Note that our government has been silencing those that try to track the bot farms and Troll factories that are undermining our democracy...

What follows is an AI generated summary of organizations that monitor state-sponsored influence campaigns-Arrell

Who's watching the trolls? A guide to influence-campaign trackers, and the American ones that went dark

Someone asked recently whether anyone still tracks Russian (and Chinese, and Iranian) influence campaigns on social media. Yes, plenty of people do. But almost all of them are now outside the US government, and many are outside the US altogether. Below is a list of the useful ones, followed by a timeline of the American programs that closed between mid-2024 and late 2025. Links throughout so you can check everything yourself.

PART 1: Who's tracking influence ops now

Independent research groups

• DFRLab (Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab): probably the best open-source investigators in this field. They write detailed case studies and show their evidence: account networks, domain records, and timing analysis.
• EUvsDisinfo database: run by the EU's diplomatic service. A searchable archive of more than 17,000 pro-Kremlin disinformation cases going back to 2015, each with a source and a rebuttal.
• Hamilton 2.0 dashboard (Alliance for Securing Democracy, German Marshall Fund): tracks what Russian, Chinese and Iranian state media and diplomats push on X, Telegram, YouTube, TikTok and their own websites. It follows openly state-run accounts only, so it shows you the official line, not covert networks. (Its 2017 predecessor, Hamilton 68, was fairly criticized for keeping its account list secret. The current version fixed that by tracking only acknowledged state accounts.)
• ISD (Institute for Strategic Dialogue): covers elections, extremism and state-backed campaigns, mostly in Europe and the US.
• Graphika: a network-mapping firm. It named and documented the Chinese "Spamouflage" operation, among others.
• NewsGuard: tracks the "Pravda" network of hundreds of automated websites that appear built to flood search engines and AI training data with Kremlin content. NewsGuard also tests how often chatbots repeat it.
• Clemson University Media Forensics Hub: did much of the early public work on Storm-1516, the Russian operation that produces staged "whistleblower" videos and fake local news sites.
• CheckFirst: a Finnish group that documented "Operation Overload," a Russian campaign that emails fake content to fact-checkers and newsrooms to tie them up.
• Recorded Future (Insikt Group): a threat-intelligence firm. It tracks "CopyCop," a network of AI-rewritten fake news sites.
• Bellingcat: open-source investigators. They don't track influence campaigns specifically, but their work often turns them up.
• University of Washington Center for an Informed Public: still operating. It co-ran the Election Integrity Partnership with Stanford (see Part 2).

The platforms' own reports

These companies can see internal data that outside researchers can't, such as account registration details, payment trails and device links. When they attribute a network to a government, it carries weight.

• Meta Adversarial Threat Reports: quarterly reports on networks Meta has taken down.
• Google Threat Analysis Group bulletins: lists of YouTube and other channels removed for coordinated influence activity.
• Microsoft Threat Intelligence: home of MTAC (Microsoft Threat Analysis Center), which first labeled Storm-1516.
• OpenAI threat reports: covers state-linked operations caught using its models to write propaganda.

European government bodies

• VIGINUM (France's agency against foreign digital interference): published the most thorough public analyses of "Doppelgänger" (cloned copies of Le Monde, Der Spiegel and other outlets) and of "Portal Kombat," the network that became the Pravda sites.
• EDMO (European Digital Media Observatory): a network of European fact-checking and research hubs.
• StopFake: a Ukrainian site that has been debunking Kremlin narratives since 2014.

A word of caution

The good reports publish their evidence: account lists, domain registration records, timing patterns. Be wary of any report that labels accounts "Russian" without showing why. Also, how big a campaign is matters less than how many real people it reached. Doppelgänger, for example, was huge but got little real engagement. The hardest question in this field is usually not "did Russia try?" but "did anyone notice?"

PART 2: The American shutdowns, and when they happened

Here they are in chronological order. The timing is the story.

1. Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO): wound down, June 2024

SIO was founded in 2019 by Alex Stamos, Facebook's former security chief. With the University of Washington, it co-founded the Election Integrity Partnership (2020 and 2022 elections), and it also ran the Virality Project on COVID misinformation. Beginning in 2023 it came under heavy pressure. The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed its records. America First Legal, the group founded by Stephen Miller, sued it in Louisiana in May 2023 (Hines v. Stamos) on behalf of plaintiffs including Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft. The core accusation was that the projects were a government-coordinated censorship operation aimed at conservatives. Stamos left in November 2023. In June 2024, Renée DiResta's contract was not renewed and most staff were let go. Stanford said the founding grants had run out, but most observers saw the lawsuit and subpoena costs as the real reason.
• Platformer: "The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled"
• NPR via WFAE, June 14, 2024
• Tech Policy Press on what it means for the field
• NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, critical view
• National Review, the House GOP view
• Wikipedia overview
Postscript: on July 1, 2026, Judge Terry Doughty dismissed Hines v. Stamos in full. This is the same judge who had earlier ruled for the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. He found no standing, and after discovery no evidence that the researchers had coerced platforms. The researchers won in court, but the observatory was already gone. (DiResta's account, written by a defendant, so weigh it accordingly. Volokh's write-up of the earlier 2024 ruling lets the case go forward.)

Legal background: Murthy v. Missouri, June 26, 2024

Much of the political case against these programs came from Missouri v. Biden, renamed Murthy v. Missouri at the Supreme Court. The lawsuit claimed the federal government had pressured platforms into censoring Americans. The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the plaintiffs lacked standing and never decided the underlying censorship claim. Both sides claimed vindication, and the political fight went on as if the ruling had settled nothing, which in a sense it hadn't.
• National Constitution Center summary
• EPIC on the standing ruling
• Tech Policy Press, critical of the plaintiffs' theory

2. State Department Global Engagement Center (GEC): closed December 23, 2024

The GEC was created by Executive Order 13721 in March 2016, and the FY2017 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) expanded its mission to cover Russian and other state propaganda. Its legal authority had a built-in expiration date. Proposals to extend it to 2031 were dropped from the FY2025 NDAA. On December 17, 2024, Rep. Tom Cole tried to add a one-year extension to the stopgap funding bill, but that version died during the Musk/Trump-driven fight over the continuing resolution. The bill that passed on December 21 left it out, and the GEC's authority expired two days later. Critics, including Musk and several conservative outlets, had attacked it for funding groups (such as the Global Disinformation Index) that rated American news sites, a line of argument that was in fact the subject of a lawsuit from The Daily Wire and The Federalist. Note the timing: this was a lame-duck Congress, not the new administration.
• Congressional Research Service: "Termination of the State Department's Global Engagement Center" (the best primary source on the legal mechanics)
• CyberScoop: office to close after funding nixed in NDAA
• Alethea on the closure
• Foreign Service Journal, March 2025
• Wikipedia overview

3. CISA's disinformation and election-security staff: placed on leave, February 2025

CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Around February 6–7, 2025, staff on its MDM (mis-, dis- and malinformation) team, plus some election-security staff, were put on administrative leave. Context: CISA's budget is about $3 billion, and a former official testified that its disinformation work cost "something less than $2 million."
• CyberScoop, February 10, 2025
• AP via News4Jax: "US cyber agency puts election security staffers who worked with the states on leave"
• CNN, as republished by Sen. Padilla: state officials alarmed (a partisan source)

4. FBI Foreign Influence Task Force: disbanded February 5, 2025

The task force was created in 2017 after the Russian interference in 2016. Attorney General Pam Bondi's first-day memos disbanded it "to free resources to address more pressing priorities" and to end "risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion." The same memo narrowed criminal enforcement of FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act) to conduct "similar to more traditional espionage."
• CyberScoop, February 6, 2025
• NBC: "Bondi ends FBI effort to combat foreign influence in US politics"
• AP via Washington Times, February 16, 2025: what dismantling election-interference monitoring means

5. EI-ISAC funding cut: March 3, 2025

The EI-ISAC (Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center) was the main channel for sharing threat information between federal agencies and thousands of state and local election offices. CISA told election officials it was ending all of its funding as part of a $10 million cut to the Center for Internet Security, calling the work "duplicative."
• Votebeat, March 13, 2025
• BankInfoSecurity: "CISA defunds threat-sharing hubs for states and elections"
• Spotlight PA: Pennsylvania's Republican elections chief reacts

6. State Department R/FIMI (the GEC's successor): eliminated April 16, 2025

After the GEC closed, its remaining work was reorganized as the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, known as R/FIMI. By April it was down to about 40 staff (from about 125 at the GEC) on a $51.9 million budget. Acting Undersecretary Darren Beattie called the staff into a meeting and told them the office was gone. Rubio announced it in The Federalist, "abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center," and said on Mike Benz's show: "We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department." Rubio also floated releasing R/FIMI's files. In September 2025, Senators Shaheen and Murphy wrote to him warning that releasing them could expose staff and foreign partners to harassment.
• MIT Technology Review, April 16, 2025 (the scoop)
• AP via Inforum: State Department closing the office
• Tech Policy Press: "The downfall of the Global Engagement Center"
• ASIS Security Management
• Reclaim The Net, supportive of the closure (worth reading for the other side's case)

7. NSF misinformation research grants: cancelled, April 2025

DOGE and NSF (the National Science Foundation) cancelled about 400 grants, many of them in misinformation and disinformation research. NSF said it would no longer fund work that "could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights" of Americans. This cut off a lot of the university-side funding that had supported groups like SIO.
• Nieman Lab
• Nextgov, April 22, 2025
• Eos (AGU)

8. ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center: dissolved, announced August 20, 2025

ODNI is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As part of Tulsi Gabbard's "ODNI 2.0" plan to cut its staff by about half, the Foreign Malign Influence Center was dissolved and its functions folded into other offices. The center had been created by Congress in 2022 and was the intelligence community's central office for foreign election-interference warnings. Sen. Cotton praised the cut as a return to ODNI's "original size, scope, and mission." Sen. Warner said he had "no confidence" in Gabbard to carry it out.
• ABC News
• Straight Arrow News
• The Debrief

PART 3: Reading the timing

Some observations, offered for argument:

It started before Trump took office. SIO's collapse (2023–24) came from lawsuits, subpoenas and donor fatigue. The GEC died through a lame-duck NDAA and a messy stopgap bill. Trump's administration finished the job, but Congress and private litigation got there first. Anyone who says "Trump killed the disinformation watchdogs" is telling half the story. So is anyone who says "it was just budget housekeeping."

Once it started, it moved fast. In 2025: FBI task force on February 5, CISA staff on February 6–7, EI-ISAC on March 3, R/FIMI on April 16, NSF grants in April, ODNI's center announced August 20. That's about six and a half months to take apart nearly every federal office whose job was to spot foreign influence operations and warn the public, platforms or election officials.

The stated reason was domestic speech; the casualties were foreign-facing. The case for closing them was real, not invented. Murthy v. Missouri, the Twitter Files, and grants to groups that rated US news outlets all gave fair grounds to worry about the government leaning on platforms over Americans' speech. But the GEC and R/FIMI had foreign-facing mandates, the FBI task force went after foreign agents, and ODNI's center was intelligence on foreign actors. You can believe the domestic-censorship concerns were legitimate and still think closing the foreign-facing offices was the wrong fix. Narrowing their mandates would have addressed the concern without losing the capability.

The midterms come right after. All of this happened in the off-year between the 2024 and 2026 elections. The Brennan Center (July 2, 2026) notes that Gabbard's March 2026 worldwide-threats testimony didn't mention foreign election threats at all, that ODNI named its election-threats executive only in May 2026, and that states are now largely on their own. In July 2026, a bipartisan House letter led by Rep. Deborah Ross asked DOJ and CISA to assess whether Russian tactics used in Moldova and Armenia (deepfakes, AI-generated content, cyberattacks) could hit the November 2026 midterms. (The Brennan Center leans left, so weigh it accordingly. But the facts it cites about the testimony and appointment dates can be checked.)

What fills the gap? Look at Part 1: Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, plus European government agencies (VIGINUM, the EU's diplomatic service), plus a few NGOs and universities, several of them now short on money. So for the 2026 midterms, the most detailed public reporting on Russian operations aimed at American voters will probably come from Paris and Brussels, and from tech companies, not Washington. Make of that what you will.

Corrections welcome. Every claim above has a link, so go pull the thread.