Calling itself Man Stuff News, the website caters to a particular sensibility with categories like “Backyard BBQs,” “TV Shows for Men” and “Beard Grooming.” A recent article headlined “Advice for Expecting Dads” offers this valuable advice: “Make sure you spend time together before deciding whether or not to have a baby.”
But the coverage changes dramatically when you turn to the world news section, where a recent article downplaying the international arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on war crimes charges repeated word for word an article published the previous day by a different name on the website of RT, Russia's international television network.
RT, which the U.S. State Department has described as a key player in the Russian government's disinformation and propaganda machinery, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But a new report says sites like Man Stuff News have helped RT get around the restrictions and continue to reach audiences in Europe and America.
Reproduction of this article by RT was made possible through the generous support of the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam, The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit research organization. These sites include content aggregators like Infowars run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, RT mirrors that repurposed abandoned “zombie” sites, fake local news outlets with names like the San Francisco Telegraph, and domains focused on spirituality, yoga, extraterrestrial life, and the apocalypse. Many of the articles were then further disseminated through social media.
While the reasons for reposting RT content likely vary from site to site, covert republishing is particularly risky in the European Union, where concerns about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns are growing as Russia seeks to undermine European support for Ukraine ahead of parliamentary elections next week.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg of Russian propaganda,” said Brett Schafer, a co-author of the report and a senior researcher at the German Marshall. “When we looked at search results in the EU, it was clear that if Russian propaganda wasn't showing up on a Russian domain, it was getting through. This is a double whammy, because not only is Russian propaganda evading restrictions and bans, it's doing it on sites that are less transparent than RT itself.”
RT said in a statement that its content does not align with “US State Department/NATO party line,” adding that it is “very pleased that RT's news content is so popular across a wide range of platforms and users.”
A message sent to the email address listed for Man Stuff News' website registration went unanswered, and the site offers few details about its location or who runs it.
As non-Russian sources repeated the Kremlin's claims verbatim, they helped legitimize them to unsuspecting audiences, the researchers concluded. The copy, which the researchers described as “Russian propaganda nesting dolls,” targeted a wide audience through sites registered in at least 40 countries across six continents, including countries where RT is ostensibly blocked. Taking into account RT's content in languages other than English, as well as other Kremlin-controlled media, the actual scope of Russian propaganda laundering is probably much broader, the researchers said.
“We are particularly concerned about increasing foreign interference and manipulation in our societies, democracies and elections,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech this month. She cited a “vast amount of negative disinformation” about specific issues or candidates, as well as malicious attempts to “buy influence and sow chaos.”
Last month, a coalition of 36 European fact-checking organisations said false or misleading content about the EU and Ukraine was one of the most pervasive forms of disinformation it had encountered.
An EU report this year said foreign actors — most obviously Russia, but also China — are working together “on virtually all platforms” to create an alternative information environment that undermines trust in democracy. The European Commission last month ran a pre-election stress test to assess platforms' preparedness for AI-enabled disinformation, influence bot accounts, and other threats.
The Kremlin is losing access to some of its key messaging channels in the West after Canada and the European Union banned RT from broadcasting after 2022. This month, the coalition also banned four other Russian media outlets.
In the United States, government regulators did not take action against RT America, the Russian network's U.S. affiliate. Instead, national television distributors cut ties with RT America in early 2022, and RT America was shut down within days.
Online platforms have also tried to curb RT's influence. YouTube blocks worldwide access RT said it notified channels affiliated with RT and worked to remove the harmful misinformation. But RT's laundered content remains on the channel and on other platforms, the researchers said, mirroring previous findings by other research groups. On YouTube, RT articles appear to be narrated using an automated voice synthesizer to evade filters. Content copied from RT also appears on major social and messaging sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Substack, Telegram and X, as well as niche platforms such as Gab and Rumble, the researchers said.
The researchers looked at more than 1,500 RT articles published last year to find websites with similar content and metadata, limiting their search to the United States and Belgium, the de facto capital of the European Union.
Some of these sites were likely distributing RT content with RT's permission, while others plagiarized it without RT's knowledge, according to the researchers. The sites may have been ideologically aligned with the Kremlin or eager to drive traffic to boost awareness and advertising revenue. Some of the sites revealed that they were reposting RT content. (Manstaff News included the web address of the original RT article at the end of its copy of its article about Putin's arrest warrant.)
Verbatim copies of RT articles appeared in government-affiliated media in Cambodia, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, as well as in Lebanese media owned by the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah. The researchers linked one website to a conservative Catholic online mission in Texas, which contained posts about abortion, candle making and, in one example taken from RT, the lack of aid after the Syrian earthquake.
The researchers noted that RT is not the only Kremlin-linked media outlet where money is being laundered. With key elections approaching in the European Union and the United States, Russian disinformation operatives have been honing their tactics. Recent videos have shown signs of manipulation using synthetic voices and artificial intelligence, targeting right-leaning US voters with fake messages about President Biden. Fake news organizations created by Russian operatives are spreading Kremlin propaganda while imitating real US media. A former Florida deputy sheriff who gained political asylum in Moscow has built more than 160 of these fake sites.