SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The U.S. Justice Department said this week Russia is trying to use fake news to influence U.S. policy and politics. That's fraudulent news stories made to look real. The Department of Justice also indicted two employees of RT, a Russian state broadcaster, saying that they funneled $10 million to a U.S. media company that hired prominent right-wing influencers here in the U.S. Now, those influencers say they had no idea their paychecks came from Russia. We're joined in the studio now by Renee DiResta, a disinformation expert who has been called upon by Congress for her expertise. Thank you so much for being with us.
RENEE DIRESTA: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: How have tactics evolved, do you think, since we first began to read account of Russia trying to meddle in U.S. elections?
DIRESTA: Yeah. It's a great question. In prior election cycles, like in 2016, a lot of what they were doing on the covert social front involved creating fake accounts. At the time, nobody was really looking for them, so they were able to grow fairly large followings for some of those accounts, hundreds of thousands of followers for the best ones. And once those accounts - once the tech platforms realized that was happening, they began looking for them and disrupting them pretty regularly. So what you're seeing here is essentially a reversion to an older strategy because it's a lot harder to track things like payments, and so you see an adaptation as one strategy becomes more difficult for them to execute, and they want to continue influencing the public, they roll to another.
SIMON: So these are real influencers, but the influencers have not been indicted, right?
DIRESTA: The influencers have not been indicted. The influencers have released statements on Twitter saying that they were completely unwitting, that they didn't know this was happening. And you can see in the indictment they are not making them say things that they wouldn't necessarily have said from a basic perspective, but they're asking them to do just a little bit. There's a little bit of a nudge there. In one example that you can see in the indictment, they're saying, hey, there was a terrorist attack in Moscow. Let's create some perception that maybe Ukraine was behind it.
SIMON: I mean, isn't the Marxist-Leninist phrase useful idiots?
DIRESTA: It is indeed useful idiots. Yes, absolutely. And the amount of money that they were receiving - so folks are aware - is about $400,000 a month or so for four videos, so one per week, so approximately $100,000 per video. That's an extraordinary rate. So just to be clear, most influencers are not making $100,000 to put out a video. One of the things that you see in the indictment is the influencers, the talent asking for some sort of verification that the supposed donor and funder of this operation was real.
The heads of the media company that were - that knew that Russia was behind it provided kind of a dossier, a one-page biography of the supposed investor, featuring a picture of a man sitting on a private jet. Sort of incredible, actually. If you Google the individual's name, of course, he does not come up. They claim that he works at a bank. If you Google bank in his name, it does not come up. So despite the fact that you do see the influencers taking some basic diligent steps, they ultimately decide to kind of go through with the relationship anyway.
SIMON: I gather they also described - and I don't know if I should refer to them as fake news websites or fake websites.
DIRESTA: Yeah. So that's the second thing that the DOJ releases, and so that's actually wholly separate from this other thing that RT is doing, but also related from a persistent actor that disinformation researchers have long called Doppelganger. And what Doppelganger does is it creates websites that look vaguely like media outlets. So the URL might be just so slightly off, you know, cnn.com.net or something along those lines. And what they run instead is just propaganda.
Russia uses fake accounts to distribute this content on social media. Those accounts are constantly taken down. The platforms - Meta is constantly playing whack-a-mole with these accounts. And so oftentimes, even though they keep trying, even though they're constantly making these websites, they're not necessarily getting any real pickup because nobody reputable is sharing the content. Nobody that has a large following is sharing the content.
SIMON: Is there any indication that, in the end, the influencers didn't say anything that they didn't want to say, and not a large audience was generated? I don't want to say what's the harm, but - OK, I will say it. What's the harm?
DIRESTA: Yeah. It's a great question. I think when you have a foreign state actor trying to put out content to sow division - right? - to divide Americans, to make them fight amongst themselves or to mislead them, because a lot of the content, particularly on the Doppelganger sites, is very misleading. You don't want to just sit back and allow that to happen. I think the government is doing what it should do here, which is it's making clear to the public that this is happening. This is real. And as Americans, we should not want this kind of interference in our elections.
We should be aware that it's happening and that it's in the background. We shouldn't panic about it. We shouldn't overreact to it. They're trying to create just a general resilience by helping people understand that these kinds of messages, particularly when they're repeated, particularly when they're pervasive and they're all around you, are used to turn other people into enemies and to create social divisions that really undermine the ability to reach consensus and solve collective problems, that really increase and exacerbate polarization.
And those issues - polarization and an inability to come to consensus - do have profound social impacts. So thinking about what we can do to address something that might not be the biggest problem, but is a problem, remains the focus of general, you know, propaganda education and disruption efforts both in government and academia and civil society at this point.
SIMON: Would Russia feel that they've achieved something just by the fact we're talking about it?
DIRESTA: Absolutely. And that's why I think it's important to emphasize the - you know, the panic responsibly part, right? You don't want to create a - you don't want to do the adversary's work for them.
SIMON: Renee DiResta. She is the author most recently of "Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality." Thanks so much for being with us.
DIRESTA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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