With AI Forensics we published multiple reports revealing Meta's systemic failure in ads moderation and the massive scale of the operation. Also, big thanks to antibot4navalny for their amazing work monitoring Doppelgänger bots on X and helping analyze these findings!
It shows multiple targeted countries, organized teamwork, and a multi-faceted approach involving ads on Meta (which has neglected to address systemically) and spoofed news outlets shared on X.
Without overstating the findings and acknowledging the possibility of a trap, this screenshot, extracted from a Doppelgänger ad published last Friday, supports our current understanding of their operations.
The French discussion channel, “S-ф”, was open, revealing a conversation on the right. Алина and colleagues shared a link to a fake @le_Parisien article and messages that seem to read: “Changed the text of the task to 'You [… ] that Ukraine can win […] the war? I don’t'.”
Their choice of logos is quite telling: a beer for Germany, cheese for France pizza for Italy and Winnie-the-Pooh for their channel dedicated to websites and animations 🧸.
In the foreground, we see the image they likely wanted to use, sent by an "Алина Малинина" on June 8 via their VK Teams . On the left, there are distinct discussion channels for the countries targeted by the Doppelgänger operations: Ukraine, Germany, France, Israel, US, Italy, and Poland.
Instead of uploading the desired image, they accidentally uploaded a screenshot of it, took last Friday, revealing their VK Teams interface in the background. After a loooong process of enhancing the compressed image, I managed to decipher it 👀
In posts about Russia-Ukraine, the presidential majority and left-leaning parties condemn Russian aggression. Meanwhile, both the far-left and far-right advocate for a ceasefire and oppose sending French troops to Ukraine.
In posts about Israel-Palestine: the left condemns the action of Israeli military and demands adherence to international law, while the presidential majority and (far)-right-leaning groups echo messages from the Israeli embassy and criticize pro-Palestine protests at SciencesPo.
Weeks before the EU elections, the European Commission published guidelines under the DSA for the mitigation of systemic risks online for elections. In these regards, as well others, our findings are deeply concerning.
