In the space of 24 hours, a piece of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's wife buying a Bugatti car with US aid money traveled the Internet at high speed. Although it originated from an unknown French website, it quickly became a trending topic on X and the top result on Google.
On Monday July 1st, a news item appeared on a website called Vérité Cachée. The article was headlined: “Olena Zelenska becomes first owner of all-new Bugatti Tourbillon.” The article claims that during a trip to Paris with her husband in June, the first lady was given a private viewing of the new $4.8 million supercar from Bugatti and immediately placed an order. It also included a video of a man who claimed to work at the dealership.
But like the website, the video was completely fake.
According to researchers at cybersecurity company Recorded Future, Vérité Cachée is likely part of a network of Russian government-linked websites that deliver Russian propaganda and disinformation to audiences across Europe and the United States, and which was supercharged by AI. Is. The group's activities The group found that similar websites in the network with names like Great British Geopolitics or The Boston Times used generative AI to publish, create, scrape and manipulate thousands of articles attributed to fake journalists. are
Dozens of Russian media outlets, many owned or controlled by the Kremlin, covered the Bugatti story and cited Vérité Cachée as a source. Most of the articles were published on July 2, and the story spread across pro-Kremlin Telegram channels that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. According to @Antibot4Navalny researchers, the Doppelganger network of fake bot accounts on X also promoted the link.
At the time, Bugatti issued a statement dispelling the story. But the misinformation quickly caught X, where it was posted by pro-Kremlin accounts before being picked up by Jackson Hinkle, a pro-Russian, Trump supporter with 2.6 million followers. Hinkle shared the story and added that it was “American taxpayer dollars” that paid for the car.
English-language websites then began reporting on the story, citing figures like Hinkle as well as social media posts of the Vérité Cachée article. As a result, a Google search for “Zielenski Bugatti” last week was presented with a link to Microsoft's news aggregation site MSN, which republished a story written by Middle East news aggregator Al-Bawabah. , which referred to “multiple social”. Media users” and “rumors.”
It only took a few hours for the fake story to go from an unknown website to an online trending topic and become the top result on Google, highlighting how easy it is for bad actors to undermine people's trust in what they do online. Watch and read. Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.