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DOJ seizes ‘bot farm’ operated by RT editor on behalf of the Russian government

Lest anyone was thinking Russian bot farms were no more after the demise of Prigozhin:

The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that it seized two domain names and more than 900 social media accounts it claims were part of an “AI-enhanced” Russian bot farm. Many of the accounts were designed to look like they belonged to Americans and posted content about the Russia-Ukraine war, including videos in which Russian President Vladimir Putin justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The Justice Department claims that an employee of RT — Russia’s state media outlet — was behind the bot farm. RT’s leadership signed off on a plan to use the bot farm to “distribute information on a wide-scale basis,” amplifying the publication’s reach on social media,” an FBI agent alleged in an affidavit. To set up the bot farm, the employee bought two domain names from Namecheap, an Arizona-based company, that were then used to create two email servers, the affidavit claims. The servers were then used to create 968 email addresses, which were in turn used to set up social media accounts, according to the affidavit and the DOJ.  The effort was concentrated on X, where profiles were created with Meliorator, an “AI-enabled bot farm generation and management software”. “Russia intended to use this bot farm to disseminate AI-generated foreign disinformation, scaling their work with the assistance of AI to undermine our partners in Ukraine and influence geopolitical narratives favorable to the Russian government.”

(tags: bots russia bot-farms twitter x meliorator ai social-media spam propaganda rt ukraine)