The United States Department of Justice said it disrupted a Russian government bot farm of nearly a thousand X accounts that spread AI-generated pro-Kremlin and anti-U.S. disinformation.
The operation, orchestrated by two Russian government agencies — the Federal Security Service and the RT news network — utilized two domain names, “mlrtr.com” and “otanmail.com,” registered with a U.S.-based provider, along with 968 X accounts.
The Russians used artificial intelligence to create and operate the bot farm of fictitious social media profiles, many impersonating U.S. citizens. AI also generated and spread the Kremlin propaganda through that bot farm.
Russia denied ties with the AI bot farm, citing a lack of evidence. Russia’s main state news agency, RIA Novosti, reported:
“U.S. Justice Department announced it has detected and destroyed a ‘bot farm’ allegedly publishing online content in the interests of the Russian government. … The West and Western media often voice accusations against RF. No evidence whatsoever is presented in such instances and moving forward such leaks never get confirmed.”
This is false.
The U.S. Department of Justice detailed how the FBI, in collaboration with international partners and the private sector, traced the operation through real phone numbers, IPs and email addresses to identify the bot farm’s organizers and operators.
The FBI uncovered that the head of RT’s digital media department proposed establishing a bot farm named “Meliorator” in early 2022.
The program, developed within RT, facilitated the creation of authentic-looking social media accounts known as “souls” to disseminate fake news and amplify existing misinformation. The FBI identified the program’s operational details, including code snippets and tools such as the Faker library for generating fake user content.
According to the FBI special agent’s affidavit, the agency identified the operators of a bot farm by analyzing domain registration records and digital communications.
The FBI uncovered that the domain mlrtr.com, used for the bot farm “Meliorator,” was registered by someone posing as Lithuanian resident Milan Blokhin, but who was actually based in Moscow. The individual used a Lithuanian VPN to mask his location but accessed his email without a VPN, revealing his Moscow location. Google provided information linking the registration to a Cyrillic name, a Russian phone number and a Yandex email. (Often referred to as “Russia’s Google,” Yandex is a Russian multinational technology and internet-search services firm.)
The FBI identified 968 X accounts spreading fake news. According to agency officials, “922 were registered using the domain mlrtr.com and 46 were registered using the domain otanmail.com.” A warrant was issued to obtain data on other accounts registered with mlrtr.com and otanmail.com, revealing connections to an RT employee.
On July 10, the RT press service, without denying or confirming the results of the FBI investigation, stated that “working on the farm [in the garden-beds] is a favorite pastime of millions of Russians.”
RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan bragged about the creation of bot farms in February, telling the “Russia” state TV channel:
“We create a large number of information sources that are not connected with us. And, while the CIA is figuring out that they are connected with us, [these sources] already gain a huge audience. … Sometimes, you wake up in the morning to find out that 600 channels are being shot down at once. But while they are closing them, we have already made new ones. This is how we keep running after each other all this time — this is even fun.”
