By Sarah Donoghue
James Gunn’s newest Superman film is rife with political commentary, but one point which has been passed off as a joke, has far deeper geo-political ramifications than monkeys smashing a keyboard. In Lex Luthor’s pocket universe, we pass rows and rows of monkeys on computers tweeting constant hate about Superman. It’s a clear parody on bots whose whole purpose is to drum up negative sentiment about certain figures online.
As a throw away joke, it’s decently funny – but looking further into it, it’s a good opportunity to highlight how disinformation bots are allowing political actors to stir up genuine political unrest in foreign countries – while keeping their hands relatively clean.
The biggest culprit of this is Doppelganger. Doppelganger is a Russian government backed disinformation campaign which has been linked to almost every anti-immigration movement across Europe and the US in the last 3 years.
In 2024, the European Union Disinformation Lab released an official report exposing the campaign. They found it had been traceably operating since at least February of 2022 and managed by the Russian Social Design Agency. The aim was originally purely to sow anti-Ukraine and pro-Russian sentiments across Europe. They aimed to undermine Ukrainian support by “accusing [the Ukrainian Government] of Nazism and corruption.”
But more recently the group has pivoted to sowing political unrest in countries which support Ukraine or are implementing sanctioned against Russian. These are “ultimately failing strategies that only hurt civil society,” said the EU DisLab.
Doppelgänger’s strategy includes, creating fake clones of legitimate new organisations, spreading false disinformation articles, and using bots to spread the article until it translates to protesting or rioting in the respective countries.
The group has been known to imitate outlets like Le Monde in France, Fox News in the US and the Daily Mail in the UK. Doppelganger has been linked to the Coolock Protests in Ireland, the Southport riots in the UK and protests at the US-Mexico border.
Doppelgänger, and other such bots, have been instrumental in the spread of far-right ideology in Ireland. As a historically, relatively, liberal and pro-immigration country, these bots are purposefully bringing destructive rhetoric to our shores to destabilise our political system and society.
Dr Eman Abboud PhD, political sciences lecturer in Trinity College, told Oxygen, “there’s a concerted effort to spread that misinformation on this island, because we are a mostly English speaking country and in the Anglosphere a lot of the bots that kind of spread this misinformation, so it does make it over to Irish social media.”
“it’s been really interesting for me because I grew up in the South of America. I’ve heard these narratives for a long time, and I’ve only just started hearing them come here. It’s just social media sharing across different English-speaking countries, in particular, the UK in the US. And then those kinds of narratives, are being taken up by the far right and then using that kind of rhetoric to mobilise people.”
“So yeah, I do think that there’s it’s not only like a by accident kind of dropping upon the borders. I think there’s a concerted effort to push these narratives on the island.”