Not only has RT been buying views and comments, but the legitimate views they have racked up over the years mostly amount to disaster porn and cat videos. It is hardly the crown jewel of the Russian disinfo toolkit. https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1249706662237286401

Russian influence ops should worry us, but if the meat of your evidence is from RT, you should keep digging.

There are a few good pts in this story (more about groups/ad mules would've been interesting) but it mostly violates what I think of as the rules for disinfo reporting:

1. Don't equivocate Putin with the entirety of his disinfo apparatus. The Russian strategy is more like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks than Dr Evil Putin sitting in the Kremlin, yelling at his troll army about which memes to post

(and ffs, he certainly wasn't *personally responsible* for AIDS conspiracies in the 80s)

2. Don't amplify BS fringe sites! The Russophile has ~5k followers on Twitter, with hardly any engagement, and now the most important news outlet in the world is directing its millions of readers there

3. Again, there's *so much more* to Russian disinformation than the overt propaganda networks like RT and Sputnik. The article hints at the information laundering that is now Russia's method of choice/necessity thanks to work of social media firms cracking down on fake accounts..

..but it could have explored that and other underground tactics more. There's a whole nasty underbelly to the disinformation world that blurs lines between foreign and domestic sources, and is much more complex than RT, Sputnik, or fake Twitter accounts.

Finally, as I wrote in a newsletter last month, "coronavirus is the fertile information environment of disinformers’ wet dreams." We shouldn't be surprised that Russia and other bad actors are using it. To pass it up would be folly, BUT... https://wiczipedia.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-infodemic

...we don't need to hyperventilate that it's happening. It's predictable. It's yet another weakness, another moment of heightened emotion, that Russia - and more worryingly, domestic disinformers - are exploiting.

What should you do about it? Read this. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/04/why-we-need-informational-distancing-during-coronavirus-crisis