Letters from an American: September 6, 2024

One of the things that came to light on Wednesday, in the paperwork the Justice Department unveiled to explain its seizure of 32 internet domains being used by Russian agents in foreign malign influence campaigns, was that the six right-wing U.S. influencers mentioned in the indictments of the Russian operatives are only the tip of the iceberg.

Since at least 2022, three Russian companies working with the Kremlin have been trying to change foreign politics in a campaign they called “Doppelganger,” covertly spreading Russian government propaganda. “[F]irst and foremost,” notes from a meeting with Russian officials about targeting Germany read, “we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain, and NATO.” Through fake social media profiles, their operatives posed as Americans or other non-Russians, seeding public conversations with Russian propaganda.

In August 2023 they launched the “Good Old USA Project” to target swing-state residents, online gamers, American Jews, and “US citizens of Hispanic descent” to reelect Donald Trump. ​​"They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” one of the propagandists wrote. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Using targeted ads on Facebook, they could see how their material was landing and use bots and trolls to push their narrative in comment sections.

“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the propagandists told their staff. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”

According to the documents, one of the three companies, Social Design Agency (SDA), monitors and collects information about media organizations and social media influencers. It collected a list of 1,900 “anti-influencers,” whose accounts posted material SDA workers thought operated against Russian interests. About 26% of those accounts were based in the U.S.

SDA also identified as pro-Russian influencers more than 2,800 people in 81 countries operating on various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram. Those influencers included “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” About 21% of those influencers were in the U.S.

Australia’s first genetically modified fruit is ripe for a taste test. Could it avert a global banana apocalypse?

When two biotechnologists fly from Brisbane to Darwin on Saturday, they will drive the Kakadu road to Humpty Doo and eat what has the potential to become one of the more consequential mouthfuls of banana in the history of the planet’s most popular fruit.

Whoever bites first will not only become the first person to taste a genetically modified fruit grown in Australia, they shall have the first taste of the first GM banana approved for commercial production anywhere in the world.

The banana in question, dubbed QCAV-4, was granted final approval for human consumption by the Australian government in April. But at that time none of the 47 GM Cavendish banana plants produced by the Queensland University of Technology’s banana biotechnology program were bearing fruit.

The trial plantation near Humpty Doo is the result of 20 years of research and has borne bunches consistently over the last seven years. A team led by Prof James Dale regularly handled them – but they couldn’t risk so much as a nibble until regulators gave the green light.

“[QCAV-4] is a Cavendish,” Dale says. “The bananas look the same, they feel the same, they peel the same, they smell the same and, we’re 99.99% sure, they are going to taste exactly the same.

“It’s just that we haven’t been able to eat them.”

The reason Dale can be supremely confident that the QCAV-4’s flavour is identical to the Cavendish banana – which accounts for 97% of bananas grown in Australia and 99% of those exported in the world – is because his team has only removed a single gene from the 25,000 genes in a wild species of banana and inserted it into the chromosome of the Cavendish.

“And the gene that we put in has nothing to do with fruit quality at all,” Dale says.

Instead, the gene in question’s qualities relate to disease resistance.