Andy Carvin, editor and research director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab, tells WIRED that his organization, which conducts extensive research into misinformation and other online harms, has been tracking Doppelganger for more than two years. The scale of the operation should come as no surprise, he says, given that fake news sites follow a clear pattern and are easy to fill with AI-generated text.
“Russian operations like Doppelganger are like throwing spaghetti at a wall,” he said. “They throw as much as they can and see what sticks.”
Meta announced in a written statement Tuesday that it had banned RT’s parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, and “other related entities” worldwide on Instagram, Facebook and Threads for engaging in what it called “foreign interference activity.” (“Meta is discrediting itself,” the Kremlin responded Tuesday, saying the ban endangered the company’s “prospects” for “normalizing” relations with Russia.)
In his testimony Wednesday, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, emphasized the sectoral 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 only of this year’s elections in the United States but elections around the world.”
Warner didn’t seem entirely convinced, pointing to the use of paid advertising in recent malign influence campaigns. “I would have thought,” he said, “that eight years later we would at least be more effective at filtering advertisers.”
He added that seven months ago, more than two dozen tech companies signed the AI Elections Accord in Munich, an agreement to invest in research and development of countermeasures against harmful AI. While some companies have responded favorably, he added, others have ignored repeated requests from U.S. lawmakers, with many eager to know how those investments have played out.
As he discussed Google’s efforts to “identify problematic accounts, particularly around election ads,” Kent Walker, Alphabet’s general counsel, was interrupted mid-sentence. Citing conversations with the Treasury Department, Warner interrupted to say that he had confirmed in February that Google and Meta had “repeatedly enabled Russian influence actors, including sanctioned entities, to use your advertising tools.”
The Virginia senator stressed that Congress needs to know precisely “how much content” the malicious actors in question paid to promote to the American public this year. “And we’re going to need that (information) extremely quickly,” he added, also referring to details about the precise number of Americans who saw the content. Walker responded that Google has removed “some 11,000 attempts by entities associated with Russia to post content on YouTube and elsewhere.”
Warner also urged officials not to treat Election Day as if it were an end zone. He stressed that the integrity of the information that reaches voters in the days and weeks that follow is just as important.
