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From Z to X: How Russian Information Warfare Primed the World for Trump and Musk

“Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics” according to Steve Bannon. But the the seeds for this tech dystopia were sown more than a decade ago

This article was originally published in the February 2025 print edition of Byline Times

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Digital Barbecues

The invitation came out of the blue: “His Excellency Ambassador of the Russian Federation requests the pleasure of the company of Mr Peter Jukes at a Digital BBQ.” 

Back in December 2015, I had no idea why Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko was inviting me to talk about “social media vs mainstream media” at his sumptuous residence in Kensington Palace Gardens, except that it would have something to do with the fact I had live-tweeted the entire phone-hacking trial from the Old Bailey, and become an advisor to a new start-up journalistic crowdfunding site called Byline.com. 

I was wary. I had been to Kyiv just after the Maidan revolution the year before, and was publicly opposed to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. But I was also curious and planned to go, resolving not to take my phone or talk to any attractive Russian women at the event. 

Then, something I now look back on with a mixture of regret and relief, I promptly forgot about it.

Thanks to working with Carole Cadwalladr on Project Citizen’s new Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring podcast, I now know the significance of these ‘digital barbecues’ and the role they have played in the decade-long information warfare Vladimir Putin has deployed in the UK, the US, and Europe. 

These glamorous events were organised by the first political secretary, Sergei Nalobin, whose activities in trying to funnel money to the Conservative Party are detailed in the podcast by the tireless whistleblower, Sergei Cristo. 

Nalobin was behind the scandal-hit ‘Conservative Friends of Russia’ group – a front for the Kremlin’s ‘active measures’ campaign to influence Tory politicians. When that was shut down, he set up the ‘Westminster Russia Forum’, which mainly focused on Nigel Farage’s UKIP and pro-Brexit right-wingers. 

Nalobin was a familiar figure around Westminster and interacted with senior Brexiters such as the Vote Leave campaign chief executive Matthew Elliott and its figurehead Boris Johnson

But Nalobin’s diplomatic visa was rescinded in 2015 and he left under a cloud. 

By the time I was invited to this digital barbecue another character, Alexander Udod, had replaced him as political first secretary. 

Udod was himself expelled from the UK after the Salisbury Novichok attack three years later. To discover more about Udod’s role in Brexit (no spoilers!), you’ll have to listen to the second half of our podcast series. Suffice it to say, the underlying story of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report is explained by it, and the reasons why Johnson wanted to suppress the report.

But back to those digital barbecues. 

Thanks to open-source intelligence, and the testimony of attendees like Steve Lacey (an advertising executive who is the second key whistleblower in our podcast), we now know that the Russian Government wasn’t only trying to pour money into UK politics – it was hoovering up expertise and contacts in the world of social media. 

Many influential tech leaders attended these embassy events, including the leading right-wing blogger Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes, whose Messagespace advertising company won a contract to work on Russian Government campaigns. 

As Carole Cadwalladr reveals in Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, the Kremlin-funded media company RT (formerly Russia Today) was, at this point, dominating YouTube, having ‘juiced the algorithm’ with disaster videos. It would pay and promote Nigel Farage as a Member of the European Parliament. Along with its sister Kremlin outlet, Sputnik, RT would be a major influencer in the EU Referendum debate, with a reach bigger than ITV News or Sky News

Sergei Cristo. Photo: Sheridan Flynn

Meanwhile, in plush offices in a St Petersburg suburb, the oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin was starting up his notorious troll farm, hiring hundreds of foreign-language Russian students to troll English-language social media and news commentary. 

As multiple FBI and congressional investigations have shown, Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency sent personnel to the US to set up fake Facebook groups and spent $50 million promoting discord in American society, backing the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.  

No such official investigation with legal powers has ever been conducted into Russian interference on this side of the Atlantic. 

The 2018 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s final parliamentary report into disinformation and fake news did conclude that the Kremlin probably had attempted to swing the referendum vote. 

But that is the extent of the investigation, apart from the heavily redacted Russia Report. 

Meanwhile, whatever Nalobin learned at those digital barbecues didn’t hinder his career. He went on to run the  Digital Diplomacy Unit at the Department of Information in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

From there, he was appointed as the chargé d’affaires at the Russian Embassy in Estonia in 2019 where, according to New Lines Magazine, “Nalobin interacted with many people in Tallinn and tried to dig his way into high society – just as he did in London”. He was deported from the Estonian capital in March 2022, soon after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

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The ‘Secret Super Weapon’

From those early days of the digital barbecues, Russian understanding of online influence operations expanded, reaching a crescendo in 2016 when Kremlin operatives were active in both the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s exit from the EU. 

As Nafeez Ahmed revealed three years ago in Byline Times, Brexit was a strategic objective of Russian foreign policy as Putin planned for his full invasion of Ukraine. But the role of Big Tech companies in enabling this kind of information warfare is the most enduring legacy of those days. 

Part of the unwritten story of Russian propaganda is the role non-Russian companies and activists played in spreading its message and fine-tuning its technology. 

Soon after the 2016 US Presidential Election, a deputy in the Russian Parliament, Konstantin Rykov – known as ‘Putin’s internet guru’ – claimed a role in Trump’s shock victory. He announced on Facebook that, as far back as 2012, he and his colleagues had the “insane idea” that they would “digitise all possible types of modern man” and “change their perception of reality” to elect Trump as President.

With a level of detail about the psychometric profiling which would have been hard to come by without intimate knowledge, Rykov explained that “British scientists from Cambridge Analytica” had succeeded by “making 5,000 existing human psychotypes” to create the “ideal image of a possible Trump supporter” and successfully target them with a “secret super weapon”. 

Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm which used military-grade online targeting to run campaigns in more than 60 countries across the world. Its CEO, Alexander Nix, boasted around the same time on Sky News that his company held 5,000 data points on each US voter.

Coincidence? Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, already had various tie-ups with Russia. Co-founded with Steve Bannon, with start-up capital from the billionaire hedge fund Trump donor Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica worked with the Russian fossil fuel giant Lukoil to gauge US attitudes towards Putin. 

Its much-vaunted psychometric profiling – designed to model and predict human behaviour – was based on a big data and artificial intelligence project at Cambridge University, and led by one Aleksandr Kogan. 

Born in the USSR (now independent Moldova), Kogan designed the app which allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal details of up to 87 million Facebook users (including myself). He was also affiliated with St Petersburg University, which was the source of recruitment for Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency. 

Kogan denied working with the Russian Government, but another Cambridge Analytica/SCL consultant, Sam Patten, formed a business with a GRU (Russian Military intelligence) agent, Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the US Treasury, “Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” prior to Trump’s election in 2016. 

Tasked with investigating Russian interference in US elections, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also concluded that “Cambridge Analytica, had a degree of intersection with and proximity to Russia, and specifically Russia’s intelligence services”.

Since both Kilimnik and Prigozhin were supervised by the GRU, it was always likely that Cambridge Analytica data could have been shared with the St Petersburg troll farm. 

Indeed, the Senate Committee concluded that Cambridge Analytica and other companies “micro-targeted social media messaging techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet Research Agency”.

In light of this, Rykov’s boasts on Facebook about his “secret super weapon” look less and less unlikely. But, whatever the precise details of the data practices and strange alliances in the Trump and Brexit votes, a model had been created. 

Apparently free at the point of use, social media giants such as Facebook and YouTube monetised themselves by turning us – their consumers – into the product, harvesting our attention and revealing data, siphoning up the ad revenue which once had funded legacy media. 

As their rivals for news diminished, those same social media companies became political players themselves. They could influence Congress and other non-US law-makers with vast lobbying operations. And they weren’t just any other industry. 

In Elon Musk’s words, these platforms became the ‘media’. They could directly target voters, profiling their likes and liabilities, and then inundate them with the most effective messages at mass. 

So the stage was set for the next evolution of Big Tech – the full Matrix. Not only do these tech monopolies covertly feed off our data for energy and finance, they play back to us a tailored reality to disguise their real role. 

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Cassandra and the Matrix

Only a few foresaw this fusion between Big Tech and full-blown oligarchical rule. 

Those who did were often shouted down, ignored, or simply suppressed. This was a big win for Big Tech at the time, aided by battalions of lawyers and supine journalists. And now we are reaping the whirlwind. 

After her exposé in the Observer, which led to the shutting down of Cambridge Analytica in 2018, Carole Cadwalladr went straight into the belly of the beast and challenged ‘the gods of Silicon Valley’ over the dangers of Big Tech.

In a TED talk delivered to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Oracle’s Larry Page, Google’s Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Cadwalladr depicted in vivid and urgent terms the “profound threat” to democracy when “a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology”.

For all her pains, Cadwalladr suffered severely from this prescient Cassandra-like warning. 

A one-liner aside in the TED talk, referring to the Leave.EU campaign funder Arron Banks and his multiple undisclosed visits to the Russian Embassy, led to a costly and time-consuming defamation lawsuit that she had to defend on her own. Even though she had co-written these articles with me and they were published in the Guardian and Observer , neither I nor the newspapers were sued. Thanks to a judge’s ruling, her case had to rely on an inference that she meant that Banks had actually received Russian funding – a meaning she never intended and has regularly disavowed. 

In this Kafkaesque manner, one of the clearest and most important voices about the danger to democracy from the ‘broligarchy’ was silenced for more than two years.  

In the meantime, both the Kremlin and the ‘tech bros’ got busy. As revealed previously in these pages, Russia’s social media campaigns have evolved dramatically from the clunky techniques of the St Petersburg troll farm and Nalobin’s ‘digital barbecues’. 

Funnelled through social media agencies, Putin’s presidential office directly supervises ‘doppelgänger’ sites that look like official Western news agencies and pump out disinformation, according to a 2024 FBI warrant. 

The same warrant alleged that Russia has identified 2,000 social media influencers for its mission, with a further indictment identifying $10 million paid by RT to a handful of American and Canadian online commentators through a UK shell company. 

And then there’s the biggest Matrix engine of them all: Elon Musk’s X. 

Not only does his platform allow him to harvest data from 600 million users, he can train his artificial intelligence tech to analyse the most effective memes and themes – just as Cambridge Analytica did with hacked Facebook user profiles. Even better, Musk’s virtual reality can immediately replay back to users that machine-learned propaganda – like the Cambridge Analytica spin-off AggregateIQ once did – promoting and paying the relevant ads and influencers, and tweaking the algorithm to spread disinformation at scale. 

In my 2012 book, The Fall of the House of Murdoch, I warned that the looming tech monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple would make Murdoch’s monopolies look like small fry.

“The News Corp story is a historic object lesson in the combined abuse of economic and political power,” I wrote. “As new media monopolies – from Facebook and Google to Amazon – form before our eyes, the lesson it provides is even more salutary for the future.”

A decade or more on and Murdoch’s Newscorp is valued at $16 billion – while Musk burned at least double that amount by purchasing Twitter, the foremost journalists’ social media platform in the world. Musk has already recouped that outlay with a $100 billion rise in the value of his shares and could buy out many Murdochs. 

But, unlike Murdoch, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX doesn’t even pretend to believe in Thatcherite competition or free markets. Musk is a self-declared monopolist who happily inserts himself into government contracts and solicits state support to further both his commercial and ideological interests. 

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Donald Trump’s re-election, Musk is now a senior member of his second administration. He has weaponised social media to an unprecedented degree, combining information warfare with global political clout. And a lot of his inspiration comes from the Russian President. 

We know that Musk deliberately suppressed Ukrainian-based accounts and promoted Russian-funded propaganda on his platform. If his negative attitude towards President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian resistance wasn’t clear enough from his posts, The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Musk was in regular conversation with Putin. 

So, to use a handy analogy from Lord of the Rings, Musk has become a kind of digital necromancer, like the white wizard Saruman, using his privileged position in the West to channel the dark autocracy of Sauron in his Kremlin towers to the east. (Perhaps, as in Tolkien’s epic, Musk deploys an all-seeing ‘Palantir’ courtesy of his tech ally and fellow South African Peter Thiel – whose surveillance company shares that name). 

This all may feel like some far-fetched fantasy, but virtually every day the richest man in the world can be found targeting European democracies with his baleful eye; promoting the far-right AfD party in Germany; trolling the British Labour Government with Islamophobic lies and distortions about ‘grooming gangs’. And the consequences of Musk’s scorching worldview are real, immediate, and by no means fictional.

Elon Musk

X was a major vehicle of the disinformation that fomented the anti-refugee and Islamophobic violence which exploded in our cities last summer and Musk has defended the rioters – baselessly claiming that civil war is “inevitable” in the UK because of its tolerance towards migrants and different religious backgrounds – and questioning why the far-right activist who did much to whip up the hate, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) is in prison (he was convicted under contempt of court laws last year).

Now, Musk seeks to institutionalise his threat to our multicultural society and its rule of law by attempting to extend his funding directly to a political party. 

Reform UK’s Leader Nigel Farage recently met with Musk and, according to the Financial Times, its treasurer Nick Candy said that Musk is among several billionaires ready to raise more funds than “any other political party” to create “political disruption like we have never seen before” in Britain.

Farage’s old friend, Steve Bannon – fresh out of federal prison – concurs. Though he has ideological disagreements with Musk about immigration, Bannon recently declared that “money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics” and celebrated the fact that Musk “can deploy both at an unprecedented scale”. 

“There’s not a centrist left-wing government in Europe that will be able to withstand that onslaught”, Bannon recently told Bloomberg

As the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, Bannon knows what he is talking about. He was there at the beginning of this dark chapter of disinformation, recruiting British conservatives to the value of big data and online campaigning as far back as 2013 at a conference in Cambridge. And the Brexit connections keep on giving. 

According to the Daily Mail, Musk is being advised on his UK targeting by none other than Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to Boris Johnson, who has for long evinced an admiration of tech ‘disruption’ and who, as campaign director of Vote Leave, used AggregateIQ to target voters with Islamophobic messages during the EU Referendum – just as Farage’s Leave.EU campaign did, boosted by RT and the Russian Embassy. 

‘It is not just Elon,” the Mail claims from a source, “Dom is in constant contact with major Silicon Valley figures, who are becoming increasingly anti-woke”. 

On his blog, Cummings himself has confessed that “something approaching [Carole] Cadwalladr’s worst nightmare — that she thought happened in 2016 but did not — is now technically feasible: effective automated personalised communication at scale.”

The facts of history are now hard to hide and deny. There has been a decade-long war against ‘one person, one vote’, and the concept of a transparent media to inform our citizenry. If we are ever to protect our democracies from this synergy of autocracy and tech, we will have to unravel these alliances of money and information and their traffic of hatred and falsehood. 

But before we can fight the Matrix, we have to wake up from it. Only then, to combat the combined forces of Putin and Musk, can we build a fellowship with other people and other cultures to withstand the “onslaught” that awaits us.

Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring is available to listen to now


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