How Russia Shapes What the World Thinks

The episode's organising idea is that the point of Russian information operations is not to win any particular argument. Josh and Chuck keep returning to the observation that the aim is ambient doubt — get enough contradictory material circulating that people stop trying to establish what is true and disengage. The technique has a name borrowed from RAND researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews: the firehose of falsehood, where volume matters more than quality.

The history starts with the Internet Research Agency, founded in 2013 by a former criminal turned oligarch and Putin confidant who also founded the Wagner Group. The IRA hired English-speaking young people with an interest in politics to manufacture stories, social posts and YouTube videos, while Sputnik and RT pushed the Kremlin's line to Western audiences through more conventional channels. The 2016 US election was the coming-out party — the hosts note the collusion allegations remained unproven, and that operations like Pizzagate were mostly amplified rather than invented. After the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine the EU banned Russian state media, Google dropped Sputnik and RT from News, and Apple and Microsoft pulled apps; the IRA itself disbanded following the Wagner Group's failed 2023 uprising, but the work moved to other organisations.

Doppelganger is the technical centrepiece, and the hosts are careful about what the word means: not an organisation or an operation, but a delivery method. Bots seeded links that appeared to point at the Washington Post or the Guardian; clicking through a shrinking chain of domains landed geo-targeted readers on a clone at an address like washingtonpost.pm, hosted behind shell companies in places like Malaysia and Lithuania so each layer could disclaim responsibility for the next. Josh's example of a tell is a fake Post article using 'gendarme' — phrasing the real paper would not print. He also argues the article is nearly beside the point, since much of the audience shares the headline without clicking. Alongside the clones ran fake fact-checking sites, War on Fakes and RRN (Reliable Recent News), covering both sides of the credibility question at once.

The content itself was targeted at France, Germany, the US, the UK and Ukraine, and mostly aimed at eroding support for Ukraine rather than praising Russia: fabricated celebrity statements attributed to Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Oprah; a fake Washington Post story about the Soros Foundation and Rockefeller paying protesters by the hour; whitewashing of the Bucha massacre. The Social Design Agency, a PR firm founded in 2022 and since directed from the Kremlin, ran the Good Old USA Project targeting voters in six swing states in 2024 and spent around ten million dollars getting right-wing influencers on board, many of whom did not know who was paying. The story broke not through any government agency but through journalists and NGOs — a German site, T-Online, noticed a wave of new Facebook accounts, all German women, all claiming to work for Netflix, all adamant that Germany should stop funding Ukraine. The EU's DisinfoLab supplied the Doppelganger name.

The last stretch is the pessimistic part. Meta says it is removing this material while missing 95% of undeclared political ads it has a financial incentive not to find; the Department of Justice's response two years in was seizing 32 websites. A study of 2016 found 1% of social media users received 70% of exposures, which the hosts read as reinforcement rather than persuasion. Both find the AI angle most alarming: models trained on scraped web text can be fed poisoned sources deliberately. Josh notes that Russia is no longer hiding any of it — coverage of Doppelganger reportedly led to more funding for the SDA, and one suggestion is the SDA leaked it themselves.