4 days before the US election, Russian state disinfo is at full blast.
Matryoshka bots that only post intentional fake videos have made a record-breaking 21 posts. Most of them are targeting the US elections.
🧵 1/13
2/13
If you encounter in the wild any of the videos below, please let me know: I'm interested if any of these gets any traction.
A large part of the following collection were contributed by dTeam; others were also found by ourselves.
3/13
"Votes of 500K dead Americans will lead Harris to victory"
4/13
"Three groups were arrested for rigging early voting with mail-in ballots. Don't expect elections to be transparent and honest. Many such groups are acting on behalf of Democrats."
5/13
"Hundreds of early ballots destroyed in Washington state, Vancouver. When homes of suspects were searched, all were found in possession of incendiary mixtures and Kamala Harris propaganda materials"
6/13
"Democrats asked multiple investigative outlets to publish dirt on Trump. Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins refusal expains why WaPo refused to campaign for Harris"
7/13
"If Harris wins, 40M migrants entering the US in 4 years will lead to state-to-state visas and eventually disintegrate the country."
8/13
"Bezos made an effective move making WaPo refuse to campaign for Harris. It brought +300K subscribers to WaPo, which reflects a real position of the candidates"
9/13
"For comparing Trump to Hitler, Harris owes apology to the entire Jewish community. Such comparison is insulting to the Holocaust victims."
10/13
"Campaigning for Harris puts so much pressure on her own voters that it leads to suicides among her active supporters and[!] LGBTQ+ individuals"
11/13
"Over 12 sexual harassment allegations against Tim Walz are only a fraction of the actual number of cases. None were accepted for consideration for formal reasons. They will be no longer ignored if Trump wins"
12/13
"YouTube deliberately blocks Trump's videos to reduce his quotability. That will have a little effect"
13/13
"Texas as a separate state will bring happiness to people and industries, according to AI"
* a record-breaking 21 posts *in a single day*.
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🧵 Можно ли забанить мессенджер MAX из аппсторов, чтобы Кремлю было сложнее выдавливать россиян из менее сервильных Whatsapp и Telegram?
Вопрос к @safe_runet, @apomazuev, @leonidvolkov (а также @yulia_navalnaya, @IlyaYashin).
Ниже подробности.
2/13
Вот как можно было бы сделать это по аналогии с двумя кейсами:
📵 запретом бота "Умного Голосования" в Телеграмме
📵 запретом приложений Сбера, Тинькова и прочих подсанкционных банков
3/13
В обоих случаях власти надавили, а Apple и Google взяли под козырёк, под официальной позицией "мы просто исполняем законы всех стран, где работаем".
И в обоих случаях в пострадали россияне: сначала от рук Кремля, а затем от рук Запада.
🧵 Kirill Dmitriev, Putin's economic envoy on ceasefire w/Ukraine, thanked🙏 an obviously burner account for supporting his efforts "building US-Russia bridges".
Turned out, that burner account belongs to a dedicated(!) troll network aimed to supporting Dmitriev's endeavors.
2/5
50+ trolls pretending to be American ordinary Joes, they blame Dems, globalists, Soros and antifa; praise Trump, Putin; pray for Charlie Kirk; call for lifting sanctions from RU; deny RU interference into US elections.
Cyrillic names and awful English is what exposes them.
3/5
All created on Jan/Feb-2024, these accounts stayed inactive or politically indifferent until 15 Sep 2025.
Then each posted a few tweets praising Dmitriev, and most of the time that's it—resulting in a total of always under 20 posts per account, mostly retweets.
🧵 A network of 100+ BlueSky accounts pretending to be legitimate news syndication, some impersonating @BBC, @EuroNews, @MeduzaProject.
Built upon ≥70 Mastodon instances, then bridged using Bridgy Fed, it feels like a for-BlueSky reinvention of the Portal 🇷🇺 Kombat concept.
2/
The goal could be similar: to boost visibility of Russian-state Telegram channels, either for the BlueSky human userbase, and/or for LLM / search engines.
The thread below summarizes our initial findings. Please reach out for details and to access the complete dataset.
3/
Post languages range from English, German, French to Danish and Norwegian, Serbian and Czech, Turkish and more.
A preliminary language breakdown, based on (an incomplete) per-account language list: