When the Democratic National Convention hits Chicago in August, demonstrators are expected to take to the streets to draw attention to a wide range of causes — immigration, police misconduct, abortion, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
What they might never know is how much Russia and other nations will have been aiming to influence the marches and demonstrations near the United Center and McCormick Place convention sites, experts on disinformation say.
“The eyes of the world are going to be centered on” the convention, says Max Bergmann, a former State Department official who says Russian has long sought “to exploit our divisions.” “There’s going to be protests, and I think that’s sort of red meat to Russian intelligence services.”
Bergmann, a program director with the Center for Strategic International Studies, a Washington think tank, says the convention is ripe for foreign influence campaigns to “sow chaos” and potentially stoke violence.
Some online influence efforts have become highly sophisticated. They don’t just focus on spreading propaganda and disinformation on social media and through their own fake news websites, according to Bergmann and others, who say Russians are now building sites that look nearly identical to mainstream Western news outlets with the aim of duping people as they spread their message.
Ahead of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Russian operatives were accused of hacking party leaders’ emails that showed a bias toward nominee Hillary Clinton over her challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders. The disclosure caused shock waves weeks before the convention and led to the resignation of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairperson of that convention.
U.S. intelligence officials concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed an operation aimed at boosting the Republican candidacy of Donald Trump, who went on to defeat Clinton. Accusations that Trump and his associates colluded with Russia hung over his term in office, though a special counsel’s investigation found there wasn’t enough evidence to file any criminal charges.
U.S. intelligence officials concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed an operation aimed at boosting the Republican candidacy of Donald Trump, who went on to defeat Clinton. Allegations that Trump and his associates colluded with Russia hung over his term in office, although a special counsel investigation found there wasn’t enough evidence to bring criminal charges.
Russia’s interference efforts this year is likely to be more wide-ranging, from using social media to stoke dissension over hot-button issues to using “human assets” to infiltrate protest groups, Bergmann says.
“It could be the case where there are perhaps Russian operatives that are then physically embedded with some of these groups,” he says. “And their job is to instigate on the ground, to be the one that throws the first rock that they set off a degree of violence.”
Also, social media has “become way more of a cesspool than it was in 2016,” Bergmann says, pointingto X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that billionaire owner Elon Musk has proclaimed to be a haven for free speech. Bergmann says the platform has “become sort of a safe space for extremists and many who want to do America harm.
“In some ways, it’s become a very permissive environment if you’re a Russian intelligence operative,” he says. “That’s the same with Facebook after getting the lion’s share of the scrutiny, I think, after 2016.”
Bergmann says Russians are primed to seize on issues such as undocumented immigration and racial justice just as activists are preparing to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas and the erosion of abortion rights.
“This is just a target-rich stew for the Russians to try lots of things and see what works or what doesn’t work,” Bergmann says. “And they’re going to have a high failure rate. But the danger is that they are able to really figure out a way to stoke either violence or instigate a real contrived political scandal.”
Russia, the FBI, the First Amendment
For months, activists have been gearing up for the Democratic National Convention. At a conference in April for what’s being called the “March on the DNC 2024,” one activist, Jesse Nevel, spoke about a federal criminal case accusing him and colleagues of working on behalf of the Russian government to conduct a multi-year “foreign malign influence” campaign in the United States.
Nevel, Penny Hess and Omali Yeshitela, all Americans, are charged with conspiring to act as illegal agents of the Russian government within the United States without providing prior notification to the attorney general.
According to a 2023 indictment, a Russian named Aleksandr Ionov recruited them and others to create dissension in the United States and promote secessionist ideologies. With Russia’s supervision, Ionov directed an unsuccessful 2019 political campaign in St. Petersburg, Florida, according to the indictment. Ionov told Reuters in Moscow he wasn’t masterminding a misinformation campaign in the United States. “These charges are complete nonsense,” he told the news service.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Ionov also raised money for the legal defense of Maria Butina, a Russian national who pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent without registering with the Justice Department. Butina, deported in 2019 to her home country, was accused of infiltrating the National Rifle Association to forge ties with conservatives ahead of Trump’s election in 2016.
In 2015, Yeshitela — founder of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, to which Nevel and Hess belong — traveled to Russia and entered into a partnership with Ionov, according to the indictment. Ionov is accused of giving directions to the Americans, who lived in Florida and Missouri, to publish Russian propaganda and disinformation.
According to the government, the propaganda included a 2015 United Nations petition “on genocide of African people in the U.S.” and a 2016 statement supporting Russian Olympic athletes accused of state-run doping. The indictment also points to a 2022 speech in which Yeshitela supported Russia’s “defensive” war against Ukraine.
The indictment said Ionov was directly involved in U.S. politics, sending Nevel a message in 2017 offering to provide him with “campaign finance” for his unsuccessful run for mayor of St. Petersburg, during which he advocated reparations for African Americans and said the city was spending too much on the police. He got only 1% of the votes cast. In 2019, according to the indictment, Ionov exchanged messages with Russian security and counterintelligence officials about his efforts to elect another, unnamed political candidate in St. Petersburg.
In 2022, the FBI raided homes and offices connected to the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement. Nevel, Hess and Yeshitela, who were indicted the following year, now call themselves the “Uhuru 3.”
On Sept. 28, 2023, Chicago attorney Leonard Goodman, who was representing Hess, unsuccessfully urged a judge to dismiss the charges against her and the other Uhuru 3 defendants, saying, “This would blow a hole in the First Amendment.”
“This is a prosecution of the critics of the U.S. government, nonviolent, with no allegation that there’s any national security concern except that they somehow have a relationship with Russians,” he said, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Nevel’s attorney Akbar Thomas acknowledges his client spoke to the “March on the DNC” meeting in April about the Uhuru 3 but said there was nothing nefarious about it.
“This is the work that this group has been doing since the ’70s in terms of anti-globalism, anti-capitalism, fighting for the rights of Black people, African people,” Thomas says. “It has nothing to do with Russia or Russian agents.”
Another American has seemingly positioned himself at the center of Russia’s information war. John Mark Dougan, a former sheriff’s deputy from Florida who fled to Moscow to evade criminal charges, has been linked to a network of more than 160 websites that post false news articles pushing Russian propaganda.
The network included a short-lived website called the Chicago Chronicle that published baseless claims that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer oversaw vaccine trials that killed dozens of Ukrainian children, according to a recent report published by NewsGuard, which scrutinizes online news and information.
The narrative was amplified by pro-Kremlin accounts on X and reported by Russian state television. Between September and this month, social media posts and news articles advancing the network’s false claims have been viewed more than 37 million times in 16 languages, according to NewsGuard.
‘I’ll have my popcorn ready to watch it all implode’
Welton Chang, chief executive of Pyrra Technologies, which tracks disinformation and online extremism for companies, think tanks and universities, says that, in 2016, Russians were largely “playing up different racial divisions” and trying to draw attention to Hillary Clinton’s failings. Chang says he’s now interested in the “potential violence-causing narratives” ahead of this summer’s Democratic convention.
Pyrra uses artificial intelligence to collect and filter posts from across the web. Most posts discussing — and in some cases cheering for — violence and destruction at the Democratic convention have originated on far-right platforms, along with disturbing conspiracy theories about the upcoming event.
A recent search of Pyrra’s computerized tracking system found numerous such posts, including one on the social network Gab — a hotbed for racism and extremism — that said: “The more insanity and chaos at the DNC convention in Chicago the better. Riots, fires, assaults, I’ll have my popcorn ready to watch it all implode.”
Antibot4Navalny, another group that researches Russian misinformation efforts, says pro-Kremlin computer robots posing as real people on X in recent weeks have been promoting articles focused on border security and immigration to the United States.
One of those articles was published by Breitbart News, a far right outlet previously run by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Two other such articles appeared on a website that Facebook’s parent company Meta has flagged as being potentially malicious. According to Meta, that website is linked to Doppelgänger, described by the social media giant as “the largest and most aggressively persistent covert influence operation from Russia that we’ve seen since 2017.”
Launched after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Doppelgänger runs “a large network of websites spoofing legitimate news outlets” and shares links to those sites on social media.
Recently, Doppelgänger created a bogus version of The Washington Post’s website to promote a story that tied billionaire George Soros to recent campus protests against Israel’s war against Hamas.
The Kremlin-linked operation has also spoofed NATO’s website and has targeted other countries, including Germany, France and Ukraine, according to Meta.
The people behind those sites “appear to be agile in quickly responding to world events in real time” and have seized on anti-police protests in France and criticism of judicial reform in Israel, Meta said in a company report.
‘Decent amount of chatter’ so far
Chang says propaganda generally is rooted in some degree of truth and “nested in existing tropes and narratives.”
“When you invent total fictions, people find it hard to believe,” Chang says. “But, if you base propaganda in that kernel of truth, then you can at least launch off from there and get that buy-in right off the bat.”
Using his company’s search engine, Chang demonstrated for Sun-Times reporters how he can find social media posts about particular topics, including the Democratic National Convention. He found plenty, including hate speech and predictions of violence at the convention, though Chang says it’s hard to tell whether they came from America, Russia or somewhere else — and that’s the goal.
“There’s sort of a decent amount of chatter this far ahead of the event, you know?” Chang says.
“They don’t know in advance what’s actually going to get traction,” he says of Russian disinformation agents. “But once something starts to get attention, they will definitely double down.”