Andy Carvin, editor-in-chief and research director at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), tells WIRED that his organization, which conducts a lot of research into misinformation and other online harms, has been tracking Doppelganger for more than two years. The scope of the operation shouldn’t surprise anyone, he says, given that fake news sites follow an obvious pattern and that filling them with AI-generated text is simple.
“Russian operations like Doppelganger are like throwing spaghetti against a wall,” he says. “They threw everything they could at it and saw what stuck.”
Meta, in a written statement Tuesday, said it had banned RT’s parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, and “other related entities” globally from Instagram, Facebook and Threads for engaging in what it called “foreign interference activity.” (“Meta is discrediting itself,” the Kremlin responded Tuesday, claiming the ban has jeopardized the company’s “prospects” for “normalizing” relations with Russia.)
On Wednesday, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, stressed the sector-wide nature of the problem facing online voters. “People who try to interfere in elections rarely target a single platform,” he said, adding that Meta is nonetheless “confident” in its ability to protect the integrity “not just of this year’s election in the United States, but of elections everywhere.”
Warner didn’t seem entirely convinced, pointing to the use of paid ads in recent malign influence campaigns. “I would have thought,” he said, “eight years later, that we would at least be better at filtering out advertisers.”
He added that seven months ago, more than two dozen tech companies had signed the Munich Artificial Intelligence Election Agreement, an agreement to invest in research and development of countermeasures against harmful AI. While some of the companies have responded, he said, others have ignored repeated inquiries from U.S. lawmakers, many of them eager to hear how those investments played out.
While discussing Google’s efforts to “identify problematic accounts, particularly around election ads,” Alphabet’s chief legal officer Kent Walker was interrupted mid-sentence. Citing conversations with the Treasury Department, Warner interrupted him to say that he had confirmed in February that both Google and Meta had “repeatedly allowed influential Russian actors, including sanctioned entities, to use their advertising tools.”
The Virginia senator stressed that Congress needed to know specifically “how much content” relevant malicious actors had paid to push to the American public this year. “And we’re going to need that (information) extraordinarily quickly,” he added, also referring to details of how many Americans specifically had viewed the content. Walker responded by saying that Google had removed “something like 11,000 attempts by Russian-affiliated entities to post content on YouTube and the like.”
Warner also urged officials not to treat Election Day as an end zone. Equally important and of paramount importance, he stressed, is the integrity of the news that reaches voters in the days and weeks that follow.