A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests

A Russian influence campaign seems to be attempting to sow division in the US around the college campus protests.

As protests at universities across the country—and the responses to them by college authorities and law enforcement—continue to stoke division and anger, the Kremlin appears to have taken a page from its foreign influence playbook, using its disinformation infrastructure in collaboration with state-run media and Telegram influencers in an effort to further divide American society.

Over the past week, a disinformation campaign operated by the Kremlin-aligned network Doppelganger amassed over 130,000 views on X, according to data shared exclusively with WIRED by Antibot4Navalny, a collective of anonymous Russian researchers who have spent years tracking the Russian influence operation.

Doppelganger is well known for using a network of inauthentic bot accounts to spread links to fake versions of real news websites. In the past, the network has impersonated websites as diverse as Le Monde in France and Fox News in the US. In recent months, the Doppelganger network has been used to stoke tensions in the US over the border crisis in Texas and boost false claims that celebrities like Taylor Swift were supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This time around, targeting a US audience, Doppelganger has promoted a fake Washington Post article with the headline “Soros Pays $30/Hour for Anti-Semitism.” The article claims, without evidence, that the protesters at US colleges “are financed by the Rockefeller and Soros foundations”—echoing claims about billionaire George Soros that have been boosted by mainstream media outlets and lawmakers in the US. The site looks identical to the real Washington Post website, except for the fact that it uses a small variation of the real URL. This post was shared in eight distinct posts on X, which were shared by over 750 bot accounts multiple times, creating almost 6,000 retweets in total, according to the researchers. The Doppelganger network uses a combination of “content bots,” which post the links, and “promotion bots,” which then boost those original tweets.

The researchers were able to identify the bots as part of the