The website, which calls itself Man Stuff News, is designed with a specific sensibility in mind, with categories like “Backyard Grilling,” “TV Shows for Guys” and “Beard Grooming.” A recent article titled “Tips for Fathers During Labor” offered this advice: “Just remember to spend some time together before you decide whether or not to give birth.”
However, go to its section dedicated to world news, and the nature of the coverage changes drastically. There, a recent article belittles a man International warrants to arrest Russian President Vladimir V. Putin for war crimes. It repeated verbatim an article that appeared on the website a day earlier under a different byline. R TGlobal Television Network of Russia.
RT, which the US State Department describes as A key player RT, the biggest name in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. However, sites like Man Stuff News have helped RT circumvent the bans and continue to reach European and US audiences, according to a report. new report,
Replicas of RT articles have been plagiarized thousands of times across hundreds of sites, according to the report, written by researchers from the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam and the . The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research nonprofit, said these sites included content aggregators such as InfoWars, run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; mirrors of RT repurposed from abandoned “zombie” sites; fake local news outlets with names such as the San Francisco Telegraph; and domains focusing on spirituality, yoga, the supernatural, and the apocalypse. Many of the articles were then further disseminated via social media.
The justifications for reposting RT content likely vary across sites, but surreptitious republication poses a particular threat in the European Union, where concerns are growing about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns, especially as Russia seeks to undermine European support for Ukraine ahead of next week’s parliamentary elections.
“This is really just the tip of the Russian propaganda iceberg,” said Brett Schaefer, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at German Marshall. “When we were running search results across the EU, it was quite clear that if Russian propaganda isn't showing up on Russian domains, it's reaching out, which is kind of a double whammy because it's not only evading bans and restrictions, but it's doing so on sites that are even less transparent than RT.”
RT said in a statement that its content does not follow the “U.S. State Department/NATO party line” and said it was “very pleased that RT's news content is so popular across a variety of platforms and users.”
A message sent to the email address listed for Man Stuff News website registration was not answered. The site gives little information about where it is located or who operates it.
The researchers concluded that because non-Russian sources were repeating the Kremlin's point of view, they often helped legitimize the narratives for unsuspecting audiences. The copied articles, which the researchers described as “Russia's propaganda nesting dolls,” targeted a large geographic area of audiences through sites registered in at least 40 countries on six continents, including countries where RT is explicitly blocked. The actual scope of Russian propaganda laundering is probably much greater when RT's content and that of other Kremlin-controlled media outlets in languages other than English is included, the researchers said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: in a speech This month he said he was “particularly concerned about the rise of foreign interference and manipulation in our societies, our democracies, and our elections.” He cited a “swarm of negative misinformation” about specific issues and candidates and malicious efforts to “buy influence and create chaos.”
Last month, a union 36 European fact-checking organizations False or misleading content about the EU or Ukraine was among the most prevalent forms of misinformation, he said.
One EU report This year it said that actors abroad – most obviously from Russia, but also from China – were coordinating on “virtually all platforms” to create an alternative information environment that would erode trust in democracy. Last month, the European Commission conducted a pre-election survey stress test Evaluating the preparedness of platforms against AI-generated fraud, campaigns influenced by bot accounts, and other threats.
Since 2022, the Kremlin has been unable to gain access to some of its main messaging channels to the West Canada And European Union RT. from its broadcast. This month, the block Suspended Four other Russian media outlets were barred from broadcasting.
In the United States, government regulators took no action against the Russian network's American outpost, RT America. Instead, television distributors across the country severed ties with RT America in early 2022, and this shut down within days.
Online Platforms There have also been attempts to curb RT's reach; Youtube blocked global access RT-affiliated channels said it makes efforts to remove harmful misinformation. However, RT's disinformation content remains there and on other platforms, researchers said. Earlier findings from other research groups. On YouTube, RT articles were narrated using an automated text-to-speech generator to avoid filters. The researchers said content copied from RT also appeared on major social and messaging sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Substack, Telegram and X, as well as niche platforms such as Gab and Rumble.
Drawing on more than 1,500 RT articles published last year, the researchers looked for websites that contained similar content or metadata, and limited their search to results based in the United States and Belgium (the de facto capital of the European Union).
The researchers said some sites were possibly broadcasting RT's content with the network's permission, while others had copied RT without its knowledge. These sites may have been ideologically aligned with the Kremlin, or more likely intent on driving traffic to increase visibility or advertising revenue. Some sites disclosed that they were re-posting RT content. (Man Stuff News ended its copy of the article about Mr. Putin's arrest warrant by posting the web address of the original RT story.)
Verbatim reproductions of RT articles appeared on media outlets affiliated with the governments of Cambodia, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, as well as on a Lebanese outlet owned by Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese militia. The researchers found a website linked to a conservative Catholic online ministry in Texas, which contained posts about abortion, candle-making and, in one example taken from RT, the lack of aid in Syria after an earthquake.
RT is not the only Kremlin-sponsored media outlet being spoofed, researchers found. As key elections in the European Union and the United States approach, Russian disinformation campaigners have refined their tactics. Recently Video Right-wing US voters were targeted with fake messages about President Biden, displaying artificial voices and other signs of manipulation by artificial intelligence. Fake news organizations The videos, produced by Russian operatives, mimicked real American outlets while promoting Kremlin propaganda; a former sheriff's deputy in Florida A man who has received political asylum in Moscow has created more than 160 such fake sites.