From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here. For the longest time, most of us thought we could spot a fake account online. And for a while, we were right. It was easy. A name that doesn't quite make sense, a photo that feels off. But that's the old version of this story. Because now, you can't always tell. The accounts look real, they sound real, they argue like real people, and they don't just show up in your replies. It's starting to feel like they're shaping the conversation around you. From recorded future news and PRX, this is Click Here, a show about how people are making and breaking our digital world. I'm Dena Temple-Raston. And this week, we're looking at the new mechanics of propaganda. Not the loud, obvious stuff, but the embedded kind, lurking in the same spaces where we argue, scroll, and decide what's true. And we talked to someone who tracks these campaigns in real time, and he calls them out for the rest of us. Russian campaigns typically spread pro-Kremlin narratives by mimicking the real news. But then, when we took a closer look, there were things about this campaign that we've never seen before. We'll be right back. If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to therecord.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox. You're listening to Click Here. I'm Dena Templerast. Welcome back. Modern propaganda doesn't work quite the way it used to. It's not just trying to convince you of one thing. It's trying to make everything else harder to trust. And to understand how that works, we went to an expert, someone who goes by the name Antibot for Navalny. And he leads a group of researchers who map Kremlin-linked information operations online. Some of them live inside Russia. So, for security reasons, he sent answers to our questions over an encrypted app. And we had someone voice them. His specialty is bots. We extract the meaning behind bot networks and interpret the activity. Bots, short for robot, can run the same tasks over and over really quickly. And they're particularly good at creating fake social media accounts and then use them to post a ton of messages that look really human. which makes them not just fast, but incredibly convincing. Convincing enough that a handful of voices can start to feel like, well, a crowd. And when a crowd starts to feel real, it can start to shape what feels true. Antibot figured out how they did it. At some point, I realized they were literally nested into each other. I count A, close B, B, close C, C, close D. Like a chain, or maybe a set of Russian nesting dolls. Every time you open one, there's another smaller one inside. Not random, but built with intention. Antibot started calling this kind of campaign matryoshka, the Russian word for nesting dolls. So what does that look like when those manufactured messages start to feel like actual news? That was on full display in Hungary in April when voters went to the polls in parliamentary elections that would decide whether Viktor Orban stayed in power This is Orban on the campaign trail. In the weeks leading up to the vote, something strange started to appear online. There were these videos, dozens of them, all pushing the same ominous message that violence was coming. They hinted at an assassination plot and cast Orban not just as a defender of stability, but as a man under threat. Because he'd stood in the way of European Union efforts to send money and weapons to Ukraine. Antibalt was watching all this unfold with a skeptical eye. On March 13, we detected two of the earliest videos they put out there. And at first, this disaffirmation campaign looked like stuff we'd seen before. Almost routine. Russian campaigns typically spread pro-Kremlin narratives by mimicking real news. Which is exactly what Antibot thought these videos in Hungary were. But then, when we took a closer look, there were things about this Orban campaign that we'd never seen before. We immediately thought it looked like a joint effort between an information ops group we call Matryoshka and the Kremlin's foreign intelligence arm. In the past, the group Matryoshka seemed to operate more independently. And the story these videos were pushing about violence brewing? That was also out of character. Using violence as a central theme? That was new. We've never seen election-related disinformation campaigns invent rumors about impending violence to get people's attention. And what that sold us was that Kremlin was pulling out all the stops to ensure Orban was re-elected. It was important to them. So this wasn't just another disinformation campaign. Something had shifted. Typically, these disinformation networks are reactive. They wait for something to happen, and then they twist it, amplify it, and then push it out further. But this time, they didn't wait. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time I've seen Matryoshka move out ahead of the news, introducing a narrative like this instead of waiting to exploit one that already exists. And then the whole thing escalated. These narratives changed shape again, from fringe videos online to something dressed up to look official. More authoritative, even bland. Videos like this. Deputy head of the office of the president of Ukraine commented on the upcoming parliamentary elections in Hungary in an interview with Le Monde. He said that Viktor Orban has a clear advantage, but that doesn't mean... All of this was landing just as Hungarian voters were making up their minds. So the campaign wasn't just trying to shape what people thought, but how the moment itself felt. Orban didn't win the election, So you could argue that the Russian efforts were for naught. But that misses the point. Because these campaigns aren't always about winning outright. Sometimes they're about shaping the terrain, lowering trust, raising tension. Not just about this vote, but about the next one. A long-term goal seems to be to undermine trust in the entire media and fact-checking altogether. To turn it into a kind of pick-your-side between competing takes. and then the idea of shared truth just disappears. And if Hungary feels too far away, that's part of the problem. I know that for U.S. audience, elections in Hungary can sound distant, almost irrelevant, like Albania and Wack the Dog, the movie. But they should care, because autocrats help each other survive and flourish. The fewer autocrats they are, the better the quality of life, even for citizens of leading democracies. In other words, this doesn't just stay contained. So we can't just look at the result. We have to look at the system that produced it And the impact of that system could have ripple effects far beyond autocracies We take a look at that when we come back Stay with us. in cyber security your greatest fear isn't the threats you see it's the critical signals lost in the noise every day security teams sort through millions of potential threats that's why recorded future exists to give you precision intelligence tuned to your needs our advanced ai detects patterns humans might miss, while our threat intelligence experts, veterans of military and intelligence services, provide crucial context. With Recorded Future, you gain the confidence to identify critical threats and the precision to act before they become attacks. Learn why 1,900-plus customers, including 45-plus sovereign governments, trust us to detect threats faster and achieve 350% plus ROI within a year. While Orban didn't win the election in Hungary, the disinformation campaign behind him did its job. It lowered trust among voters, it raised tensions, and it injected doubt into the system itself. And it used a blueprint that Antibot said he's seen play out all over Europe. There were fake websites designed to look like legitimate news outlets, with articles that at first glance looked fine, but fell apart if you looked more closely. The URLs were just slightly off. We started noticing patterns in how these accounts were built. The names followed the alphabet. So all the U.S.-associated bots started with D names. French ones used names that began with a J. German names started with an R. Patterns the average person would never notice. So these pro-Kremlin planted stories would be picked up, amplified by networks of accounts, and then pushed across platforms until they started to trend. Researchers sometimes call this the firehose of falsehood. Not one message, but many. Sometimes even contradictory messages, hitting all at once. So instead of persuading you, they overwhelm you. Not by making you believe, but by making it harder to know what's true. And Antibot says in Russia that confusion isn't just a byproduct. It's the point. Putin is trying to drop a new digital iron curtain around Russia. And it is almost there. Not just by shutting information out, but by filling the system with so much noise that clarity disappears. And here's the part that should give you pause. the people who track this kind of thing may not be able to keep doing it. I've been funding this myself, and my personal savings are almost gone. If we can't find someone to sponsor our work, provide some funds, we'll have to end our operations in the next couple of months. At the very moment these campaigns are getting more sophisticated, the people watching them are running out of runway. And with fewer eyes on it, there's more room to experiment, more room to escalate. And the worry isn't just that this propaganda exists. It always has. But something about this moment feels different. Propaganda has always been with us. It's not that we've ever been without propaganda. It's now that we are surrounded by it. Ethan Zuckerman is the founder and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. It's at the University of Massachusetts. It's Amherst. He studies how information moves online and what happens when that system starts to break down. So when you hear a phrase like fire hose of falsehood when it comes to information operations what do you think it actually does to a person who trying to make sense of the world I think in many cases, what a firehose of falsehood does is makes us despair at the possibility of knowing what is actually true. And then once we know that nothing can actually be known, we pay more attention to power than we do to truth. Because if you can't tell what's true, the question starts to change from what's real to who should I believe? The idea is simply to tell people it's too much work to figure out what's really true. Reality is being controlled by super powerful people, and you have no possible way of navigating the world that they've created for you, so just give up. Even if you know that the propaganda isn't true, if you have to keep repeating that, well, it does something to a person, even an informed person. Human beings are really bad at cognitive dissonance. If you have to get up every day and say stuff that you think is not true, it's easier over time to come to believe that it is true. So I think there's a way in which repeating the words over and over has a way of making them true in your mind. And that's the part that lingers. Not whether you believe it at first, but what happens when you have to live with it, a kind of one-two punch. First, make the truth feel unreachable and then make belief easier to impose. Because when the goal isn't persuasion, but confusion, you don't have to believe anything. You just have to make everything else hard to trust. Antibot put it this way. This is about introducing uncertainty and confusion to undermine not a particular story, but news more generally. And once that happens, the conversation itself starts to break down. Something more familiar. Noise. And when there's enough of that, it gets harder to hear anything very clearly. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietry, Sean Powers, Erica Gaida, Zach Hirsch, and Casey Georgie. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Covedo, and fact-checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Goff, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Neiswanger. Find us on X or Facebook at Click Here's Show. Or leave us a voice message at 6615 CH-TALK. Sometimes we'll turn those moments into reporting, sometimes into a conversation, and sometimes into a future story you'll hear on this show. I'm Dena Templereston, and thanks for listening. Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future. Know what matters. Act first. If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to therecord.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.
