A Russian influence network active in France and Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic was also deployed in the run-up to Romania’s recently cancelled election, according to documents seen by the Financial Times

3 comments

1. Paywalls suck: https://archive.ph/JyKZj

   Highlights from the article:
   >A Russian influence network active in France and Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic was also deployed in the run-up to Romania’s recently cancelled election, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.

   > AdNow, an online advertising firm founded in 2014 by Russian nationals in Moscow headquarters and with a London affiliate, was used in a campaign to push misinformation about western coronavirus vaccines. The company, now relocated to Bulgaria, in recent years has been active in ad campaigns in Romania and Bulgaria, the documents show. They were first revealed by BG Elves, a Bulgarian cyber security expert group and by Romanian investigative portal Snoop.

   > “They play with social engineering, try to trigger emotions to force you to click on their misleading ads,” said Petko Petkov from BG Elves, who reviewed the AdNow software and concluded it uses an enhanced profiling operation that collects user information that can be exploited for political goals. “It is very easy for you to be misled. The final goal is to ask for your personal data.”

   (…)

   >AdNow has been here for years delivering ads, health misinformation and financial scams to the public, which prepared them for an abrupt campaign like the one on TikTok,” Ilie said.

   > “In a country like Romania, with 19mn people, if you see 440mn ads in a month, all of them being for frauds or fake medicine, that can educate people to lose their faith in science, in reason.”

   > The founder and general director of AdNow LLC between 2014 and 2018 was Yulia Serebryanskaya, a graduate of Novosibirsk State University who worked on the presidential campaigns of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, and later acted as a communications director for the ruling United Russia party. The company was then transferred to another Russian national.

   ***

   But really, it’s quite detailed and lays out the layers of the Russian disinformation campaign quite well. Worth a read.

2. So after the embarrassment of finding out that the TikTok promos were paid by the incumbent party (and canceled the election results on that basis), they still have the nerve to try to promote this theory?

3. Nowhere does the whole article mention what this document is and where the dcument came from. We are just supposed to accept this “document” as is, despite for all we know it could be anything from an academic journal to some jumbled words written on a piece of toilet paper. It is honestly sad to see the low depths that journalism sank to.

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