2 February 2024
On 20 November 2023 a group of Twitter accounts shared a message with almost 200 media outlets and fact-checking organizations that included a video from a billboard in Time Square, New York.
The 27 seconds long video showed an advertisement for a drug rehab center in Los Angeles that included a statement from the American rapper and actor Snoop Dogg and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In the video, Snoop Dogg says: “After much consideration and conversation with my family, I’ve decided to give up smoke.”
Then a picture of Zelenskyy is shown with the text “If even Snoop Dogg could quit drugs. So you can quit drugs too”. The statement refers to the past year’s accusations of Zelenskyy being addicted to drugs used by pro-Russian disinformation groups to discredit the Ukrainian president.
It is not the first time that the Time Square billboard has been used to produce fake videos. In September 2023, AFP reported the creation of the fake video “Glory to Urine”.
In the case of Zelenskyy, the video was fabricated using several public images including a picture from Snoop Dogg’s Instagram (I’am giving up smoke) published on 16 November 2023. The fake video was released the 20 November 2023 on Twitter so the forgery took place between the 16th and the 20th of November.
The producers of the fake video made a few embarrassing mistakes. Let’s take a look at them.
1. Timestamp of advertisement
The billboard displays an advertisement of the release of Call of Duty III the 10th of November 2023 that provides us with a timestamp that indicates when the original (later modified) video was recorded (before November 10, 2023).
2. Christmas campaign
A second mistake was the use of the T-Mobile billboard for the fake video. This billboard is owned by T-Mobile and is solemnly used by the T-mobile shop in Time Square for their Christmas campaign this time of the year.
More nerdy readers will also find the choice of of grey colors for the fake advertisement a rookie mistake.
3. Snoop’s announcement
What the producers of the fake video could not expect was that just three hours after the release of the fake video (20 November 2023), Snoop Dog announced on Instagram “I’m done with smoke. I’m going smokeless with @solostove“. Yeah, Snoop wasn’t quitting drugs, he did a commercial for a smokeless fire-pit stove.
During the investigation of this case we discovered that there were hundreds of high quality (4K) videos recorded from Time Square uploaded to You Tube. Therefore, to gather high quality material for the video, shot from different angles at more or less the same time of the year, Time Square constituted an – almost – perfect location for the scam.
Conclusions
The video is part of a new campaign run in X (formerly Twitter) that uses a technique labeled by AFP as “Matriochka”. The campaign makes use of two different tiers of puppets. A first layer of puppets is responsible of posting the fake content and a second group of accounts is responsible of quoting the material when addressing the media outlets and fact checkers.
The goal of this approach is simple and seeks to extend the life of the accounts that amplify the fake content (second tier) as accounts that source disinformation are often quickly suspended (first tier).
While the “Doppelganger” campaign that we described back in 2022 targeted the general public, these new campaigns “Doppelganger-Matriochka” target media outlets and fact checkers overloading them with bogus fact checking requests.
Media coverage
Coverage by International media:
- [29 Jan 2024] Radio France International (source:AFP), New anti-Ukraine disinfo campaign aims to bog down Western media