Recently unearthed documents reveal that leaders of an online news site aimed at Americans have received money from both Russian and Iranian government media outlets, showing how widening geopolitical alliances are making it harder to identify and trace foreign influence operations.
Hacked emails and other documents from the Iranian government-funded Press TV show payments of thousands of dollars to a writer who is now Washington-based editor for Grayzone, whose founder regularly appears on Russian television and once accepted a trip to Moscow for a celebration of Russian state-controlled video network RT that featured Vladimir Putin.
Misinformation experts say the overlap in funding underscores concern that the spread of falsehoods and propaganda online is entering a more complicated stage as the November election draws closer.
“What you are reporting is, I think, the most practical example of that convergence we’ve seen, where you have someone who has deep ties to Iranian state media working for an organization that we also know is a destination for narrative laundering from Russia,” said Emerson Brooking, co-director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab.
The Press TV files, much of them in Persian, were released on Telegram in 2022 by a self-proclaimed hacktivist group called Black Reward, but the files received little attention then. An activist disinformation researcher, Neal Rauhauser, converted them into a searchable format and provided them to The Washington Post.