessing the most authoritative databases and servers, bending them to a different picture of reality. This is a decentralized infrastructure that is very difficult to identify, affiliated with dozens of companies with completely different profiles, using bots to hack social media accounts. The first to notice these activities were 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.

Due to these characteristics, DisinfoLab applied the title of Doppelgänger, also referring to the campaign RRN (Recent Reliable News)which has received special attention since the scandal of interference in the 2016 US presidential election, also given the current controversial pre-election season in the United States. Of course, no confirmation of Dvoinik’s existence comes from Moscow, whose term is also carefully avoided in the official press. It is believed that Dvoinik is currently reaching at least 1.6 million people a day, occupying 5% of advertising space on social networks.

So when you read that Macron, or Biden, have “lied to the people, it’s time for a change – read the details here”, or if you search for information on LGBT rights and are directed to mypride.press, it’s quite likely that you’re talking to a Putin impersonator. Of which you might think there may be a few flesh-and-blood examples, but there are certainly thousands less material and far more damaging ones floating around the news networks.

Photo: Kremlin.Ru