In 2022, European observers tracking Russian disinformation detected an ambitious online influence operation they dubbed Doppelganger. The Moscow-led effort cloned the Internet sites of valid newspapers, magazines and news services, adding Britain’s Guardian and Germany’s Bild, and published replicas under domain names. and filled them with Kremlin propaganda.
The crusade is not surprising, given Russia’s efforts to manipulate Western public opinion. More unexpected is that, at least two years after their detection, fake Doppelganger sites are still popping up on the web like mushrooms after a downpour, despite ongoing efforts to shut them down.
The patience of those sites reflects the onslaught of Russian interference — and the near impossibility of tracking them, let alone preventing them — in the run-up to next month’s European Parliament elections. They are also a foretaste of what Americans can expect in the future. This is the fall presidential campaign, in which Moscow will try to magnify the venomous clamor of American politics.
Social media has made the spread of disinformation and propaganda almost free. Now, generative AI has slowed the pace of its output in the run-up to European parliamentary elections between Thursday and June 9, when some 200 million voters in the bloc’s 27-member bloc are expected to go to the polls.
The deluge of misinformation, manipulation, and malice is pervasive. An online page impersonating the French Ministry of Defense announced that 200,000 French conscripts would be sought to serve in Ukraine. He revealed that a well-known German journalist, known as the “Putin insider” and Moscow sympathizer, had received more than $600,000 through a Russian billionaire allied with the Kremlin. The Belgian, Polish and Czech governments say they have exposed evidence that the Kremlin greases the hands of MEPs.
The previous elections were held amid the poisonous torrent of Russian meddling. What’s different this year is that the war in Ukraine has increased the risks for Vladimir Putin — and the consequences imaginable, in terms of reversing Western aid to Kyiv.
“The motivation is transparent and there’s no genuine concern of being found out,” Bret Schafer, who studies Russian disinformation for the U. S. -based German Marshall Fund, told me. “What are we going to do, sanction them? It’s happened before.
The European elections will not provide irrefutable evidence that Russian intrigues have tipped the vote against the dominant parties, or strengthened those sympathetic to Moscow and oppose a more Western option for Ukraine. Polls expect those blocs, especially those on the populist right, to win, but it will be highly unlikely to say how much Moscow’s misdeeds have affected things.
But as a check on this fall’s U. S. elections and democratic accountability, the European elections are already sounding alarm bells. Specifically, they lay bare the obstacles governments, academics, and civic teams face in finding out what Russia is doing.
These officials and teams rely heavily on tech companies, especially social media giants that add X and Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, to detect Moscow’s online work.
But despite a new EU law aimed at ensuring some transparency and oversight for tech giants, the symptoms so far imply that government agencies and civil society teams are not getting the data they want to assess Russian disdata and interference.
Last month, EU officials opened investigations into Facebook and Instagram, in addition to an existing investigation into X, on suspicion of failing to live up to its responsibility of involving metastases of lies and manipulation. These regulations came into force this year as part of the bloc’s new Digital Services Act; Failure to comply can only result in hefty fines.
X and Meta have been limited to the knowledge of academics and civic groups, whose vigilance is imperative to tracking the scale and form of Moscow’s machinations. This increasingly means that the West remains blind to Russian depredations online.
Under Elon Musk’s ownership, X last year began charging more than $40,000 per month for account access and posting information that was lost before the platform’s rebranding. This sum is beyond the reach of most academics, researchers, and non-governmental groups. Meta also announced the shutdown of its own knowledge-tracking tool, known as CrowdTangle, which provided analysts with must-have information.
Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinfoLab, the civil society organization that revealed Operation Doppelganger’s way of life, told me that its resilience and persistence, even after it was revealed, are a sign of concern.
The question, according to Alaphilippe, is not whether Russia is winning the propaganda war in Europe, but whether democracy is up to the challenge of holding everyone accountable. Do we have democratic guarantees?
If the answer in Europe is no – which is very likely – then the scenario will be even bleak elsewhere. Especially in the United States, where political turmoil and First Amendment safeguards make it even more complicated to monitor Russian misdeeds.