White House seizes 32 domains, issues criminal charges in massive election-meddling crackdown

The Biden administration on Wednesday seized 32 websites and charged two employees of a state-owned media outlet connected to a $10 million scheme to distribute pro-Kremlin propaganda, and claimed the actions were necessary to counter Russia’s attempts to influence the upcoming US presidential election. This is all part of the ongoing Doppelgänger operation – a Russian-government-backed influence campaign that has been active since at least 2017. It uses a network of “thousands” of phony social media accounts, fake-news websites and deepfakes to influence American voters and spread pro-Moscow messaging.

It’s called Doppelgänger because it uses typosquatted domains – sites with names that are close to legitimate ones – such as washingtonpost.pm rather than the real washingtonpost.com – to trick viewers into believing they are reading and watching content produced by reputable news orgs. But as screenshots