DFRLab: a look back at 2024
Revisiting key milestones in DFRLab publishing over the last calendar year
DFRLab: a look back at 2024
Banner: A pro-democracy protester stands outside the Georgian parliament building in Tbilisi, December 16, 2024. (Photo by Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect)
We’ve somehow reached the end of another tumultuous, volatile year in which the world has struggled with multiple ongoing conflicts, democratic backsliding, and an innumerable number of influence operations. At the DFRLab, our team of researchers on five continents have kept close watch on the global information environment, persevering to understand how online harms are weaponized against democracy and society in general.
While it’s impossible to incapsulate a year in which we published scores of case studies, monitoring reports and investigations, it’s important to look back to help anticipate the future. Among some of the more notable moments of 2024:
The year of elections
Over the course of 2024, dozens of countries held national elections under varying levels of safety, interference and accountability. In the US, the 2024 presidential election was marred with multiple instances of foreign interference documented by federal agencies, as well as by the OSINT research community. At the DFRLab, we were particularly interested in instances of alleged foreign interferences as well as the allegations themselves, which is why we created FIAT 2024, an interactive tracking tool to help online audiences understand who was making the accusations against which countries and what evidence they had to back them up. To date, we’ve documented more than 75 allegations of foreign interference targeting the US election, and we’re continuing to add new cases to the database. We even identified one instance of a Chinese operation amplifying a Russian operation targeting the US, a dynamic we intend to continue monitoring in the months and years ahead.
With a team spread out across Europe from Spain to Georgia, we paid particular attention to major elections across the continent. This included highly contested elections in Moldova, Georgia and Romania. Moldova pulled off a pro-Western win, despite enormous influence efforts by Russia, while Georgia veered away from democracy into the direction of the Kremlin, with an election marred by influence operations by both the ruling party and Russia itself. And in Romania, the sudden rise of an unknown candidate on TikTok was precipitated by a well-organized Telegram campaign.
There was also much speculation that AI would play a serious role undermining elections around the world. To date, this has been overstated. While we observed multiple cases across Europe, in South Africa and in Brazil, they didn’t move the needle in ways that some election observers feared.
War in the Middle East
The Middle East conflict continued to metastasize, with Israel’s targeting of Gaza extending into Lebanon, as well as direct but brief conflict between Israel and Iran. While the conflict played out in the real world throughout 2024 leading to tens of thousands dead in Gaza and thousands more in Lebanon, other aspects of the war could be seen taking place online. In Lebanon, Hezbollah conducted a smear campaign to undermine independent Lebanese journalists while also fighting a propaganda war with its videos of its drone air force; Palestinian militants also capitalized on online video as part of its own propaganda strategy. Israel, meanwhile, was caught for the very first time running an inauthentic information operation against the United States. The DFRLab and other open source researchers documented a network of suspicious X accounts targeting US politicians with messages undermining the UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA. Meta and OpenAI ultimately traced these to an Israeli digital comms firm, while the New York Times uncovered payments from the Israeli government to the firm for running that campaign.
Ukraine continues to persevere
Despite all efforts by Russia to crush Ukraine, the country continues to fight against Kremlin forces and their allies. At the start of the year, we released the report Beehive vs. Mammoth, a review of Ukraine’s decade-long work to build information resilience in the country. Later, we released Undermining Ukraine, a global overview of Russian influence operations seeking to destroy Ukraine’s willingness to fight, and Another battlefield: Telegram as a digital front in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which looked at the Russian Telegram ecosystem and the role it plays in the war.
Too much to contain in a single roundup
Of course, this barely scratches the surface of the work that took place at the DFRLab. We examined how the Maduro regime weaponizes apps against dissidents, while Russia undermined the West’s reputation in Africa through propagandized video games. We looked at Doppelganger, the Russian fake website operation that frustrated officials and consumed enormous energy of the research community. And we documented China’s efforts to target Taiwan and Japan with pro-Chinese, anti-Western narratives. Unfortunately, 2025 appears to be just as volatile a year as 2024, if not more so, but the DFRLab will be there to hold malign actors accountable and expose how they employ a multitude of online harms to undermine democracy, civil society, and independent media.
Cite this post:
Andy Carvin, “DFRLab: a look back at 2024,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), January 6, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2025/01/06/dfrlab-a-look-back-at-2024/.