The Disinformation Playbook

R. Michael Alvarez

Last week, the U.S. government launched a crackdown on Russian-led disinformation campaigns. These disinformation campaigns were actively working to spread disinformation to provoked further political polarization in the United States, as we head in the final months of the 2024 presidential election.

The court filings shed light into how these disinformation campaigns are being established and funded, and also tell us a lot about how difficult it will be to detect and deter these efforts (thanks to Politico for posting the court filings online!). To summarize, the Russian media outlet RT provided about $10 million dollars, pushed through a complicated array of foreign companies and intermediaries, to a U.S.-run media company. This U.S. media company’s business is producing and publishing English-language videos on social media platforms.

To quote directly from paragraph 2 of last week’s indictment:

“Using multiple fake personas, AFANASYEVA edited, posted, and directed the posting by U.S. Company-1 of hundreds of videos. Many of the videos published by U.S. Company-1 contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy. While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

The indictment then notes that since November 2023 the company receiving this RT funding has posted nearly 2,000 videos that on YouTube have gained more than 16 million views. The company did not disclose the RT funding. Nor did the company register as a foreign agent, as required by U.S. law.

What’s interesting is that these seems to be a direct continuation of disinformation activities that have been going on since before the Cold War. In a recent book, “Active Measures,” Thomas Rid recounts the history of Russian disinformation efforts. The book makes quite an interesting (and frightening) read. I highly recommend Rid’s book for those who want to learn more of the history of disinformation efforts.

However, it’s also clear that modern communications technologies, and the rise of social media “influencers,” can make disinformation efforts like these very difficult to detect before they do their damage. And that these disinformation efforts can have a scale and reach that might have real effects on the upcoming presidential election. Reading the indictment it’s clear that current disinformation efforts are much more ambitious, seeking to directly influence the American public and an American presidential election — than those that Rid discussed in his book.

While it’s lot clear how federal authorities discovered this particular disinformation effort, my guess is that the magnitude of the financial transfers and payments may have tipped investigators off. In the indictment, they claim that one of the social media influencers was paid a monthly fee of $400,000 (plus other bonuses and incentives) to produce four weekly videos. That is a lot of money, the sort of money that I think may catch the attention of authorities, especially if it is connected to large sums of money coming from overseas.

These court filing help provide some insight into what the modern-day disinformation playbook is. This seems like an ambitious effort to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election at a large scale. But this leads me to wonder about whether there are smaller-scale disinformation campaigns like these, more carefully targeted, AI-enabled, efforts to spread disinformation to voters in battleground states, or to specific voter segments. Smaller-scale campaigns, carefully targeted, are likely to be much more difficult to detect. But they could be quite effective at moving the needle in an incredible close election. We’ve been warning about this problem for some time, and this disinformation playbook has made it much clearer that we need to double-down on efforts to detect these disinformation campaigns.