List of political disinformation website campaigns

Indian Chronicles

Indian Chronicles, dubbed by the EU Disinfo Lab, is an influence operation initiated by Srivastava Group starting in 2005 and enabled by Asian News International in order to promote Indian interests and disparage Pakistan and China. The operation created a network of at least 500 fake news websites and had targeted 116 countries. Srivastava Group had co-sponsored a trip of 27 Members of European Parliament to visit Kashmir and meet with Narendra Modi in 2019.^[55][56]

Other campaigns

Endless Mayfly

Endless Mayfly, dubbed by Citizen Lab, is an Iran-affiliated disinformation campaign of inauthentic social media accounts and fake news websites that, according to Citizen Lab, "spreads falsehoods and amplifies narratives critical of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel."^[68] It is notable for using a technique that Citizen Lab described as "ephemeral disinformation": When an article from the campaign received significant engagement on social media, it was deleted and URLs were linked to the website that the article was falsely portraying.^[68]

International Union of Virtual Media (IUVM)

The International Union of Virtual Media is described by the Atlantic Council as "a cluster of ostensibly independent websites that aggressively repackaged and re-broadcast Iranian state media",^[71] without citation.^[72] The network has been taken down by Facebook, Twitter, and Google for coordinated inauthentic behavior.^[72]

Storm-2035

Storm-2035, dubbed by Microsoft Threat Analysis Center in August 2024, is attributed by Microsoft researchers to "an Iranian network" and described by them as a collection of fake news websites that has been active since at least 2020 and has targeted both conservative and liberal audiences in the United States.^[76] At least some of their content has been alleged by Microsoft to be created by generative artificial intelligence models to repost content from United States-based news outlets without attribution.^[76] Such outlets include The Guardian, The Week, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times.^[77][78] An investigation from OpenAI found that the network used ChatGPT to generate articles and social media comments.^[79] A network of social media accounts that promoted one of the sites was taken down in 2022 by Twitter for coordinated inauthentic behavior.^[76]

Other campaigns

Zeno Zeno

Starting in October 2023, the Israeli government via the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs supported what The New York Times and Haaretz described as an "influence campaign" that primarily targeted Black lawmakers in the Democratic Party, as well as young left-leaning residents of the United States and Canada.^[88][89] The ministry hired Stoic, an Israeli political marketing firm, to conduct the operation,^[88][89] dubbed Zeno Zeno by OpenAI.^[90] Social media accounts and pages linked to the campaign were taken down by Meta in 2024 for coordinated inauthentic behavior,^[91][88] including the use of profile pictures created by generative adversarial networks and possibly hijacked accounts.^[92] Many social media posts from the campaign were created by ChatGPT.^[88]

HaiEnergy

Shanghai Haixun Technology Co., Ltd (上海海讯社科技有限公司), a Chinese public relations firm, is linked to an influence campaign (titled "HaiEnergy" by Mandiant) to promote positive energy, which Mandiant defines as "messages positively portraying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Chinese Government, and its policies."^[108] Mandiant alleged that the firm had possibly staged protests in Washington D.C. in 2022 involving religious freedom and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.^[109]