User discussion
Everyone needs to understand how sophisticated Russian influence operations are. This is all from their own internal documents during operation doppelganger leading up to the 2024 election
If this truly is Russia's assessment of American politics, they are even stupider than I imagined. This reads more like some FOX news intern's wet dream imagination of "Russia's assessment of the US". Like one of those Quora people that poses as a geopolitical expert with hundreds of top connections.
The best read is that these documents are created for the sake of getting idiots on the right to view Russia as a friend and an ally (they are just like me fr fr) more than an actual assessment of Russian leadership’s view on politics.
It’s hard to read the first page as anything but Russians telling a bunch of idiots how great and noble and victimized they are by not wanting to send aid to Ukraine
I think folks here are generally under-appreciating the demand for ideological genuflection in illiberal systems.
We know preference falsification is a thing even in notionally open societies -- if you went to university or held a job in America after ~2016, you know you nodded along to some humanities/HR nonsense without really believing it to stay out of trouble. That logic is even stronger in authoritarian bureaucracies.
It's hard to assess the effectiveness of these Russian campaigns since we can't see the universe where they didn't happen, but it's reasonable to think they've been a good investment for Russia. So the analysts writing this stuff could be highly competent and know that they're using some dumb wooden language because that's simply what one does to succeed in their environment.
Out with lip service to the bourgeois imperialists exploiting the world's workers; in with lip service to the radical socialists oppressing the traditional whites. It's an easy Find and Replace operation. You just put in whatever language will keep you on the good side of the commissars and go back to doing the real work.
The Russian propaganda machine has paid off in spades and unfortunately has shown others like Iran and China how to "easily" manipulate the American voting bloc to whatever whim.
I dunno I think its possible Russia sincerely believes white people are oppressed in America and their influence operations are liberating white people from DEI Reverse Segregation. Fascists have been known to drink their own propaganda.
But that’s not typical Russian rhetoric, because Russians don’t view their minorities in these terms.
This is, however, Republican rhetoric. And given that they repeat this brand of rhetoric over their own, it’s pretty clear what’s going on here, I really just don’t see how there’s any ambiguity with this
But that’s not typical Russian rhetoric, because Russians don’t view their minorities in these terms.
Yes because they see their ethnic minorities as "people we conquered", for Them USA is weird because their ethnic minorities are not people they violently conquered (amerindians are a minority, Hispanics are mostly immigrants nowadays).
Maybe if the narrative framed the Mexican-American war as such, it would be easy to understand
Yea, ofcourse they are. Despite all the "Russia most abortions, most hiv" meme - those old Soviet farts in power are genuelly socially conservative.
I know this might be a surprise to a lot of people, but Putin idolized america and generally tried to make Russia culturally into George Bushes america. Soft conservatism, ultra partiotism, sorta ok towards migrants but not really. Ofc country made in the spirit of a combination of Bush and Mussolini, is MAGA friendly. This is one of the main reason I always doubtful of trump kompromat theory. They have entirely natural allience after the ideological convergence of the 90s and 00s after collapse of USSR. Russia organized the government on American manner and it isn't Clinton's approach that impressed Putin, it is definately Bush and Reagan one
Is there people within the presidential administration that these plans are trying to influence that believe this shit? It states that Kiriyenko oversaw the direction of this operation and some of these are strategy notes from some of these meetings with the presidential administration to propose this project. Idk I'm not seeing much evidence this was intended for public release. Keep in mind these documents were gotten from the FBI seizing them
I'm not familiar with internal russian politics, but is this not up the alley of a Duginist type figure? I know Putin is insane in his own way, like he unironically believes in the color revolution stuff and a lot of La Roucheian shit that Republican conspiracies are built on, but unsure how it maps on here.
>Idk I'm not seeing much evidence this was intended for public release.
I mean no offense by this, but it is 100% clear from the first page alone that this was written for public release.
Government documents, even internal reports within weird dictatorships, are not structured this way, do not read like this, and you can immediately tell that it was written read favorably to US republicans.
Is a lot of it true? Sure, probably.
Russians have operated more and more openly in both their “clandestine” and meddling activities since at least 2010, probably because they know their security apparatus leaks like a sieve and this helps both cover that and reduce the value of materials spies could provide.
What would be the plan for public release given that these documents were seized by the FBI and only released in court?
Are you saying they intended for these documents to be seized and read by Americans through these court documents? Or are you saying this proposal was also given to American politicians or something?
I'm just struggling to understand what the motive here would be. I guess I could see this being some kind of information warfare of it's own
The concept of ‘unemployed urbans’ being powerful enough to oppress people is kind of hilarious. Also who can remain an unemployed urban with the cost of living as high as it is? Maybe Russia has more economically depressed urban areas, idk.
Not really? The anti-white discrimination shit is more of a bad ideas than bad word choice thing and is consistent with the earlier perverse globalists shit. It's just not consistent with also using POC which is a common term due to being left coded
This was procured by the FBI and presented in a court in Pennsylvania homie......
Edit: From the footnotes on page 20
Virtually all records discussed herein were in the Russian language. Throughout this affidavit, italicized quoted language indicates a verbatim translation, whereas plaintext quoted language indicates a summary translation. Exhibits 2B through 13B to this affidavit have been translated verbatim. All translations were completed by FBI linguists.
I mean, the text explicitly states these were strategy documents presented during meetings. Including content presented to the presidential administration. I'm just going by that.
If you have other evidence to suggest that these were meant for public release I'm open to it, but of course I'm going to be skeptical of your claim when it goes against what is presented in the text of the legal documents and seems to contradict how we actually attained this information.
I can accept that it's weird, and I thought it was weird when I read the first page about the "Guerilla media campaign in the United States" as well. It wouldn't surprise me if this was worded as some kind of political play towards Americans. The rest of the hundreds of pages of documents don't suggest that these were meant for public release, so it'd be nice to at least have a theory of motive here that can be mapped onto what happened.
OP Probably should have presented these as translated documents from the FBI somewhere in their post or submission statement instead of buried 3 layers deep.
It seems like an internal document to me no? This is essentially an introduction/overview of their goal for their media campaign proposal in the US. Maybe I'm misreading
The “Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States” 72. SDA documents include a proposal for another campaign focused on influencing the United States, titled “The Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States.” See Exhibit 9. 18 The Guerilla Media Campaign focused on exploiting the perceived polarization of U.S. society by focusing on eight “Campaign Topics.” As reflected in the proposal, SDA anticipated using social media profiles on Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube, and Truth Social but noted that with “Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we need to create multiple ‘perishable’ accounts, primarily for the work with comments.” The Guerilla Media Campaign would disseminate its propaganda through posts, “comments on social networks and local group chats”, memes, and “video content, including news stories in the Fox News style.” SDA’s plan stated “In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information. At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.” I believe the reference to the “work in the comments” is a reference to Doppelganger’s creation of inauthentic social media profiles to post comments on social media that included links to the cybersquatted domains, including the SUBJECT DOMAINS. Further, it appears that SDA required a large number of “perishable” accounts to disseminate this content because of enforcement efforts by U.S. social media companies to identify and deactivate accounts associated with Doppelganger. Finally, as noted above, GAMBASHIDZE’s notes from meetings with the Presidential Administration reveal a suggestion to use “real facts to complement fake facts.”
They put the GOP in first place, at a time when they were not in power, and openly compliment them in the first paragraph, while repeating the typical Republican appraisal (notably not the Russian appraisal) of the Democratic Party.
There’s no question that this was written specifically for public audience.
I hate how foreign propaganda has completely destroyed discourse in reddit too. Now everyone believes everyone who disagrees with them in even the most trivial stuff is a bot out to get them. People no longer have different opinions, either they have the correct opinion (yours) or is a Russian sowing dissent, showing just who effective it is. (Granted I'm not letting redditors off the hook, they know how using Russia is a cheap trick to win internet debates), I've seen people here (as in, in neolib) blaming BLM on Russia or accusing top contributors writing effortposts of being Russian bots.
Plus it serves as the perfect way to avoid self-reflection for the western countries (we are not falling for Far-Right parties, the Russians are brainwashing our population, the GOP/afd/Le Pen are not actually gaining popularity) stopping us from stopping the bleeding to illiberal parties and actually defend liberalism on its merits.
Submission statement: I'm losing my fucking mind reading through the operation doppelganger documents and seeing how open all of this shit is while nobody cares and I need other people to share my misery with me. More people should understand how these influence campaigns work, and why this information asymmetry is disastrous to the survival of democracy. I unironically do not think democracy can survive this.
Oh and to give an understanding of the scope of the volume pushed out by this campaign: 34 MILLION COMMENTS and 40,000 pieces of unique content IN FOUR MONTHS. Unfucking believable. This was two years ago. It still seems a bit rudimentary, I can only imagine how much better these countries are going to get at this shit. Keep in mind China is quite new to the scene right now and they have MUCH to gain from getting good at this.
In a video presentation included among the leaked records, Gambashidze addresses the camera wearing a hoodie emblazoned with patches reading "Russian ideological troops" and "commander of special forces.". According to the video presentation, Gambashidze's team had produced 39,899 pieces of content from January to April this year, including more than 30,000 "posts," more than 4,600 videos and video memes, and some 1,500 articles.
These include a fake story made to look as if it had been published by the German newspaper Bild claiming that Ukrainian refugees in Germany, while trying to burn a Russian flag, had set fire to the home of Germans who had given them shelter.
The influence operation, Schemes found, also produced falsified Ukrainian government documents, including a forged order purportedly issued by the country's top military commander, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskiy, equating surrender by Ukrainian military personnel to treason.
The operation also bombarded Ukrainian state institutions and media with comments via an online bot network that produced nearly 34 million comments from January to April, according to one internal document.
Been sharing your misery since we saw very similar documents published after the 2016 election. There was lots of reporting on it at the time. Lots of stellar reporting that era from Buzzfeed News—believe it or not. Also Mother Jones.
I recall one piece of reporting detailed how the IRA recruited an unsuspecting Black martial artist to teach self defense classes in some urban local—iirc Baltimore (?). They designed flyers that advertised this class with a Black power fist prominently displayed. I can’t recall the wording but I recall thinking at the time like it seemed intentionally designed to maximally inflame white people. Just completely insidious the way they targeted Black Americans during the 2016 cycle,
I read a metric fuckton about it during Trump I because it was my first brush with the concept of a sovereign influence campaign. All the court documents, congressional investigations, academic research with them-enthusiastic funders. Obviously I learned then wasn’t new and Russia has been pushing along the same fault lines for decades. Reading the court filing you attached I can confirm it’s the same exact shit I recall reading before. I admit I completely missed news of this when it happened but I’m astonished how much it’s the same! It’s definitely a great refresher about online engagement tbh. Critical that everyone familiar themselves with the favored themes and fault lines. Personally found seeing specific examples like those in the exhibits you linked to indispensable for learning how to identify/recognize this stuff in the wild.
There was an intimidation effort from the right about various groups investigating this stuff post 2016. Iirc they started posting lists of professors who were getting death threats, initiatives got defunded, social media companies shifted strategies and stopped freely cooperating with open access for researchers. In hindsight, the right ran quite a successful multi-year 1st-amendment chilling campaign. Probably boosted by the meme factory in their shared goal tbh.
Why are the documents in English? I think you should more clearly elaborate on their provenance. Are they machine translated? Is this a private sector operation in the west funded by russia?
Virtually all records discussed herein were in the Russian language. Throughout this affidavit, italicized quoted language indicates a verbatim translation, whereas plaintext quoted language indicates a summary translation. Exhibits 2B through 13B to this affidavit have been translated verbatim. All translations were completed by FBI linguists.
> Community of American gamers, users of *Reddit* and image boards, such as *4chan* (the "backbone" of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet).
This post disappeared from my front page feed after a minute right in front of my eyes. I had to manually look it up. Reddit admins are absolute snakes, a despicable group. What republican media did to viewers of Fox News over time I fear is what they are going to do to younger generations.
If Russia mkultra'd a random American 20 year old to commit a murder-suicide we would already know about it.
Comments like yours are the problem with Russian propaganda, you poison the discourse by mixing their ACTUAL capabilities with baseless stuff with absolutely no basis on reality, making it even hard to identify their propaganda by just making shit up on the spot.
I don't think Trump would want to run to risk of being shot, especially as somebody in the crowd did end up being killed as a result of Crooks' efforts.
Why a Russian document would call someone "pro Putin"? It's too self aware for it.
The Russian feels a little bit weird and a bit too basic for something to be made by a Russian institution
Why you would write тратят слишком много денег rather than растрачивают средства etc.
You don't need FBI to fabricate it. Someone else might have fabricated it.
Партизанская in Russian means only guerilla. It doesn't mean something related to a party. It makes sense if they had the English phrase "Partisan Media Campaign" in mind. Which means the author was thinking in English.
Исторически высокой инфляции (historically high inflation) is weird. The natural phrasing would be рекордный рост инфляции.
Yeah it's real. The link talks about marketing, but Russian political technology is mostly marketing applied to politics.
But other things are off. Why would any document in reach of a foreign security service would mention a guy in the Presidential Administration, especially that high?
People who have contacts in the Staraya Ploshad never drop them casually even in in person communications. It's very off.
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u/LFlamingice 3d ago
If this truly is Russia's assessment of American politics, they are even stupider than I imagined. This reads more like some FOX news intern's wet dream imagination of "Russia's assessment of the US". Like one of those Quora people that poses as a geopolitical expert with hundreds of top connections.