The United Kingdom announced sanctions against three Russian individuals and three legal entities involved in Russia’s disinformation campaign against Ukraine and the Western democracies.
The British sanctions hit the Social Design Agency (SDA), which, as an international journalistic investigation has shown, receives money from the Kremlin and promotes its propaganda in the West, the British government said in a statement.
Leaked documents from the Russian PR agency Social Design Agency showed that its employees carried out information operations to influence the German elections and increase the popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the NDR and WDR TV channels exposed this in their investigation.
“The Social Design Agency (SDA) is tasked and funded directly by the Russian State, and along with its partner company Structura, has attempted to deliver a series of interference operations designed to undermine democracy and weaken international support for Ukraine,” the UK government’s statement said.
The SDA-affiliated Struktura group of companies and the autonomous non-profit organization Dialog were also subject to restrictions, as were their managers, Ilya Gambashidze, Nikolai Tupikin, and Andrei Perla.
The British government says that the sanctioned individuals are part of a Russian disinformation operation known as Doppleganger, which manipulates public perceptions of politics by creating clones of legitimate websites and social media pages of popular news outlets.
“These deceitful tactics are designed to mask the truth around Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and distract from the true nature of the war. Their murky actions are part of a co-ordinated attempt to use deceptive information operations to undermine democracy in pursuit of their aims,” the statement said.
Russia’s Social design Agency has created a network of at least 120 websites spoofing existing news and government sites, towards which it deceptively redirected social media users through their campaigns, the report said.
The documents leaked to the media contain information about the employees of the Social Design Agency and confirm that it works under the direct supervision of the Kremlin’s Vladimir Putin administration.
The agency’s main tool is to spread fakes and memes on social media, primarily Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram, and generate engaging comments for them. Journalists were able to verify the existence of several pages mentioned in the documents.
The activities of the Social Design Agency were based on key performance indicators. For instance, the agency set a goal to “increase the support of the AfD to 20%” in Germany’s national election polls.
Other declared goals of the campaign against Germany included an increase in the “fear of the future” indicator, with over 50% of Germans reporting this feeling, and the “polarization of German society.”
The documents also outlined topics intended for dissemination in the German social media segment, including the assertion that “Germany is unarmed”, “the US deliberately drives Germany into bankruptcy through anti-Russian measures,” “Germany is in the deepest economic and social crisis in recent history,” and so on.
Read also: Agency of Social Design disclosed as a tool of Russian disinformation machine
According to an investigation by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and NDR and WDR, the Social Design Agency may be behind the Kremlin’s large-scale disinformation operation Doppelganger, which created clones of websites for well-known media and government agencies.
A Kremlin-linked network Doppelganger uses fake versions of real news sites to promote disinformation in the US and in the EU countries. Doppelganger is known for using a network of fake bot accounts to spread links to fake versions of real trusted news websites.
In early September, the United States imposed sanctions on the Kremlin’s disinformation network, which included the Dialog NGO and its subsidiary, Dialog Regions. The U.S. Treasury Department then announced sanctions against the leadership of the Russian propaganda channel RT and the hacker group RaHDit for interfering in the 2024 presidential election.
RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonian, her deputies Yelizaveta Brodskaya and Anton Anisimov, deputy director of English-language broadcasting Andrei Kiyashko, digital media project manager Konstantin Kalashnikov, and his subordinate Elena Afanasyeva were subject to US sanctions.
Additionally, the Russian non-profit organization (ANO) Dialog, its subsidiary ANO Dialog Regions, and Vladimir Tabak, the heads of both of these companies, are all subject to the new US sanctions.
The U.S. Treasury Department also announced so-called blocking sanctions against the Russian media group Rossiya Segodnya and its CEO, Putin’s leading propagandist, Dmitry Kiselyov.
U.S. prosecutors also shut down 32 Russian-owned website domains used in a government-led campaign known as “Doppelganger” to undermine global support for Ukraine. The Treasury and State Departments also said they would put sanctions on Russian people and groups they say are spreading misinformation.
U.S. intelligence has previously reported that “foreign enemies of the United States will try to influence the November 2024 presidential election by adjusting their operations to domestic political events in the country”.
In late October, US Senator Mark Warner sent letters to major website domain providers expressing concern about their role in the Russian disinformation campaign in the US. Cloudflare, GoDaddy, NameCheap, NameSilo, Newfold, and Verisign executives were urged by Senator Mark Warner to take action to investigate how they have “ostensibly facilitated sustained covert influence activity by the Russian Federation and its influence campaigns.”.
The US Department of Homeland Security stated in a study released on October 2 that Russia, Iran, and China represent the biggest threats to the country’s democratic institutions and vital infrastructure, especially in light of the impending presidential election.
According to the DHS assessment, hostile foreign actors may employ a variety of strategies to sabotage electoral processes, such as employing generative AI to produce text and video that seem real and propagate false information.
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