Disinformation Networks

Rather than just dump information (which I do further down), I’ve written a brief synopsis on various disinformation groups included in the data to highlight the research behind labeling them as such.

Russia

Veterans Today

This group of sites is unique in that it has connections to both the Russian and Iranian governments. Wikipedia really doesn’t mix words in explaining the connections to governments, so I’ll move on to the connections between sites. By scraping the Google Analytics ID from the site, you can see at least ten domains share the same ID. What’s sad is this group primarily targetted Vietnam veterans during the 2016 election, it’s connections are well-established and yet it is still effective propaganda. Interesting side note, veteranstoday.news appears to be a spammer copycat of these state-sponsored sites with no apparent affiliation.

Sputnik & RT Deception

The French government published an extensive document (large PDF warning) on internet disinformation. The flagship sites of both RT and Sputnik are easily connected by Google Analytics IDs; however, the sites they control to influence other countries have no direct connection. An interesting distinction the French report notes is that even though RT and Sputnik present themselves as independent in the same way the BBC is, misinformation is among the chief complaints against even the flagship outlets.

RIA FAN / Internet Research Agency (IRA)

This group is comically dumb, but they’re persistent and creative. Their success stems from tapping into the fears of the worst-informed Americans. I’ve already written an in-depth analysis of their connections, so I won’t rehash. As for the Russian RIA FAN sites not previously discussed, they don’t have any technical connections I can see, but they do heavily share authors, articles and agendas.

Vesti

Vesti is another Russian state-owned media outlet, which also goes by Russia-24. While vesti.ru is semi-transparent and has 10 associated sites via Google Analytics, they also run several sites targetting former Soviet states that are less transparent. The strategy behind adopting targetted top-level domain names was outlined in the French government’s report.

South Front

Politico identified this domain back in 2017. This site is frequently cited by Russian accounts on twitter to skew information about Russia’s war efforts.

Iran

Press TV

According to Wikipedia, Press TV is “affiliated with Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). IRIB is state-owned but independent of the Iranian government in its management and is the only legal TV and radio broadcaster inside Iran.” The site makes no attempt to conceal its government ties off-site as the information can be found easily by searching the domain; however, the site makes no mention of its affiliation on-site. Furthermore, presstv.com is hosted and registered in America using a registration privacy service and is primarily written in English. The same site with the Iranian top-level domain (presstv.ir) is more transparent from a technical perspective and is used solely to redirect to the American site. presstv.ir is hosted and registered in Iran. From this site (bottom of page), it is possible to see ten total domains that were all previously hosted by the same provider (English News) that are all related. Being hosted by the same provider is not particularly insightful, unless the total number is quite low (anything less than 50 makes me look deeper).

China

4thmedia

These sites claim to be independent, but have numerous links to government agencies. Expect to see an increase in activity as trade wars escalate.