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Ever wonder what sort of people are motivated to spend hours on the internet every day, posting angry comments under articles on sites like Gateway Pundit, the New York Post, Breitbart, Fox News, or the Daily Mail.
Well, it certainly isn't normal "concerned citizens," according to research by media watchdog NewsGuard who analysed the comment sections of several right-wing news sites and shared the findings with Wired:
“NewsGuard identified 194 users that all target the same articles, push the same pro-Russian talking points and disinformation narratives, while masquerading as disgruntled Western citizens,” the report states. The researchers found these fake accounts posting comments in four pro-Trump US publications: the Gateway Pundit, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Fox News. They were also posting similar comments in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid, and French website Le Figaro. [...]The actors behind this campaign appear to be exploiting a particularly vulnerable part of the media landscape,” McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, tells WIRED. “Comment sections designed to foster reader engagement lack robust security measures, allowing bad actors to post freely, change identities, and create the illusion of genuine grassroots campaigns rather than orchestrated propaganda.”
The researchers believe that the disinfo narratives pushed by these accounts are linked to Storm-1516, a Russian disinformation campaign with a history of posting fake videos to push Kremlin talking points. Recently Storm-1516 was behind pushing a deepfake video of someone making false allegations of sexual assault against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, something that was confirmed by US intelligence.
“Replying in threads is a tactic that can have an impact with very little investment,” Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED. “By inserting disinformation into an unrelated conversation it might be seen, even if the account being used has no followers and was just created yesterday. It also doesn't matter if the account you are using is caught and shut down because you haven't lost an investment, you can just create another account five minutes later.”
There is another pay-off for the Kremlin, as the fake comments allow Russian state-backed media outlets to misrepresent how Western audiences feel about particular issues to their own much-lied-to people.
Either that or they could just lose £30 million a year in dark money running a news channel on British terrestrial TV.
"The fake comments, Newsguard found, are also then used in reports from Russian state-backed media outlets to bolster claims about how Western audiences are responding to a particular incident.
NewsGuard’s researchers identified 104 articles in Russian state media that cited comments from Western news outlets as evidence to back up their claims between January and August of this year.
This tactic allows bad actors to reduce the risk of detection and embed propaganda in a subtle, seemingly organic way, blending it into the casual commentary of supposed everyday Western readers,” Sadeghi said. “The repetition of the same claim across multiple formats and contexts can create a sense of familiarity that may lend the narratives an appearance of credibility."
Either that or they could just lose £30 million a year in dark money running a news channel on British terrestrial TV.
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