Hybrid operations

Soup 271, March 1, 2024

Soup	271
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Date	2024-03-01
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Soup type	Deep dive
Profession	Propaganda
Country of origin	Global
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In other languages	Operazioni ibride (it)
Related soups:	The Fifth column Wagner Group Russian narratives Firehose of Falsehood Trolls and bots on X DD Geopolitics and Ghana Rally

In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll talk about hybrid operations in the context of information operations. Hybrid operations are a blend of political warfare and influencing methods like employing troll/bot farms, and spreading fake news, propaganda and disinformation.

In this thread, I will demonstrate four case studies on how Russian operatives conduct hybrid operations on three different continents. All of them have distinct characteristics, but rely on the same mechanisms, like using social media to spread the message.

Hybrid operations often combine real-world, and orchestrated and pre-planned scenarios with online activities. Sometimes Russia shills attempt to mobilize people for real-life events like protests by inflating these events on social media and fake news sites.

Pro-Kremlin live events that have been inflated on social media rarely draw a big crowd in real life. According to Facebook group, a 2024 protest in Bucharest was supposed to gather over 50,000 people, but finally only the organizer showed up. The 2023 vatnik gathering…

…"Rage Against The War Machine" in DC managed to attract a few hundred people with their massive online campaigning and some well-known speakers & pedophiles. In Finland, a 2024 Convoy gathering (with 0 trucks) was also a total bust, regardless of strong online presence.

In countries like Germany with strong fifth column and relatively strong support for pro-Kremlin parties like AfD, there have been some larger protests which have allegedly been amplified by the Kremlin:

The Fifth column

Maybe one of the most well-known examples of hybrid operations comes from the US — in 2016, a man named Matt Skiber became active in the US political sphere. He was very active in politics and organized events such as “March for Trump” rally in NY. He arranged megaphones, … 7/21

…designed posters, wrote press releases and communicated with other Trump supporters. In reality, Matt Skiber didn’t exist — he was a “digital illegal” created by a troll farm employee posing as a Trump supporter. Digital illegals are extremely effective and…

… very cheap assets that can be deployed and organized quickly. They are also easily augmented with the help of troll/bot farms, and for this reason Russia has been investing heavily in them for over a decade. In digital warfare, Russia has been ahead of the West, …

…and social media sites haven’t found an effective way to counter them. In the past, they’ve been used in large, polarizing events like Black Lives Matter and climate change protests and COVID-19 lockdowns to provoke civil unrest and infighting, and divide societies.

Today, this “digital fifth column” promotes and augments various conspiracy theories and strongly polarizing social phenomena, for example the US border dispute and Texas “secession” in the US and farmer protests and anti-Israel rallies in Europe.

In the second example, we’ll go to Europe and focus on the farmer protests that have been going around Europe for some years now. The motivation for these protests is genuine — the farmers are genuinely concerned about their income and the reasons for this are manifold.

But it’s safe to say that Russia has been using all of their resources to provoke the protest.For example, @molfar_agency exposed the Polish protest leader as a member of a pro-Russian party, and TVN24 exposed one of the protesters to be connected with the Russian embassy.

In 2022, Russia launched a huge disinformation campaign called Doppelgänger. The group produces video and photos of staged events and then tries to make them go viral on social media with the use of troll farms and fake news blogs. The group relies on fake websites…

…that mimic the appearance of large news media, including Der Spiegel, Fox News and The Washington Post. In May 2023, @kevinshakir et al. exposed that the group tried to create fake anti-Ukraine/NATO protests using paid actors/agents:

1/9 🧵 10(!) anti-Ukrainian demonstrations in European cities linked to a Russian intelligence service.

We have just published the second piece of our investigation on how leaked Russian documents reveal fake protests, shared by men in St. Petersburg. 👉 https://t.co/c8ua7kllbi pic.twitter.com/pMIhIgi94t
— Kevin Shakir (@kevinshakir) May 8, 2023

Doppelgänger operatives were also involved in painting graffiti of Stars of David on buildings around Paris after the 7th October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack. These graffiti were then shared around social media and fake news media to further fuel the antisemitic sentiment.

Russia has poured massive amount of money into a project called Maidan-3. This 1, 5 billion USD project aims to propagate anti-Ukrainian sentiments online, and it will culminate in March-April of 2024. One of the main goals of the project is to stop military aid to Ukraine.

In Africa, Russia has used PMC Wagner/Africa Corps for their hybrid operations. They’ve conducted hybrid operations at least in Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan. In CAR, they even vandalized a French brewery to start their own:

All of these operations are still ongoing in some form: in the US, millions of “Christian BBQ dads” are calling for Texas secession and protection of its warm water ports, in Europe Doppelgänger is trying to create outrage by staging scenarios, hoping they’d go viral, …

…and Wagner/Africa Corps are trying to overthrow governments and replace them with pro-Kremlin dictators, and at the same time attempt to control the information space in Africa together with massive fake news networks like Russosphère and media networks like Sputnik.

Overall, the West has been unable to respond and counter these massive campaigns. Once they’ve been discovered and exposed by outlets like @EUvsDisinfo, @StopFakingNews or BBC Verify, several new ones have already appeared in the social media space.