Report Shows U.S. Citizens Helped Coordinate Online Disinformation Assault From Macedonia

Journalism

from the disinformation-nation dept

You’ll recall that even back in 2014 a lot was being made about Putin’s troll factories, or the oodles of hired underlings paid by the Russian leader to fill the internet with bile and disinformation twenty-four hours a day. Much of what we originally learned about these disinformation shops came from Russian whistleblowers like Lyudmila Savchuk. Savchuk spent two months employed by the operation and was so disgusted that she quit, launched an anti-propaganda social activist campaign, and successfully sued the Russian government for one Ruble in a bid to expose the effort.

Over the last few years we learned that these online propaganda efforts were much larger and sophisticated that originally believed. Reports as early as 2015 had already highlighted how these also extended well beyond just routine shitposting and clever memes and into the real world; like the time Russia went so far as to open a museum in Manhattan to try and spin its “annexation” of Crimea.

Many tried to downplay the impact and scope of these efforts in the following years, insisting that no real damage could come from a bunch of marginally-competent Russians with broken english shitposting on the internet (a narrative that doesn’t quite gel with the DOJ indictment or the whistleblower accounts that have emerged since, showing the efforts were notably more nuanced and sophisticated than initial 2014 and 2015 reporting suggested).

This week, a new report from Buzzfeed made it clear that 2016’s disinformation wave wasn’t just constrained to a few warehouses in St. Petersberg. Back in 2016, reports emerged suggesting that some entrepreneurial “teens in the Balkans” had been part of a broad effort to spread disinformation in support of Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The stories at the time identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. At the time, these efforts were largely brushed aside as the result of local teens eager to cash in on Facebook monetization of garbage information:

“The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising ? a declining market for American publishers ? goes a long way in Veles.”

But an investigation by Buzzfeed has since uncovered a notably more industrialized propaganda effort, aided, in part, by Americans:

“But after reviewing social media posts, government records, domain registry information, and archived versions of fake news sites, as well as interviewing key players, BuzzFeed News, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Investigative Reporting Lab Macedonia can now reveal that Veles? political news industry was not started spontaneously by apolitical teens.

Rather, it was launched by a well-known Macedonian media attorney, Trajche Arsov ? who worked closely with two high-profile American partners for at least six months during a period that overlapped with Election Day.

The report states that Arsov, in turn, was working with Americans like Paris Wade, who is currently running for office in Arizona. It also notes that at least one member of Russia’s Internet Research Agency indicted by Robert Mueller was in Macedonia three months before the first web domain for the country?s US-focused disinformation site was registered. And while there’s no hard, public evidence yet linking Russia to the effort, the report heavily implied that American and European investigators are pretty clearly headed that general direction:

“Reporters did not find any evidence connecting the Russian, Anna Bogacheva, to the Veles sites. Arsov denies any links to Russia. But now Macedonian security agencies are cooperating with law enforcement in the United States and at least two Western European countries to probe possible links between Russians, US citizens, and the pro-Trump ?fake news? websites, two senior Macedonian officials said.

A senior FBI agent familiar with the Macedonia case confirmed that the bureau is assisting with the investigations. The agent said that information determined to be of interest to Mueller is being shared with his office, but declined to comment further.”

Granted that’s not to say that much of the motivation wasn’t just simple profit for folks like Arsov, who proclaimed that duping Americans into consuming bullshit was profitable — at least until Facebook started weeding out garbage. But the story also makes it clear that Arsov was pretty cagey about his relationship with allies in the States, and quotes former FBI agents like Clint Watts, who suspect that much of the initial funding and analytics know how may have originated with people like Anna Bogacheva, who was among the 13 Russian nationals indicted by the Mueller probe back in February:

“According to the indictment, Bogacheva at one point oversaw the ?data analysis group? for the agency?s US operation. Along with another agency employee, Bogacheva allegedly traveled around the United States for about three weeks in June 2014, gathering information for an intelligence report that was shared with her superior at the agency.

Exactly a year later, she arrived in Macedonia.”

And while there’s again no hard ties between Russia and the Macedonia efforts yet, the report makes it clear that multi-country law enforcement inquiries are in their very “early stages” as they try to unravel the scope of the disinformation assault. Meanwhile, if there’s one thing that has been made clear since this wave of propaganda was first unearthed, it’s that this entire affair keeps getting larger, weirder, and more complicated, in stark contrast to those intent on framing it as some meaningless trolling by a handful of innocuous, ineffective and hapless shitposters.

Filed Under: anna bogacheva, election trolling, fake news, macedonia, paris wade, politics, russia, trajche arsov, troll factory