How Russia Shapes What the World Thinks

Stuff You Should Know

This episode of Stuff You Should Know examines Russia’s sophisticated disinformation campaigns, focusing on the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and its evolution into operations like 'doppelganger.' It details how Russian

Key takeaways

• The Internet Research Agency (IRA), founded in 2013 by a former Russian criminal and oligarch close to Putin, ran troll farms to spread disinformation via fake social media posts and websites.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, A-O-Landia rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A-O-Landia rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcastss, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shout out to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nick Taturo. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Titoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing, my mom? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mom as I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Titoro. It's called Happiness, delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Titoro. And listen now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's missing. We don't know where she is as possible. The Russians have her. At the very least, it's quite possible the Russians have misled her in some way or another, and maybe they tricked her into leaving when it was time to record. You cheeky boy, don't worry, everybody. Jerry's just really on vacation, but that was a very clever setup to this episode on, essentially on Russian propaganda and how, you know, I think we all knew that like their propaganda machine was big back in the Cold War and stuff, obviously. But it's a really big problem now and has been for a while ever since the advent of the internet and especially social media. Yeah, because those two things are wide open set up for people to distribute misinformation, deliberate misinformation. The Russians are far from the only ones that do it. They're just really, really good at it. And they've been doing it for a long time. I would guess they were probably the first country to really start doing this on like a wide scale. But, I mean, as far back I think is 2010 or at least the 2000, yeah, but like the 2010s at least, 2013 at the absolute latest, the Internet Research Agency was the first kind of famous one. that surfaced. And the whole premise back then and now is to basically game social media and use whatever you can, whatever like weaknesses it has in like the entire structure of it, to confuse people to sow discord and disinformation and chaos and questioning what reality is, getting the media to start using words like post-truth and stuff like that. that kind of stuff, it might not have a specific aim where it's like we want to, say, get Trump elected. That was part of this too. Like that was a Russian name as well. Or we want to stir America up over the border crisis. Just creating a climate where people question what's real or what's true, that in and of itself is a huge triumph for these Russian operations that have been going on for more than a decade. Yeah, I think that was one of the things that chilled me most was it wasn't like we really need to get people to believe this one thing about Ukraine, let's say. It's more like, no, let's just sow chaos and confusion to where you doubt what you're reading and you don't know what the truth is anymore. And that's just like, that feels even scarier, you know. It does because ultimately, eventually most people would be like, it's not worth trying to get to the bottom of this. You know, I'm just going to stop. I'm just not going to pay attention anymore. I'm just not going to care. Or I'll just share something because, like, I read it. Yes, exactly. Sometimes on Reddit. Yeah. Good point. All right. So maybe we should jump back a little bit and talk about the IRA, not the Irish Republican Army, but the Internet Research Agency or the Russian troll farm, as it might know it better as. That was founded in 2013 by, guy that was a former criminal, eventually a successful entrepreneur, and kind of higher up oligarch in Russia and, you know, confidant of Vladimir Putin. And he also founded, you know, confident up for a while because he also founded the Wagner group, which you may have read about the news, the Russian mercenary organization that would eventually try and overthrow Putin. Yes. Do you watch the agency on Prime? No, I don't. It is magnificent. Yeah. It's one of the best spy shows of recent times. Ooh, I love a spy show. You guys liked Black Doves, right? Yep. This is at least on that caliber, if not higher. Michael Fossbender's in it, Richard Gear, Jeffrey Wright, a bunch of other very talented people. But it's all like SpyCraft stuff. And it's really worth it. They just released their second season. and I've got three episodes left. I started two days ago, and both seasons are well worth watching. Okay, I did not watch Black Doves, actually. I thought you were talking about the, what's the Gary Elman show, Wild Horses, something Horses? I don't know. I know the one you're talking about. You watched that? Yeah, I watched that one. Is it good? Yeah, that's really good. I mean, Gary Oldman's fantastic. Slow horses. Slow horses. I swear you watch Black Dose because Emily said she liked it. The one with... She may have watched it. Bend it like Beckham? Yeah, Kira Knightley. I didn't see it. Emily may have watched that without me, though, because she loves that too, buddy. Okay, just watch them both. But definitely watch the agency. It's much more likely to be in your wheelhouse if either one of them are going to be. All right. Okay. So back to the show. Oh, I know I brought that up. They battle essentially the Wagner group, but it's called the Halla in the agency. Oh, okay. I got you. Sorry about that. That's okay. Everyone loves a good recommendation from either one of us, I think. Yeah, I also, I want to be clear here. This was not brought to you by prime. We're not trying to manipulate you or propagandize you or market to you. This is just, I watch it on prime, and it's on prime, and it's so good that I just took that time to share that with everybody. That's all. Exactly what it seemed like on face value. And do you know why I have to say that, Chuck? Oh, I don't know, Josh. because of stuff like this operation that we're going to talk about. That's right. So the IRA that I spoke of, the Internet Research Agency, what they did, and this is like mid-2010s, they hired a ton of, you know, young people, basically, who could speak English and who knew a lot about politics to like, hey, why don't you start a troll farm, you know, get on board this troll farm, and just create fake stuff, create fake news stories, although I'm loved to even say those words to, together, fake social media posts, YouTube videos, eventually, you know, as you'll see what would become like deep fakes and AI and stuff like that, but this is before that. Yeah. And while this was going on, Sputnik and Russia Today, or RT, these are, you know, I think legitimate or at one point were legitimate Russian news outlets, right? They were always backed by the Kremlin. Oh, well, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, I think that they were still. they still had journalists and stuff like that, but they were trying to get the Russian viewpoint across to Western audiences. Right. So they started distributing stories around the world, basically, like we were saying, trying to get people to, like, to believe whatever they wanted to them believe at the time, like politically. Right. And the 2016 United States election was a real big kind of debut. They've been kind of added already. but the 2016 election, they really showed just how much they could monkey with stuff, or at least the potential of them monkeying with stuff. And this is where the allegations of Trump colluding with the Russians, this is what they were talking about. Unproven, by the way, to Rachel Maddow's great dismay. Pizza gate. They didn't necessarily come up with these things, but they were able to amplify them and get people talking about them and make people quite. questioning what was what, you know, or the Democrats, like really keeping child sex slaves in the basement of Comet pizza in D.C. Who knows? Maybe you should take an assault rifle from North Carolina and go find out. Yeah, exactly. So once this sort of starts coming out and the United States and, you know, all over North American and Europe started realizing what was going on, in February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there started to be a little bit of action taken. The EU ban Russian state media, including Sputnik and RT. Other companies, Google News dropped them from aggregation service. I think Google, Microsoft, and Apple all started like pulling their apps. So that sort of started happening. And then in 23 was when that failed uprising against Putin by the Wagner group happened. And the long and short is after all this, the IRA finally disbanded, but this work continued among other groups. Yeah, this is a good example of the whack-a-mole that the West is playing. The Russian internet disinformation operations have the West on our heels. Clearly, there's basically no one who knows what they're talking about with this stuff, who would disagree with that. The West still has not figured out how to do it, aside from piecemeal responses like taking Russia Times app off of the Apple app store, you know? Like, that's the kind of response we have to this still. And this has been going on for more than a decade. And one of the reasons why it's so hard to do anything about it is because they use what the RAND Corporation researchers Christopher Paula and Miriam Matthews call a fire hose of falsehood. Just put everything out there. It's not, it's not the quality. It's the quantity that they focus on. Yeah, for sure. after Crimea was annexed in 2014, and then obviously after the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, they really ramped up a lot of messaging to try and get sentiment, sometimes on their side, but a lot more times like just against Ukraine and what was going on. And this eventually would become known as doppelganger. But to be clear, doppelganger isn't like it wasn't operating. doppelganger or there's not an organization called doppelganger. Right. It's more of just sort of, I think the media sort of misread that and labeled it that, but it's really just sort of this method of doing what they're doing and how they're doing it. Yeah. To be specific, it's a way of cloning dummy websites that look like actual legitimate websites. Some of the ones that they targeted were LeMond and France, their website, Washington Post in the U.S., the Guardian in the U.K., and they would essentially just take, they would have their bots, start sending links or putting links all over the internet to basically share, right? Hey, look at this crazy article, right? The Washington Post actually reported this, so it seems like it would be legitimate. And you would click that. And it would take you to a different series of domains that got smaller and smaller to where if you were in the area, were targeting, say you were in the United States and you had clicked, you know, this thing to find out about whatever this fake Washington Post thing was saying, it would take you to this fake website like Washington Post. PM. Just different enough that, that like, you probably wouldn't notice, but it's a different domain