Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners
Russian intelligence is operating a systematic program to launder pro-Kremlin propaganda through private relationships between Russian operatives and unwitting US and western targets, according to newly declassified US intelligence.
US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.
“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,” a US official authorized to discuss the material told CNN. “The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the FSB’s agenda.”
The campaigns have sometimes been effective at planting Russian narratives in the Western press, according to the intelligence. Maxim Grigoriev, who heads a Russian NGO, made multiple speeches to the UN presenting a false study that claimed the humanitarian group the White Helmets – which operates in Syria – was running a black market for human organs and had faked chemical attacks by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom Russia is allied. Those claims eventually found their way into a television report on the far-right OANN in the United States, according to open-source materials provided by the official.
…
But the official stressed that the Western voices that eventually became mouthpieces for Russian propaganda were almost certainly unaware of the role they were playing.
“At the end of the day, this unwitting target is disseminating Russian influence operation, Russian propaganda to their target public,” the US official said. “Ultimately, a lot of these are unwitting people — they remain unaware who is essentially seeding these narratives.”
The intelligence provides several examples of Russian civilian “co-optees” doing the bidding of the FSB.
One man, Andrey Stepanenko, founded a media project in 2014 that sponsored journalists from the US and the West to visit eastern Ukraine and learn “the alleged truth” about what was happening in the region. In fact, the FSB directed his efforts and “almost certainly financed the project,” according to the declassified intelligence.
CNN was not able to locate Stepanenko to ask for comment.
The US official also cited Natalia Burlinova, the founder of a Russian NGO who routinely coordinated FSB-funded public diplomacy efforts aimed at influencing Western views. In 2018, she visited, had meetings and hosted events at multiple US think tanks and universities in New York, Boston and Washington – work that was funded by the FSB, according to the intelligence. Her conduct was already public: She was indicted earlier this year on charges of conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia inside the United States, although she remains at liberty in Russia.
Burlinova in an email to CNN denied that her US trips in 2018 were financed by the FSB.
“All travel expenses were financed by a grant that we previously received from the Presidential Grants Fund, the main grant operator of Russia,” she said. “The FSB of Russia did not give me any money for the trip.”
The official declined to offer specifics to back up the intelligence community’s assertions that the FSB is funding this kind of operation but noted that once officials were able establish FSB backing, it is easy to trace the narratives they are pushing in open-source materials.
“Once you’re aware of who these people are and their association with the FSB, by nature of what they’re doing, they have very, very public personas,” the official said. “And so I would just say it’s not really difficult to kind of follow the strings.”
The US official declined to say whether Russia has used these same tactics to try to influence US elections.
The FSB does use similar tactics to influence political opinion within Russia, according to the intelligence. In one instance, a Russian media figure named Anton Tsvetkov organized protests outside of embassies in Moscow — including the US Embassy — at the FSB’s behest. The protests pushed Russia’s narrative of the war in Ukraine, “promoting the ‘Ukrainian Nazi’ narrative and blaming the U.S. and its allies for the deaths of children in the Donbass,” while hiding the Russian government’s role, according to the declassified intelligence.
“The purpose of those protests really was … designed to sell it to the Russian people,” the US official said.
Bro this isn't news. Its r/TheDonald, Lemmygrad, and half of youtube and facebook. This has been happening since 2016.
I’d still say it’s news, it’s just confirming that Russia has continued their same pattern of behavior. Early on the troll farms actually infiltrated communities (I remember reading that they targeted the Bernie subreddit too), but now they just upvote, like, and share unwitting US pawns
Yeah I thought it was weird when so many Bernie supporters switched to Trump. They're political opposites.
Not just that. The whole “Bernie or bust, never support democrats again!” Stuff
There were waves of people who claimed that because their guy Bernie didn't get the nom, they threw a fit and were outright voting 3rd party instead of Biden. Of course, none of them ever went to the polls to vote in the primaries because [insert 14 different excuses]
Yeah, that stuff was incredibly transparent I don't think it got many real people.. But if they get just one in five hundred former supporters then it still moves the needle.
It's insane that our margins are what they are. A lot of this stuff just shouldn't have debate. It's too common sense.
First past the post creates these razor thin margins. It's not organic. If we had a ranked choice required plurality then the margins would widen in most races and flip in others.
I know a former Bernie bro. He switched to trump because "the system fucked Bernie and trump is trying to fuck the system"
Lol who downvotes someone for telling a story. Come on guys, he’s not advocating for this, just sharing a story.
Give people a vote system and they'll prove they suck I guess. Thanks though
I wonder if some of these were former Ron Paul types. I know I was briefly until I learned more about him. Honestly I just wanted weed to be legal nationally.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I know he worked for the DNC for a while, but I also know a deep end right winger became close friends with him so who the hell knows what happened. Dude always struck me as a bit impressionable
Before the 2016 election, there were a few actually-good parts of Trump's platform that he had in common with Bernie, such as opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a few other things that I can't remember at the moment.
Those commonalities were pretty much all either Trump supporting the right thing for the wrong reasons or just blatant lies, but some of the stupider Bernie supporters were duped, I guess?
(FWIW, I supported Bernie but still voted D in the 2016 and 2020 general elections.)
And I'll likely vote against Biden in the primary, but when it comes to the general I'll compromise. Compromise is a core part of democracy.
Exactly. I can't stand Hillary, but I absolutely voted for her in the general. Because the alternative was considerably worse. Many of us saw through Trump's bullshit and recognized him as having the complete opposite mentality of what makes somebody a good president. It's not even about politics. Trump isn't a politician! He bragged about dodging taxes. He bullies people. The list goes on and on. And when he was elected, many people were sounding the alarm that there's no way this guy is voluntarily leaving office. If he gets impeached and convicted, loses the re-election, or hits his 2 term limit, it was pretty obvious how he was going to act. And what really drove it home was the vast number of crimes he committed while in office. He knew that being president was the only thing shielding him from criminal prosecution. There's no way he was going to leave office peacefully. Even during the primaries, he refused to pledge his support to whoever won the nomination if it wasn't him. He shoved other world leaders out of the way so he could stand in front of them. He doctored a National Weather Service map with a sharpie because he couldn't possibly admit that he made a mistake about where a hurricane was headed. He spent his entire presidency bullying people on Twitter.
I mean, yeah, Hillary and Biden suck. They're neolibs. But if Trump is the alternative, I'll be the first in line to vote for the neolibs. And sadly, being in my 40s, Biden is probably the best president we've had in my lifetime. I may question his true allegiances, but I stand with nearly every decision he's made while he's been president. I just wish we could get a left wing populist president in my lifetime. Everybody thought Obama was that person, but I saw through his shit when he was campaigning. He made a lot of promises that he would never be able to keep, and when push came to shove he turned out to be a neolib all along. But if I had to choose between Obama and Trump, Obama all the way.
It wasn't even subtle.
I remember posts with thousands of upvotes from this website called thedurian. I googled the people who ran it, one of them had a linkedin which mentioned his location as Moscow and that he had previously worked for RT.
Given I was banned for posting screenshots, I suspect the mods of /r/thedonald were in on it.
TheDonald started as a joke that was legitimately funny. As soon as anyone tried to call it out as a joke, that person would be banned within seconds. That's not normal, volunteer moderation.
There were people with the power to ban paid to control that sub. They took shifts, likely from Russia.
"Id rather be a Russian than a Democrat"
Right around the time Russians stopped being "damn commies" to "antidote to the degenerate west" to them.
Oh SHIT I actually forgot that was a thing commonly heard. Frankly it's been brain breaking news headlines (and usually the even with context it was accurate headlines) since 2015 so hard to remember it all.
It's also Tucker and Talk Radio.
And there is literally nothing to declassify. This has been happening out in the open for years. The FBI has been warning us about this shit multiple times. Yet the funny think is that people don't think it is happening to them.
This has been happening for way longer than that
I noticed a decent number of Russian memes (before Trump) trying to make Russia and Putin look cool, and remember wondering if they were from Russians actually trying or from Westerners having lolz.
There's another lemmy instance to watch out for??? Unless it's old hat already, I don't see much beyond .world stuff
hexbear is another one that's defederated thankfully
IIRC, lemmy.world defederated with lemmygrad a while ago.
Ah ty. Now I want something like r/subredditdrama but it's to keep track of this stuff lol. I miss consuming harmless drama
Honestly there needs to be some way to easily see who is defederated from who, and ideally why.
So far it's safe to assume it's because the user base are tankies/pro russia/far right and spread those comments while also causing problems in whatever instance defederalizes them. I just want the tea
There's trackers for that
Really? Can you provide a link or the relevant search keywords to find such a thing?
Thank you for supporting the 24h news cycle, where everything is breaking yet nothing matters past a day because „it isn’t news“ anymore.
That's a shock to no one.
My anti-mask friend kept linking Zero Hedge articles to support his stance. Not recognizing the source, I did 10 minutes of research and told him his sole source of information appeared to be a Russian propaganda vehicle. He went on a very aggressive rant about my arrogance at dismissing his "alt media" out of hand.
About a year later, the FBI publicly outed zero hedge as pedaling Russian propaganda. But apparently that was fake news too.
It's impossible to talk to that guy anymore. He doesn't live in reality.
I too have lost friends to “anti-western alt media”
They tell me how YouTube is censoring everything and thus rumble is the place to go. Gave that site a quick search and learned all I needed to know lol.
They also claim Russia a victim of western aggression but cannot put together a reasonable answer in relation to the invasion of ukr. To no surprise, they also have nothing to say in regards to the persecution of lgbt and non-Roman Catholics, the joke that is their “democracy”. The US is disgusting to them, will trot out foreign policy…. but Russia is A-Okay somehow!
“Oh well I’m not sure of the specifics so maybe they have a good reason”, and yet you’re so sure Russia is the victim? Fucking sad as hell. Lost fucking cause
They say shit like how Iran is one of the most moral countries around. I pointed to the uprisings of women after killings related to hijabs and I was told that I can’t be sure of what’s happening over there. It’s just so fucking obvious that it’s propaganda being parroted, I just don’t understand how you can be so fucking dumb
Not all of the online ones are that dumb. Some are just straight up Russian. Meanwhile 80% of the GOP won't speak out against it because they don't want to lose their seats.
I can't believe we still have operational coal plants in 2023. That fact alone is insane. We should be making a bipartisan plan to phase out the common use of gasoline and diesel. Even just saying we'll tax gas to a price of $10/gallon by 2030 would be enough to make the transition happen.
We should be taking action against anything on the seas burning bunker fuel.
The easiest shit to combat climate change really is low hanging fruit. Of course at this point we'll need active measures as well. We've gone too far to just stop polluting.
Had a similar experience on a forum during peak pandemic, all the sources provided ended up being linked to Russia and mostly to the same person that was involved in a bunch of "news" websites. Try explaining to someone that they don't know how to validate a source... Yeah...
Yuuup. One of his sources saying that covid was overblown was Frontline Doctors of America. I spent 20 minutes looking into who they were. Not a single virologist, pathologist, etc in the bunch, claiming that covid was curable.
He literally said "he lost respect" for me that day when I laughed that one of his source's doctors was on video saying vaginally cysts were caused by demon rape in your dreams. He gave me a back faith victim argument about being disrespectful to other people's cultures.
Yeah dude. Sure. That's what you're upset about, dude who literally told me, verbatim, "emotions are stupid" after I gave him a long thought out multiple page explanation of my side, telling him about seeing my parents waste away because they couldn't go outside because my mother's immuno compromised from chemo, etc etc.
Fuck your bad faith bullshit.
Isn't dismissing something you don't like as stupid an emotional reaction? I mean 'stupid' is not really exactly the same as 'lacking in intelligence,' it's a word with emotional weight.
Yes, it is. And even more infuriating that his next reply, the explanation of HIS stance, was that covid was hurting HIS business (lawyer, ambulance chaser).
He missed the irony completely. And that conversation has done irreparable damage to our friendship. We were very close. I was a groomsman at his wedding before all of this.
We've tried to reconcile, but it's not there. In each of our opinions, the other's head is too far up ones ass.
I totally understand. I've been there myself. Not with anyone super close, but I've still lost friends to this insanity.
If you don't respect or understand your own feelings you are not going to be able to attribute the correct source for them.
Why did you sexually harass her? I wasn't, she was flirting. How else can you explain why I was attracted to her?
Why did you yell at your coworker? He is always doing x!
I bet you that your friend talks like this all the time. He can't accept that he can just be sad or angry or horny or happy. No, his response to a situation is always appropriate. It is everyone else that is doing this to him.
Those doctors need to lose their license.
Yeah, I mean, prescribing medication for off label use seems like an easy malpractice suit. These are the dickhead family practice doctors that pushed chlortrimeton on their patients and claimed it cured covid because none of them died.
I never understood this. We know who is writing those articles, we know where he lives (ffs it is Mahwah New Jersey, right on his Wikipedia page), we know he is being funded by the Russian government and yet nothing. How is my government can just randomly murder people for normal activities and yet can't even put the fear of God in this guy? Grab him, perp walk him, throw him in a jail cell with two rival gangs for the night, interrogate him for a day, and ditch him two hours away with no money sne a dead cellphone.
Are they registered foreign agents? If so, they're probably in the clear. If not, they may be violating federal law. Americans acting on behalf of a foreign government are required to register with the DOJ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
“Unwitting westerners” = MAGAtard trumpers for those of you that don’t want to read it all.
also communities like chapotraphouse that's on hexbear that's thankfully defederated on this instance, they just vomit Kremlin propaganda, they are blaming the USA for Russia invading Ukraine can't make that shit up, some of them actually reveal their true colors though and openly call for the annihilation of Ukraine
The lemmygrad and lemmy.ml tankies are bad enough as it is.
isn't lemmygrad also defederated?
Hexbear- I’ve heard of that shithole. Haven’t witnessed it first-hand so I’m glad admins are doing a good job at keeping that trash out.
Ironic
Ironic how? That hate isn’t tolerated? Yeah. That is ironic.
Ironic that a Lemmy user is cheering the censoring of a community they admit they've never seen do any ill.
I’ve seen the posts where links are used to prove their racism and bullshit brigading. I personally haven’t interacted with them. Do I need to be murdered to hate murderers?
I’ve yet to see an apologist make a good argument.
An easy way to identify them is to ask roughly how many Chinese citizens were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. You can add "more or less than a hundred" to make it simpler and faster.
Don't forget tankies!
The report was released by a top ranking military official known as "Captain Obvious".
They're atleast a "Colonel Obvious"
“General Knowledge”
salutes the general
Literally everyone knows this
Literally everyone who wasn't duped knows this
I am shocked. This is my shocked face 😮
Aww, how cute. They think these people are doing this unwittingly. I'm convinced there are some people doing this quite wittingly -- and a bunch are in office...
No shit
Tucker Carlson is the prime example of this.. he's been doing real estate deals with Russians for a long time, and they feed him his "news"..
Makes you wonder what kind of disruptive narratives they're pushing online that aren't Russia-related.
What kinds of trends would they want to amplify in western online communities to cause the most harm over time?
Like how a remarkable proportion of pro-Russia social media accounts were also antivaxxers during COVID?
Don't forget climate change denial.
Which is particularly beneficial for Russia as their useless land will become prime agricultural land and they'll have access to more warm water ports.
They say the same for Canada and it doesn't work like that. It isn't going to warm enough, increased variability is even worse for crops, and the soil typically isn't good for agriculture anyway even if the temperature was better.
Correct, it does help Russia's energy economy right now though.
Most of Canada is Muskeg or the Canadian shield. (rock)
We wouldn't gain much more usable land than we already have. About the only advantage is I won't have to shovel my driveway anymore.
Anything the modern far right champions today is destructive to the US so... the entire conservative political ideology.
Remember when Republican congress members visited Russia on the 4th of July?
The Russian information doctrine is to fuel any fire that has two sides. They don't actually pick sides, they just want nations more divided, because nation that is divided cannot function properly.
They definitely pick sides. There are cases where they'll specifically support the other side for a specific rally or action if they think it can cause disruption and strife, but those cases are an exception to the rule.
Everyone is focusing on "unwitting Westerners" while I'm focused on "laundering propaganda." Like, that's just how propoganda from other countries works right? Starts from a source, then people who believe the source spread it around their own country.
This seems to be acting like it's some new fangled way to spread fear and misinformation when that's the way it's always worked. The only difference now is that it's all online and people rarely verify sources so they take what they read as facts at face value.
Hexbear.
Lol no shit. A few of them are my coworkers.
"Unwitting Westerners" they definitely be witting.
I don't think you can call Tucker Carlson or Fox "unwitting". Nor a number of Republican Congresscritters.
I mean,… they don’t wit at all, so… the are unwitting.
I think they be witless.
Maybe we should bring back the old term: useful idiots.
There's also plenty of it through entirely witting Westerners.
Have you seen Gab? That is where most of it is dumped and consumed.
Russian trolls will push a US political point on Gab and right wing politicians will pick it up and spew it out on the news. It's really sickening if you ever decide to dig into that mess.
In other news, water is wet.
At least they're trying to. Fortunately, the Russian psyops seem pretty poor in this war and they haven't even managed to pull off any false flag operation to the point of causing contoversy among Ukraine's western allies, and the support remains as strong as one could hope for this long into the war.
It's scarey how much of the popular conservative media in the US seems to be paid off by Russia.
But you see it everywhere you look, there were just news reports of Nicholas Sarkozy bending over backwards to talk about how reasonable he thinks Putin is and how France needs Russia.
Fucking crazy, but some people really do listen to this shit and end up having their world views shaped by what they see as their trusted sources.
The opposite side can equalily say this about you. How can you know that it's not your world-view, rather than theirs, that's been shapped by the US propaganda that you listen to?
The two countries with the most vaccines and the least number of people vaccinated are the US and Russia. Russia's vaccine isn't even from the evil west! But still people won't take it.
You propagandize enough people and they don't trust you when you're telling them the truth.
Orban, and his comrades are no unwitting... they know what are they doing, and for how much, and for what (putin has all of the KGB files about him, and his comrades).
Their dumb followers are the unwitting, just like trumpists
I'm not even saying this is necessarily untrue, but the irony in this article is palpable.
If commenting on bias in reporting then I can't help but recall the seminal work on the topic in the West in Manufacturing Consent. , particularly the section of the model on sourcing.
I mean, how can you read this article about FSB influence and just ignore the sourcing sentence stating:
Agencies we also know have deceived the public.
Again, this isn't unnecessarily untrue, but don't be blind to the other side of it either.
Not everyone you disagree with online is a witting/unwitting Russian agent, especially tiny Lemmy communities.
I love that you've chosen the "can't trust the intelligence agencies, only Noam Chomsky" hill to or on, and yet this articles conclusion is just laughably obvious
The model isn't a personal opinion. It was created by Chomsky, yes, and Edward Herman, but it's just a framework for analyzing media and appeared first in a published work alongside numerous "case studies" featuring a litany of citations detailing not only the stark difference between how our media covers our own actions vs "enemy states" but also how those very own intelligence agencies meddled in multiple other countries, including Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and more.
But I guess when we do it, it's good and cool.
Newly discovered US official intel says "no u"
Honestly surprised not to see Jackson Hinkle's name on this. Him and The Quartering give me grifter vibes.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.
“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,” a US official authorized to discuss the material told CNN.
“The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the FSB’s agenda.”
Maxim Grigoriev, who heads a Russian NGO, made multiple speeches to the UN presenting a false study that claimed the humanitarian group the White Helmets – which operates in Syria – was running a black market for human organs and had faked chemical attacks by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom Russia is allied.
One man, Andrey Stepanenko, founded a media project in 2014 that sponsored journalists from the US and the West to visit eastern Ukraine and learn “the alleged truth” about what was happening in the region.
The US official also cited Natalia Burlinova, the founder of a Russian NGO who routinely coordinated FSB-funded public diplomacy efforts aimed at influencing Western views.
The original article contains 770 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
US has just revealed what it itself has been doing towards others for decades.
So Russia is hiring propagandists to spread its narratives to US citizens... same as US does to another countries with its NGO and USAID shills. So maybe it's not good, but it's definately fair.
I was going to say, standard spycraft right?
So... Was the propaganda false propaganda or true propaganda?
US propaganda during the Cold War included things like "our grocery stores have bananas" (true) and "we will totally definitely not expand NATO if you dissolve the USSR" (false).
True propaganda is just a fact that makes you look bad.
I'd hope the West is doing the same to get western propaganda out in Russia, China, Northern Africa, etc. Would be embarassing if this wasn't happening.
So... No evidence, just "these people happened to be spreading ideas that didn't fit with the Western perspective"
Are we back to McCarthyism already?
I'm not doubting that Russia's trying to spread propaganda: so are we, and so is any major player that wants to play the game. I'm just skeptical that this mess of a source is worth a damn.
The article literally mentions examples.
Back in the day, /r/thedonald had plenty of (highly upvoted) stories from a site called thedurian. I googled the editor, and his linkedin mentioned his location as Moscow and mentioned he'd previously worked for RT. Their stories were also spread on other subreddits. Stuff like that was rampant on reddit.
It's rampant in the fediverse too. Lemmgrad and tankies spout Russian/Chinese propaganda all day long, thinking they're top tier minds for being critical of western media, when in reality they simply ended up falling for another country's propaganda.
If you think there's no evidence, when it's everywhere including on social media, you're in denial or worse.
I too can point to people I don't like... That isn't evidence.
Well I mean it's CNN. It's been utter shit for years. The only thing you can say about it is it isn't as blatantly politically biased as Fox, but is absolutely corporatist.