False posts of bed bugs infesting Europe, false reports about abduction and a false investigation into President Joe Biden all bare the trademarks of Russian disinformation.

Disinformation expert Darren Linvill is closely monitoring one Russian operation slyly named FBI.

"The FBI stands for the Foundation for Battling Injustice," says Linvill, the co-director of the Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University. "And it's a front organization operating out of Russia that works to launder stories and launder narratives into Western conversations in France, Germany. And the United States."

Archived pages of the fake Russian site show its founder was Vladimir Putin's so-called chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He rose from selling hot dogs to catering for the Kremlin to leading mercenaries around the world with the Wagner Group, before leading a mutiny against Russian authority last year. He died when the plane he was on exploded in mid-air. Putin said fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the dead.

Prigozhin also founded an infamous Russian troll farm that generated fake personas on social media in a mission to influence American elections.

Read more: https://scrippsnews.com/stories/russi...
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