SVT has analyzed data collected by Antibot4Navalny, a Russian opposition analysis group that maps the Doppelgänger campaign’s activity on the X platform.
The articles were collected between March 1 and May 29, 2024, and consist of nearly 2,000 bot posts that spread almost as many unique pro-Russian propaganda articles.
The articles can be traced to the Doppelgänger campaign through the website addresses, which are linked to the network by, among other things Meta.
Antibot4Navalny has used artificial intelligence to extract the names of people, politicians and parties that appear in the articles. The AI has also categorized how each entity has been portrayed: positive, neutral or negative. With the help of a script, SVT has extracted all objects (persons, governments and so on), which gave us over 10,000 mentions to analyze.
To ensure the reliability of the material, we have checked the correctness of 200 randomly selected articles. We have then tracked down the mistakes we discovered that the AI made and ensured that they do not affect the conclusions we draw from the material.
Antibot4Navalny has categorized all links according to which country the messages are aimed at.
The country distribution has been made based on several factors, such as which language is used in articles and bot posts, which news sites have been falsified and which topics an article covers.
The USA, Israel and Ukraine are also targets for the campaign, but we have chosen to filter them out of the data analysis to focus on the EU countries.