Russian Propaganda Targets Gamers Using AI Generated Content

What’s old is new again.


A hefty price tag for a Sony console about to launch? Why I Never!

Looks like there is more going on under the hood then initial reports suggested with the PS5 Pro, after watching the technical presentation Sony used to unveil the mid-gen refresh with the PS5 Pro, which is assuredly a good thing, as a seven hundred dollar price point for only an incremental upgrade for a new game console feels like a no from me, dog.


To channel the wisdom of a prophet from a bygone era

In other news, I had been meaning to share and comment on some other pressing news for a few days now, as the news itself is not necessarily a huge surprise to me, but a shocking reminder that this kind of stuff is still going on now, with both a gaming public and a regular public not quite as aware of the happenings as they ought to be. To that point, Wired reported on a massive disinformation campaign led by Russian operatives, using bot accounts, fake news, and AI generated propaganda to target and influence a number of affected groups, gamers included, to help sabotage the 2024 election:

“In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.

On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.“

Wild stuff, needless to say. The whole article is worth reading, as Wired does a good job of going over a lot of what the court documents reveal. As I said from the get go, if you’ve been following along the past decade or so, this stuff is actually pretty par for the course in the world of online bastard-like behavior and general troll wankery, though the implications of the bad actors in these scenarios are wide reaching and can’t be understated or dismissed out of hand. Gamers are a group of people who are considered politically marginalized to the point of being easily radicalized for political gain through manipulation via propaganda online, and spreading awareness of these insidious misinformation campaigns is key in helping to combat them.

~Pashford