Exposing 🇷🇺🇺🇦🇺🇸🇦🇪🇦🇿 troll farms |Cited by:@AP @NYTimes @WashingtonPost @FT @CNN @Wired @TheEconomist @AFP @Libe @LeMondeFr @SZ @TheTimes @NBCNews @EFE
@antibot4navalny.bsky.social
Joined March 2018
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Back to targeting the US midterms, the Kremlin-aligned Matryoshka network is today:
🔹 faking celeb endorsements for #/DemocratsAreAbusingMyChildren
🔹 fabricating traumatic stories about stars' childhoods & careers
🔹 framing the Dem party as a violent child abuse syndicate
🧵 Today’s Matryoshka bot campaign targets Spain's Nov 29 vote.
💬 The housing crisis is the tip of the iceberg: the economy is doomed, elections won’t help.
💬 The real "solution": leave the EU, lift sanctions, split off Catalonia (sic!).
Here's how the logic unfolds ⤵️
The Kremlin-aligned Matryoshka network is weaponizing the Krakow shooting to drive a wedge between Ukraine and its European partners (France, Germany, Italy and Poland).
There are two narratives that this campaign wants you to believe:
For the Albania / Montenegro campaign, Matryoshka pivoted to Tumblr.
Burner accounts; 'Untitled' names; likely-machine generated handles.
This is the first time during our years of monitoring that it published its videos there.
Anyone knows someone at Tumblr's Trust & Safety?
More about this campaign: xitter.twitterapi.xyz/antibot4navalny/status…
The Kremlin-aligned bot network Matryoshka is mocking Montenegro and Albania for asking* NATO for help to counter Russian disinformation.
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The Kremlin-aligned bot network Matryoshka is mocking Montenegro and Albania for asking* NATO for help to counter Russian disinformation.
Kremlin-aligned bot network Matryoshka is exploting the 'Azov Torture Chamber' narrative.
First Matryoshka post appeared long after the narrative got viral, so very unlikely it was people behind Matryoshka who invented the narrative.
Kremlin-aligned bot network Matryoshka is actively exploiting the Poland's political crisis—while also mocking Donald Tusk's statement about Russian bots.
With only a few weekdays left until the US midterms, Matryoshka is resorting to its laziest format yet: repurposed videos of scholars.
Today's claim is "Smart People Don't Vote For Democrats".
Today, official @WhiteHouse account uses exactly the same narrative as Matryoshka, a long-exposed Kremlin-aligned bot network, did less than a week ago:
"Voting for Democrats will bring chaos that you can see in France today".
Full thread detailing Matryoshka campaign: ⤵️
Apparently first Trump, Vance and others voiced this narrative.
Then Matryoshka tried to amplify it.
Later White House amplified it too.
h/t to @joeabodnar
politico.com/news/2026/10/20…
🗓️ Oct 22:
Matryoshka weaponizes protests in France to influence the US midterms in favor of the Republicans.
🧵
We contributed to the NYT story on Haley Stevens and an India-based content farm:
nytimes.com/2026/10/19/busin… | archive.ph/qRpHE
As it started gaining traction yesterday, here is some backstory.
In early Aug 2026, while monitoring an unrelated pro-Kremlin bot network, we found 200+ videos on X praising her platform, surprisingly posted by 28 accounts otherwise dedicated to viral junk.
Half of them were based in India, per X's public data: xitter.twitterapi.xyz/antibot4navalny/status…
Alternatively explore these 3 steps for details of how it works:
@RidT
This is largely related to your Sep-2024 op-ed: foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
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Across 20 campaign posts targeting the US midterms, we proved with verifiable evidence that Matryoshka artificially inflates view counts and other engagement metrics.
While the average post in this campaign shows 56K views on X, only ~2.1K (3.8%) of them could be organic.
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Across 20 campaign posts targeting the US midterms, we proved with verifiable evidence that Matryoshka artificially inflates view counts and other engagement metrics.
While the average post in this campaign shows 56K views on X, only ~2.1K (3.8%) of them could be organic.
The X team (Global Government Affairs unit) announced the suspension of >13K inauthentic accounts targeting the US midterms on behalf of foreign states.
Here is why that number is a drop in the ocean, even for Russian-state influence operations alone: ⤵️
xitter.twitterapi.xyz/GlobalAffairs/status/2…
People come to X to talk about what's happening in the world, including the upcoming 2026 US midterms. Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and we are proud that X is the global town square where these debates happen. Our job is to keep that conversation authentic, open, and safe.
To ensure these fundamental values are protected during elections, our Safety team uses a variety of detection methods to proactively find and act on activity that breaks the X Rules. These measures build on the safety protections we run 24/7, year-round. X's Authenticity Policy is particularly important to this work. Whether it is spam networks or entities engaged in influence operations, we are actively working to identify and stop coordinated inauthentic behavior that undermines the integrity of our platform.
Through proactive sweeps and investigations, X recently identified and suspended more than 13,000 accounts involved in three suspected foreign influence operations linked to Iran, Russia, and China that targeted US political conversation. The networks used inauthentic accounts to post and amplify content about US politics, targeting candidates and public figures across the political spectrum.
X's Civic Integrity policy addresses misleading content that could affect participation in elections or other civic processes. This includes content that may confuse people about how, when, or where to participate, or that aims to discourage participation. X relies on Community Notes, which let people add context and credible sources, alongside platform moderation. Users can report content under "Civic Integrity" in our in-app reporting flow, and their submission will be routed to request a Community Note, a collaborative way to add helpful context to posts and keep people better informed. Additionally, in critical escalations, X may apply a Civic Integrity label to posts that violate our policy.
We remain committed to X as a global town square where people openly debate topics of public interest and engage with election-related information. Our work continues through Election Day and beyond.
See our Civic Integrity Policy for more information:
help.x.com/en/rules-and-poli…
1️⃣ A single 3-day campaign by Doppelgänger—a Kremlin-linked influence operation first exposed in Sept 2022—deployed 24.7K bot accounts back in May 2024.
The operation is still active today, despite detailed TTPs and long-exposed infrastructure.
xitter.twitterapi.xyz/daithaigilbert/status/…
As Trumpworld pushes conspiracies about Biden's health ahead of the the first presidential #debate tonight, @antibot4navalny researchers found Kremlin bots promoting an AI-manipulated video depicting Biden as senile.
Here's how they are doing it:
1/6
wired.com/story/russia-disin…
Yesterday Matryoshka bots showed an early preview of how the "Ukraine missile silenced Yandex bots" viral hoax can be weaponized in the coming months.
If pro-Ukraine officials, media and opinion leaders were deceitful about bots, the Kremlin claims they are also: ⤵️
By popular demand:
A follow-up thread on Russian bots, Yandex, Cloudflare, MAGA, AfD and "breathing easier" on social media.
1️⃣ We see no "dramatic drop" in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years).
🧵 (Un)surprisingly the Kremlin-aligned Matryoshka bots are still active today.
Praising the Trump-Putin diesel deal, they are demanding an immediate lift of EU sanctions against Russia—claiming they are destroying European economies and provoking civil unrest.
