DOJ seizes AI-enhanced social media bot farm pretending to be American

What is just a portion of the undiscovered bot farms plaguing the internet has been discovered by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and seized.

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The DOJ announced on Tuesday that it seized a bot farm linked to Russia's state-owned publication RT. The US authorities claim the bot farm can all be traced back to one employee. The bot farm consisted of more than 900 social media accounts designed to masquerade as accounts owned by Americans, and their goal was to post a massive amount of information online at once.

It states in the report the accounts posted content about the Ukraine-Russia war, which included videos of Russia's President Vladimir Putin justifying the invasion. The RT employee setup this bot farm by acquiring two domain names from Arizona-based company Namecheap. These domain names were then used to create two email servers that were then used to create nearly 1,000 bot accounts for social media platforms - 968 in total.

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Notably, in 2023, Russia formed a private intelligence organization whose purpose was to "advance the mission of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Russian government, including by spreading disinformation through the social media accounts created by the bot farm," according to the DOJ. The deputy editor for the RT publication is a member of this organization, which the DOJ alleges was to spread disinformation through RT and its bot network.

As for the social media platforms being targeted, this particular bot network focussed its efforts on X, formerly Twitter.