Russian hackers hijacked hundreds of online accounts on the Bluesky social media platform and used them to post phony news reports aimed at eroding public support for Ukraine amid Russia's ongoing, four-year war there.
As many as 2,000 posts have been removed by Bluesky since they began showing up in waves in April in an apparent escalation of Russian efforts to spread disinformation online, The New York Times said Thursday, citing the company and Clemson University researchers.
A director of Clemson's Media Forensics Hub told the newspaper that the Russians were “clearly still experimenting” after years of relying on fake accounts with fictitious content.
"They're always experimenting," Darren Linvill said.
The Clemson researchers and a group of internet monitors called the dTeam have linked the posts to the Social Design Agency, a company based in Moscow.
The Independent has reached out to Bluesky for comment, but the company told The Times it was an "industrywide problem," adding, "We dedicate significant resources toward detecting and disrupting coordinated inauthentic campaigns."
Clemson also tied the hacking campaign to a Kremlin influence operation that involves spreading fake news articles that appear to come from legitimate news organizations, in an apparent attempt to promote the false claims by having fact-checkers debunk them.
The Social Design Agency didn't respond to a request for comment, The Times said.
The hackers reportedly targeted Bluesky users considered influential in their fields, including journalists, professors, a pollster, an anime artist and a Hollywood filmmaker whose account was used to post a video in which artificial intelligence software made it appear a Canadian police official was criticizing French President Emmanuel Macron.
Bluesky suspended some hacked accounts until their owners sought to reset them, which is how Pamela Wood, a reporter at The Baltimore Banner, learned that she'd been targeted.
Wood told The Times that she was on vacation on April 28 when her account was locked after being used to post a video with a caption that falsely said The New York Post had linked Ukraine to the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last month.
“Bluesky didn’t provide much information but suggested that my account may have been hacked or compromised,” Ms. Wood said. “My account is rather vanilla — just posting my stories, pretty much — and I hadn’t posted or even looked at Bluesky in a few days, so getting hacked made the most sense.”
The hacking operation had a "level of sophistication beyond what we usually see," said Joseph Bodnar, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who wasn't involved in the Clemson research.
“What we usually see is using hijacked accounts on X, but those are random, obscure accounts with crazy avatars,” Bodnar told The Times. “They’re not trying to get someone moderately known or respected.”
Bluesky, which began as an invitation-only platform, was opened to the public in February 2024 and grew in popularity after billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, announced his support for Trump's reelection. But Bluesky's 42 million users pale in comparison to X's nearly 600 million, according to The Times.
