Mr. Cheong, for example, does not seem to be complicated in any way. He regularly tweets multiple videos per night from the protests and, he said, “It was definitely not my intention to just ride the only story.”
But the Bible video fits his policy, and his tweet on it caught fire.
Russian spies and American conspiracies
Most of the Russian efforts garner much less attention, and fall on far lesser known websites. At the end of last month, US officials identified one of those websites as Inforos, an outlet they say is controlled by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, and were used to test various disinformation topics targeting Americans, Canadians and Europeans. Disinformation from Covid-19, for example, has spread to the pandemic, and stories of dangers posed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have since become an old standard.
“Russian intelligence has become more versatile and has more resources in its use of online disinformation,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, citing a recent State Department report on Russian disinformation. “The methods used in 2016 seem purely rudimentary and charming.”
InfoRos sits, according to U.S. officials, at the top of a GRU-directed network that includes two other nominally independent news websites, OneWorld.Press and InfoBrics, according to current and former U.S. officials. Those pages, in turn, print stories to alt-right and alt-left pages in North America and Europe that are receptive to the anti-establishment and often conspiratorial messages sent by the Russians.
In some cases, a straight line can be drawn from GRU-running operations to U.S. websites that promote conspiracy theories. One such story appeared in January, when InfoBrics claimed that a whistleblower had revealed that British spies and the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, had orchestrated the dancing of a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, in which ‘ t Russian-backed separatists fight government power. (Investigators determine that the plane was brought down by a Russian-made missile.)
The story was produced by a research fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies, a think tank in Serbia that has similar ties to Russian intelligence. The article was then published by InfoBrics. In turn, it was picked up by The Duran, an independent website based in Cyprus that often disseminated Russian disinformation.
Neither the US nor allied governments have publicly identified The Duran as having direct ties with Russian spy agencies. But the site is where Russian state-sponsored disinformation and fringe theories come together, according to a NATO cyber analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
