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The Documentary Podcast

Trending: The American pushing Russian disinformation

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.32.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The websites have names like DC Weekly and Chicago Crier. They are filled with thousands of legitimate-looking stories, plucked from real news websites and rewritten by artificial intelligence. But BBC Trending has found that these sites are part of a wide-ranging operation designed to insert false stories into political debates, over Ukraine and now gradually shifting to the US election campaign. One of the people involved is John Dougan, a former Florida police officer now living in Moscow. Online evidence links him to the network of sites, which reference American cities and are populated by fake journalists. Experts believe they are part of a wide effort to influence American public opinion in advance of November’s presidential election.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

In late November 2023, an odd video appeared on YouTube.

0:09.0

Hello guys, my name is Shah Zad Nasr. I'm here to share an interesting discovery of mine.

0:16.0

That interesting discovery was about a purchase of two yachts for tens of millions of dollars.

0:21.0

Pictures of the luxury vessels float up on the screen, as do

0:25.2

pictures of the buyers and screenshots of documents that purport to be sales contracts.

0:30.2

The Raspi voice tells us that something fishy is going on.

0:34.0

Now here's where it gets interesting.

0:38.0

Both Boris and Sir Hay are Ukrainian citizens.

0:42.0

Both are close friends with the President of Ukraine.

0:47.0

Both are Jenski proxies.

0:49.0

Where did the money come from?

0:51.0

The mysterious Shenzhenesier, who has no online profile to speak of, waits nearly

0:56.8

until the end of the video for the big reveal.

1:00.1

Over last two years, U.S. has erected more than hundred billion dollars to Ukraine with virtually

1:09.2

an oversight.

1:10.8

It's true that the US has given a large sum of money to Ukraine's war effort, but most of the rest of the video was false.

1:18.0

The yachts, we checked with the owners.

1:20.0

They hadn't been sold at all, and certainly not to friends of Zellensky.

1:24.0

It was a classic piece of disinformation, old-fashioned fake news.

1:29.0

But this clip started a chain reaction.

1:31.0

Although virtually nobody watched this video on YouTube, the story was picked up the next day by a website called DC Weekly.

1:38.0

It was repeated on telegram channels and on X, on Facebook, and other social media sites. And then a few weeks later...

...

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