The Justice Department said Tuesday that it had moved to disrupt a covert Russian influence operation that used artificial intelligence to spread propaganda in the United States, Europe and Israel with the goal of undermining support for Ukraine and stoking internal political divisions.
Working with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, as well as officials at Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, the department said it seized two internet domains in the United States and took down 968 inauthentic accounts that the Russian government created after its attack on Ukraine began in 2022.
In affidavits released with the announcement, officials with the Justice Department, the FBI and the Pentagon’s Cyber National Mission Force linked the effort to Russia’s Federal Security Service and RT, the state television network that has channels in English and several other languages.
The disclosure of such a large, global network of bots confirmed widespread warnings that the popularization of rapidly developing AI tools would make it easier to produce and spread dubious content. With AI, information campaigns can be created in a matter of minutes — the kind of work that in the months before the 2016 presidential election, for example, required an army of office workers.
The Russian network used an AI-enhanced software package to create scores of fictitious user profiles on X. It did so by registering the users with email accounts on two internet domains, mlrtr.com and otanmail.com. (OTAN, perhaps coincidentally, is the French acronym for the NATO alliance). The software could then generate posts for the accounts — and even repost, like and comment on the posts of other bots in the network.
Both domains were based in the United States but controlled by Russian administrators, who used the accounts to promote propaganda produced by the RT television network. In a statement, FBI Director Christopher Wray called it “a generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm.”
As with other legal action against Russians, the allegations are unlikely to lead to arrests, but officials made it clear that they hoped that exposing propaganda operations could help to disrupt them and blunt their impact.
The United States “will not tolerate Russian government actors and their agents deploying AI to sow disinformation and fuel division among Americans,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
The seizures came ahead of November’s presidential election, which, officials have warned, is already a target of influence operations from Russia and other nations, including Iran.
In a separate briefing Tuesday, officials with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that Russia’s efforts to sway public opinion in the United States about American support for Ukraine, using the bots, paralleled its ongoing efforts to influence the election in November.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments, said Russia was continuing its strategy from 2016 and 2020. Then, it favored the election of President Donald Trump.
Although the Russia operation detailed in the affidavits focused on X, formerly Twitter, officials in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands issued an advisory calling on other social media companies to identify fictitious accounts on their platforms “to reduce Russian malign foreign influence activity.”
X’s cooperation showed that the company is willing to work with federal authorities despite Musk’s avowals to create a public square free of interference from the authorities.
The Justice Department said that X “voluntarily suspended the remaining bot accounts identified in the court documents for terms of service violations.” The company declined to comment on its role in disrupting the Russian network.
The Justice Department said that the use of the domains violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law the Biden administration invoked to impose punitive economic penalties against Russia when its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. The department also said payments for the domains violated federal money laundering laws.
The campaign created fake users on X that seemed genuine, like Ricardo Abbott, supposedly a resident of Minneapolis who created an account in June 2023. One video posted by that account showed President Vladimir Putin of Russia claiming that parts of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania were “gifts” granted to those countries by the Soviet Union during World War II.
Another bot used the name Sue Williamson, and claimed to be a resident of Gresham, presumably the city outside Portland, Oregon. Her account bio included an obscenity and the phrase, “Think for yourself.”
The accounts focused on several countries besides the United States, including Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ukraine and Israel, the officials said.
RT, which the State Department describes as a critical player in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries, while social media companies have also labeled or otherwise restricted its spread on their platforms.
Even so, it has repeatedly sought new ways to sidestep those restrictions and reach global audiences. A report last month found that thousands of the network’s articles had spread online using fake websites with names, like Man Stuff News, intended to disguise the origin of the content.
The Justice Department’s announcements charged that the network’s deputy editor-in-chief worked with an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service to organize the operation. It did not name the editor, but the network’s website identifies the person holding that position as Anna Belkina. RT’s press office, asked to respond to the accusations, appeared to mock them. “Farming is a beloved pastime for millions of Russians,” it replied in an email, without elaborating.
A senior NATO official said that coordinated government responses to Russian information operations — the United States, Canada and the Netherlands are all members of the alliance — were intended to show Putin “that we know what’s happening.”
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at German Marshall Fund, a research organization that reported in May on the fake websites spreading RT content, said that the Russians remain persistent.
“While today’s announcement is obviously good news and shows that the government and private sector are still cooperating to combat foreign malign influence,” he said, “we should look at this in much the same way that we look at drug seizures at the U.S. border — for every influence campaign they catch, there are likely many, many more that have evaded detection.”
© 2024 The New York Times Company
