Move over, Facebook and Twitter. Russian trolls are expanding their social media portfolio and going longform with a growing footprint on Medium. Over the past few years, Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns have increasingly turned to the sleek, minimalist writing platform to host fake articles—stories that fed into Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine conspiracy theories and other favorite topics of Moscow. So how are trolls abusing the tech industry’s favorite self-publisher and what is the company doing about it?
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Most social platforms have gone through a Kübler-Ross-style grief cycle when confronted with the problem of disinformation and what they intend to do about it. Sites like Facebook started out with denial—Mark Zuckerberg famously brushed off President Obama’s November 2016 warning about foreign disinformation on the platform—and have since moved to somewhere between bargaining and acceptance.
Medium declined to make its trust and safety team available for an interview but did issue a brief in response to questions from The Daily Beast. “The Trust and Safety team continuously monitors Medium for active campaigns and networks, and consults with outside experts to learn about, monitor, and receive reports on global trends. Medium is in regular contact with outside organizations, and is continuously building and iterating on internal tools to identify and prevent known and suspected bad actors.”
When fake accounts and state-backed campaigns get called out, Medium does act quickly to suspend the accounts and content. The accounts and articles reported on by Graphika and The Daily Beast were quickly taken down once reported. But that leaves open the question of how well the company is doing at identifying inauthentic content before it’s called out by third parties.
Longform trolling: It’s not unheard of for illicit content creators to switch up their favorite social media platforms as companies crack down on abuse. We’ve seen it play out with grisly ISIS media content, which started out spamming Twitter, hopped to the encrypted Telegram messaging service, and has since spread to smaller, more obscure social media apps as companies clamped down on the group.
Over the past few years state-linked disinformation trolls have been expanding their social media publishing haunts beyond just the big name platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit and into longer-form outlets to disguise their propaganda as news articles.
And that’s where Medium comes in. Medium was started by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams—initially as a way to allow Twitter users to break free of the site’s 140-character limit, but he developed the site into a separate company and publishing platform.
Russian trolls have shown a particular fondness for using the site to distribute propaganda over the past four years. Reports from the social media analysis firm Graphika show that Russian-linked trolls first posted on Medium in October and November of 2016 before ramping up to 25 posts in 2017. Russian trolls began with a single account under the name “lukasesmeraldas” and spread fake stories about the Clinton campaign going to work for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a crude photoshopped photo of Barack Obama to claim that Obama administration officials were going to work for the Ukrainian government. Later into 2017, Russian accounts like “tosealy” posted claims that then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had passed along a “do-not-prosecute” list to Ukrainian officials forbidding them to take on corrupt officials.
Medium rare: The scale of abuse so far is small, with only a handful of Medium accounts identified as state-linked trolls compared to the thousands of Twitter accounts and Facebook ads controlled by the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.
But they have been used to push some high-profile propaganda campaigns on the Kremlin’s behalf. Graphika also found that Russian-backed disinformation campaigns made use of Medium to push pro-Brexit propaganda and Ukraine conspiracy theories. On the latter front, one Russian linked account published an article on Medium attacking Yovanovitch, who was fired by the Trump administration after a Rudy Giuliani-led smear campaign, using the debunked claims of a former Ukrainian prosecutor about a “do-not-prosecute” list from the U.S. embassy.
Not just Russia: Medium has also attracted other disinformation actors besides those pitching pro-Putin narratives. In January, The Daily Beast reported on a network of pro-Iranian trolls that stole the identities of unwitting legitimate reporters for outlets like Haaretz and the New York Post to spread pro-Iranian propaganda. The trolls also made extensive use of The Odyssey Online, a semi-open platform that solicits and publishes articles from the public and posted a fake story about the supposed expulsion of a dissident Iranian cult group from France on Medium.
There’s a zillion self-publishing platforms that the aspiring nation state disinformation troll could use. So why choose Medium? One theory is pretty obvious: the veneer of legitimacy.
If you have a propaganda article you’d like to pass off as a legitimate news source, you can always create a fake website around it to look real. That route, a favorite of Iranian trolls, offers the veneer of legitimacy but adds an additional layer of hassle since websites take more effort to set up and leave behind longer trails of clues for researchers to track. Blogging platforms like Google’s Blogspot, Wordpress, and others would take the hassle out of self-publishing fake articles but don’t have the aura of a legitimate news source.
That’s why Medium and sites similar to it are likely of interest to disinformation actors. Medium is a unique platform in that it combines self-publishing and edited journalism under the same URL. Medium has stood up more traditional journalism outlets like GenMag, Elemental, OneZero, with subdomains that indicate they’re professional journalism content and different from the casual self-published material on the site. But that’s a subtle distinction that might not be immediately obvious to a casual clicker who sees a link posted on Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook.
Domestic trolls have also taken to Medium to give a veneer of sleek-designed legitimacy to their disinformation campaigns. Notorious bumbling hoax artists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burman attempted a half-assed smear of Mayor Pete Buttigieg in April 2019 with a fake allegation that the Democratic presidential candidate sexually assaulted a man. Wohl allegedly drafted the fake claim and posted it to Medium under Kelly’s name before Medium swiftly took the post down.
Not just Medium: Nor is Medium the only platform that offers the combination of easy self-publishing with the veneer of legitimacy. Graphika’s investigations found that other self-publishing platforms like BeforeItsNews.com were favorites of Russian trolls who would use the site to copy and paste the same content published on Medium. With posters like Jeff Bezos and widely read journalism verticals, Medium has the kind of mainstream cachet that the obscure BeforeItsNews lacks. But the site allows users to self-publish in a format that, to an unfamiliar eye, can seem like a normal online news outlet.