Fool Me Once: Russian Influence Operation Doppelganger Continues on X and Facebook

Charles Terroille, Science Feedback
Max Lesser, FDD (Foundation for Defense of Democracies)
Ivana Stradner, FDD (Foundation for Defense of Democracies)
Claudia de Sessa, Alliance4Europe
Lorenzo DiStasi, freelance journalist
Kateryna Savranska, Demagog
Dominik Uhlig, BIQdata.pl / Gazeta Wyborcza
Aleksy Szymkiewicz, Demagog
Oleksandr Siedin, Detector Media
Oleksii Pivtorak, Detector Media
Florian Roussel, independent researcher
Paul Bouchaud, AI Forensics

Full Report

The full report contains:
– Language-specific chapters exploring the narratives Doppelganger employed while targeting Germany, France, the U.S., Poland, Italy, and Ukraine on X.
– Analysis of the tactics and techniques employed by Doppelganger.
– Analysis of the overall dataset covering Doppelganger activities on X,
– Analysis of Doppelganger’s use of Meta ads to spread their operational content.
– Recommendations.

Acknowledgements:

Editors
Lea Frühwirth, CeMAS (Center for Monitoring, Analysis & Strategy)
Saman Nazari, Alliance4Europe

This report was made possible through the Counter Disinformation Network.
The Counter Disinformation Network (CDN) is a collaborative platform that gathers more than 130 disinformation-countering practitioners from 40 civil society organizations, universities, news organizations, fact-checking organizations and independents mostly from Europe and North America. The network was initially convened by Alliance4Europe with the aim of supporting a whole of society approach to countering disinformation by bringing together the different parts of our community of defenders and finding ways to work together. All members of the network can propose projects, using the network as a force amplifier to enable research that would not be possible individually. We believe in not reinventing the wheel. Therefore, CDN aims to feed and support existing initiatives, such as the FIMI ISAC and the DAD-CDM project. The network seeks to help mobilize resources with different experts and from different countries to write comprehensive reports, highlighting systemic issues and foreign information manipulation and interference, and working together to promote it across a wide range of countries and stakeholders.