Thread by @P_Bouchaud

While skimming through tens of Doppelgänger ads recently approved by Meta, for a total reach over 200k users in France, Germany, Italy, and Poland over the past two weeks, I stumbled upon an interesting slip-up in one of their ads 👇

Instead of uploading the desired image, they accidentally uploaded a screenshot of it, took last Friday, revealing their VK Teams interface in the background. After a loooooong process of enhancing the compressed image, I managed to decipher it 👀

In the foreground, we see the image they likely wanted to use, sent by an "Алина Малинина" via their VK Teams . On the left, there are distinct discussion channels for the countries targeted by the Doppelgänger operations: Ukraine, Germany, France, Israel, US, Italy, and Poland.

Their choice of logos is quite telling: a beer for Germany, cheese for France pizza for Italy and Winnie-the-Pooh for their channel dedicated to websites and animations🧸.

The French discussion channel, “S-ф”, was open, revealing a conversation on the right. Алина and colleagues shared a link to a fake @le_Parisien article and messages that seem to read: “Changed the text of the task to 'You […] that Ukraine can win […] the war? I don’t'.”

Алина appears to actively work on well-defined tasks, using VK Teams ‘Task’ functionality.

Without overstating the findings (and acknowledging the possibility of a trap), this screenshot, extracted from a Doppelgänger Meta ad published last Friday, supports our current understanding of their operations.

It shows multiple targeted countries, organized teamwork, and a multi-faceted approach involving ads on Meta (which has neglected to address systemically) and spoofed news outlets shared on X.

With @aiforensics_org we published multiple reports revealing Meta's systemic failure in ads moderation and the massive scale of the operation. Also, big thanks to @antibot4navalny for their amazing work monitoring Doppelgänger bots on X and helping analyze these findings!