Marc Champion: Putin's 'troll farm' isn't necessary. We've got our own

When it comes to disinformation warfare, Russian President Vladimir Putin is, of course, a pro. As a career KGB agent, it’s what he knows and what he does. That point was again underscored by the recent U.S. Department of Justice case alleging a systematic Russian effort to interfere in November’s presidential election.

That did happen in 2016, but it’s 2024. By now you have to ask why Putin bothers — given the industrial quantities of homegrown disinformation we’re producing ourselves — and just how much attention we should be paying to his so-called active measures.

The DoJ’s 277-page affidavit alleges that Russia has been running a broad, covert election interference project called Doppelganger, and as a result has shut down dozens of websites traced back to the country. All of this was being organized in meetings at the presidential administration in Moscow, better known as the Kremlin. According to notes taken during these meetings, at least some were presided over by Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergey Kiriyenko.

It’s hard to overstate Kiriyenko’s centrality to the Kremlin. A one-time liberal, he’s now the point man for Putin’s domestic political strategy, including the recent presidential elections, as well as for digital media and for administration of the four Ukrainian regions that Putin unilaterally annexed to Russia on Sept. 30, 2022. He’s deeply loyal, runs the Russian association for Putin’s beloved martial arts, and is a close ally of Yury Kovalchuk, the billionaire often described as “Putin’s banker.”

And just for the avoidance of doubt, the meeting notes that the U.S. somehow got hold of — and which I assume to be genuine — confirm that a report on Doppleganger’s progress was sent to Putin himself. The Kremlin denies the existence of Doppleganger.

According to the DoJ’s case, Doppelganger directed troll farms to write comments on posts, as well as to produce fake articles under fake or forged bylines, often on fake websites made to mimic those of U.S. and European flagship media outlets.

The goals laid out include not just influencing the next U.S. election, but also undermining public support for the defense of Ukraine and discrediting the U.S., U.K. and NATO in general. A project called “International Conflict Incitement” aimed to stir up existing domestic conflicts within U.S. allies or to “artificially create” new ones. One enthusiastic suggestion recorded by the Kremlin meeting’s notetaker was to: “make a fake on an American soldier that raped a German woman. That would be great!”

There’s detailed written guidance for the troll farms on what messages to push, as well as quotas for them to meet — 60,000 comments per month for Germany and France combined. And there’s astute advice for those less steeped in the ways of disinformation “to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information.”

But Putin’s obsession with disinformation displays a weakness. It reflects his deeply held belief that voters and populations as a whole have no thoughts or agency of their own; that their attitudes are instead the products of manipulation, either by his own special services and other branches of the state — especially within Russia, where the Kremlin exercises tight control over traditional and social media — or by foreign agencies, such as the CIA.

So, when more than a million Ukrainians took to the streets in 2013-2014, spending months outdoors in subzero temperatures and often under brutal police attack to protest, this was not — in Putin’s view — an expression of popular will, but a coup d’etat orchestrated by the CIA. That same misconception led him to believe the local population wouldn’t fight back when he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later. It was a catastrophic error.

The sad truth is that by now Putin can probably save himself some money. When you have the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk or the U.K.’s Nigel Farage to stir up social conflict and amplify disinformation in the name of free speech, who needs operation Doppelganger?

Twitter alone publishes about 6 billion posts a month, a third of them political, dwarfing the quotas set for Russia’s troll factories. And while it’s hard to quantify how many of those posts consist of deliberate falsehoods, several studies have found that fake news gets shared more on social media — 70% more, according to one by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers.

Russian interference operations are real, but these are our own problems. Our homegrown websites, talk show hosts and bloggers are now churning out more fake news, conspiracy theories and incitement to violence than Russia could ever hope to invent.

This kind of disinformation is so filled with malice that it’s comforting to think of it as a foreign plot. When riots erupted in the U.K. town of Southport in July, over the stabbing of six-year-old girls at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance class, a fabricated story gave the attacker an Arabic sounding name and said he had come to Britain by boat, as an illegal immigrant the previous year. The story spread like wildfire. It was passed on by far-right U.K. sites, political parties and influencers — as well as by a website called Channel3Now that appeared to have Pakistani and Russian connections and has since been shut down. Violent anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim protests continued for days after the court gave the perpetrator’s true identity, as a 17-year-old, U.K.-born Christian.

There’s no hard evidence Russia set that fire, though no doubt the officials heading Doppleganger would be celebrating if so. What’s certain is that Putin believes himself to be in a zero-sum conflict with the West, and sees both free-speech protections and the democratic process of choosing leaders as vulnerabilities he can exploit. But let’s not make the same mistake as an aging Cold War spy, believing our chaos and dysfunction are in any significant respect the work of the Kremlin. He’s just egging us on and enjoying the show.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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