AI Summary
5 min readFor years, the Russian government has been running a sprawling, sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at the West, and its primary goal is not to make you believe any single lie. Instead, as Josh and Chuck explain on this episode of Stuff You Should Know, the real objective is to sow so much chaos and confusion that people simply stop trying to figure out what is true. The strategy is less about winning an argument and more about making the very idea of a shared reality seem exhausting and pointless.
The roots of this modern campaign trace back to 2013, with the founding of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), often called the Russian Troll Farm. The IRA was created by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former criminal who became a successful oligarch and close confidant of Vladimir Putin (and who also founded the Wagner mercenary group). The IRA hired young, English-speaking workers to create fake news stories, social media posts, and YouTube videos. This was the early, crude version of what would become a much more sophisticated machine. While the IRA eventually disbanded, its work was quickly taken up by other groups, creating a game of whack-a-mole that the West has yet to win.
The Firehose of Falsehood
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:57) **Welcome & Russian Disinformation Setup** - Josh and Chuck introduce the topic of Russian propaganda, noting it’s been a major problem since the internet and social media, with Russia being particularly adept at it.
- 2 (03:00) **The Internet Research Agency (IRA) Origins** - The IRA, or Russian Troll Farm, was founded in 2013 by a former criminal turned oligarch and Putin confidant, who also founded the Wagner Group.
- 3 (07:07) **State Media & The 2016 Election Debut** - Sputnik and RT (Russia Today) were Kremlin-backed outlets distributing stories to Western audiences, but the 2016 U.S. election was a major debut for the IRA’s manipulation potential.
- 4 (10:09) **Western Response & The “Fire Hose of Falsehood”** - After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the EU banned Russian state media, and tech companies like Google and Apple pulled their apps, but this is a piecemeal “whack-a-mole” response.
- 5 (12:07) **Operation Doppelganger: Cloning Legitimate News Sites** - Doppelganger is a specific technique, not an organization, where Russia clones dummy websites that look like legitimate outlets like the Washington Post or Le Monde.
- 6 (14:10) **The Social Design Agency & Kremlin Control** - A PR firm called the Social Design Agency (SDA) was hired by the Russian government to run much of the Doppelganger activity, directed by the Putin administration.
- 7 (19:14) **Post-Invasion Ramp-Up & Celebrity Fakery** - After the 2022 Ukraine invasion, the disinformation flood ramped up, targeting France, Germany, the US, and the UK to turn public opinion against supporting Ukraine.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Operation Doppelganger was a Russian propaganda project discovered in 2022, a minor part of the enormous, ongoing disinformation and chaos-sewing campaign Russia spreads across the world through social media. And some of your views may have come from it.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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