Propaganda through artificial intelligence: Russia creates fake Wikipedia-style pages

After the high-profile Doppelgänger operation, which used fake pages of authoritative publications for propaganda, the Russian intelligence services switched to more complex tactics. According to Bloomberg’s investigation, the Russian Federation’s new strategy consists in creating a hidden network of sites that visually imitate the interface of “Wikipedia”.

The goal of the project is to manipulate Google search results and the responses of modern language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT. The organization “Social Design Agency” (SDA), which is under EU and US sanctions for conducting disinformation campaigns, is behind the activity.

Disinformation through AI

Algorithms of chatbots and search engines often take encyclopedic sites as the most reliable sources. By creating such resources, SDA fills the information gaps with narratives needed by the Kremlin. Once fed into the AI ​​​​training base, this generated content is then broadcast in neural network responses to millions of users around the world.

Journalists studied leaked internal SDA documents describing specific operations:

• Case of Armenia: The clone site of “Wikipedia” was launched on April 14, exactly two months before the elections. The goal is to bring the country back under the influence of the Kremlin through intensive propaganda, which, however, did not help the pro-Russian parties win.
• Global reach: The main mission of the network is to promote the pro-Kremlin agenda through digital tools that ordinary people use every day.

Open vs hidden resources

It is important to distinguish between open and hidden resources. The Ruwiki portal, launched in July 2023, openly positions itself as a Russian analogue of Wikipedia and does not hide its origin. In contrast, the new SDA network operates in secret, masquerading as independent encyclopedias to successfully bypass the security filters of large technology companies.