Report: Two layers of fog – Anonymous Norwegian websites linking to Russian-affiliated domains

The Russian disinformation and propaganda ecosystem consists of an unknown number of ‘news’ websites in multiple languages. While some are officially Russian, such as RT and Sputnik News, the majority hide their Kremlin affiliation. We call those ‘proxy sites’. Our database includes 80 official and 2606 proxy sites.

In this report, we refer to them collectively as ‘Russian-affiliated domains’. This exploratory study examines whether there are anonymous Norwegian websites that share links to the 2686 Russian-affiliated domains in our database. We consider websites to be anonymous if they do not provide truthful or verifiable information about the website’s owner or authors. This may be an indicator of covert influence activity targeting a Norwegian audience and thus enable us to identify Russian-affiliated proxy sites in Norwegian.