I’m starting to feel like a Vietnamese villager in 1966, standing open-mouthed staring up at the sky as thousands of propaganda leaflets rain down, dropping from impersonal machines that fly relentlessly overhead.
Saturating people with propaganda is an old tactic. During the Vietnam War, for instance, it is estimated that US and allied forces dropped more than 50-billion leaflets. One example cited by Wikipedia involved US and South Vietnamese aircraft dropping brightly coloured safe-conduct passes over areas where Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces operated.
In a more recent example from 2006, Israeli aircraft dropped thousands of pink and yellow propaganda leaflets into Lebanon. One showed the leader of Hezbollah as a cobra dancing to music played by the rulers of Iran and Syria, which now, of course, you could use AI to make into a realistic video.
There was even a multimedia dimension, with one operation (ominously called Operation Wandering Soul) combining leaflet activity with sound warfare. According to Wikipedia, US forces used recordings broadcast from helicopter-mounted loudspeakers to exploit Vietnamese beliefs concerning unsettled dead: the audio featured altered voices, ghostly lamentation and messages implying that dead communist soldiers were unable to find peace.
I thought about this while reading a recent OpenAI report about disrupting a new covert Russian influence operation. OpenAI recently banned a cluster of Russian-originated ChatGPT accounts that were being used to promote the International Burke Institute, a self-described “expert community” based in Israel. OpenAI says that “what began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a ‘sovereignty’ index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins”.
OpenAI says that the sovereignty index is a new feature. It’s promoted by the ostensible “think tank” to praise Russia and denigrate Western countries, and is the first time OpenAI has disrupted an influence operation tied to Russia that went to such elaborate lengths. The Russian ChatGPT accounts prompt the AI in Russian, but most of the comments generated are in English, and the operators told ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian.
Ghost reporters and sock puppets
Russian saturation disinformation is everywhere. It’s being disseminated in many different ways, on many different platforms. For example, just last week Graphika, a global digital-intelligence and network-analysis company, and Code for Africa, the organisation I work for, released a report called “Umbrae Ex Machina: Mapping Russian Ghostwriting Operations Across African News Outlets”.
I wrote about that report for News24 last week, so I can’t write about it here. That would be double-dipping, and nobody wants that. In short, the report found that Russian-linked influence operations have used fabricated “ghost reporters” and fake experts to place pro-Kremlin material in English- and French-language African media. They’ve been doing this since at least 2021.
The Russian narratives laundered into our news ecosystem focused on security issues and terrorism in Africa and featured strong anti-Ukraine, anti-French, anti-US and, more broadly, anti-West sentiments. At the same time the ghost writers pushed pro-Russia narratives, such as praising mercenary group Africa Corps (previously Wagner), the group that has wreaked such violence across the Sahel region.
Investigators found 44 ghost reporters, and their content appeared on 138 websites and at least 113 Facebook accounts and pages. It won’t surprise you to hear that one of the South African websites that carries a bunch of these fake writers is IOL. To be clear, it’s not the messaging that is the problem here. Being anti-West is a perfectly legitimate standpoint. The problem is the fact that this is a co-ordinated, state-sponsored and inauthentic information attack on the health of your personal information environment.
The OpenAI and Graphika/Code for Africa investigations are just two of many being done on a continuous basis. And Russia isn’t the only country deluging us with disinformation and propaganda; it just happens to be one of the main culprits doing the most to destroy the health of democracies like ours. Well, some might give the US that accolade. We can debate that.
What we can’t debate, though, is that where old propaganda campaigns carpet-bombed people with paper, the contemporary influence operations seek to carpet-bomb attention. They don’t do this with a single, authoritative broadcast but with thousands, if not millions, of apparently real voices that turn out to be sock puppets, ghost reporters, paid-for influence campaigns and general digital chaos. When the US made leaflet drops in Vietnam, they weren’t aimed at winning an argument but at sowing distrust of communist commanders. Russian influence operations are also attempts to destroy our trust in what we read.
