DOJ vs. Doppelganger: Four Takeaways From the US Government’s Action Against Russian Election Interference

On September 4, 2024, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) seized 32 website domains connected to Russia’s “Doppelganger” network and charged two Russian state media employees with funneling almost $10 million to a Tennessee-based online content creation company.

This and other recent foreign operations targeting the US presidential election underscore a hard truth: US efforts to combat foreign malign influence have not deterred the country’s adversaries. In fact, those adversaries have been refining their strategies and techniques to more effectively manipulate American voters. The DOJ’s sweeping crackdown on Russian interference sheds light on foreign actors’ evolving tactics.

Foreign actors are manufacturing faux news sites that masquerade as legitimate media outlets.

The DOJ’s announcement underlined Russia’s strategy of using spoofed websites to disseminate content that advances the Kremlin’s interests. According to the DOJ report, Doppelganger registered domains intended to mimic legitimate US media outlets (for example, registering washingtonpost.pm to mimic washingtonpost.com), including Fox News, The Washington Post, and Forward, among others. In May 2024 ASD, along with its partners at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the University of Amsterdam, similarly discovered a network of roughly 400 domains that republished articles that were identical or nearly identical to those that originated on the Russian state media outlet RT.com. Several of these domains purported to be local US outlets, including one called the “San Francisco Telegraph”.  

Other malign foreign actors have also adopted this tactic. In August 2024, Microsoft reported that it had detected four fake websites linked to the Iranian group Storm-2035 that impersonated US news outlets to influence the 2024 US presidential election.

Foreign actors are exploiting unwitting Americans to spread and amplify propaganda.

The DOJ’s indictment underscores Russia’s use of—often unwitting—US citizens to spread pro-Russian narratives. The unnamed Tennessee-based company cited in the indictment is confirmed to be Tenet Media, a platform linked to right-wing commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms. The indictment alleges that the owners of Tenet Media were both aware of and attempted to conceal the fact that they were being funded by Russian operatives. However, the indictment also makes clear that the contributors to the platform—including conservative content creators Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool—were unaware of the true financial backers of the site. All three influencers released statements saying they were victims and had no knowledge of the Kremlin scheme. This operation corresponds to US intelligence warnings that Russia is relying on unwitting Americans to spread narratives and amplify those that advance Russia’s geopolitical objectives to bolster the legitimacy of their claims.

RT employees are intimately involved in Russia’s covert influence campaigns.

Over the past few months, employees of Russian state media outlet RT have been implicated in at least three covert campaigns to manipulate US public opinion. In July, the DOJ disrupted a covert campaign involving Russia’s security service and a deputy editor-in-chief at RT, Russia’s primary overt propaganda channel. That effort involved the creation of nearly 1000 fictitious X accounts that were used to disseminate pro-Russian propaganda in the United States and elsewhere. Six employees of RT, including RT’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, were sanctioned for their role in Doppelganger. And two RT employees, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, were indicted for laundering nearly $10 million to Tenet Media to co-opt the platform and its contributors. RT has long maintained that it is a credible global media outlet that has been unfairly targeted because of “Russophobia” and its opposition to “Western information dominance”—two claims it repeated in September. But the revelations of September 4 make clear that RT is not, in any traditional sense, a media outlet; it is, in its editor’s words from 2014, a tool for conducting an “information war” with the West.

Foreign actors are increasingly employing AI tools to sow disinformation.

Unsurprisingly, the DOJ announcement also touched on Russia’s employment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to advance their influence efforts. Per the DOJ statement, Doppelganger relies on “cutting-edge AI” to produce malign content, such as paid advertisements, to promote pro-Russian narratives and further polarize American society. Likewise, the aforementioned Kremlin influence campaign that the DOJ disrupted in July 2024 used AI to create the network of nearly 1,000 fake personas that would in turn churn out AI-generated posts. Iran and the People’s Republic of China have also reportedly been testing AI-generated content on American audiences ahead of November. As Election Day draws closer, the United States must be prepared for the potential circulation of AI-fabricated “evidence” and other content that supports election-rigging narratives or undermines election results.