With the growing popularity of the Twitter alternative Bluesky, this network is also becoming increasingly interesting for disinformation campaigns. Currently, the pro-Russian influence operations “Doppelganger” and “Matryoshka” are apparently expanding their activities to Bluesky.
On Friday, the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) reported on a current campaign with hundreds of fake accounts. According to disinformation expert Saman Nazari, quoted by RND, their characteristics point to the “doppelganger” operation. The anti-bot collective antibot4navalny on Bluesky comes to the same conclusion.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externer Inhalt geladen.
“Matryoshka” has apparently been active on Bluesky for some time. At the end of 2024, The Insider reported that this disinformation operation was expanding its activity on Bluesky. The operation is following the current migration of users from X/Twitter to Bluesky, partly by copying fake news content from X, but also partly with content that is apparently primarily published on Bluesky. The French news agency AFP was recently able to attribute around 50 posts on Bluesky to “Matryoshka”.
Old and new tactics
According to the AFP, the posts by “Matryoshka” were particularly notable for their AI-generated deep fakes. In these posts, university professors, for example, tell false information that they have never actually said. Another tactic of “Matryoshka”, known from X/Twitter, is to use fake accounts to point out the fakes to fact-checkers and thus tie up their capacities.
According to research by ant
