How I Became a Target of the Russian Disinformation Machine—And the GOP

The following is an excerpt from best-selling author Steven Brill’s The Death of Truth, to be published on June 4, in which Brill draws in part on his experience as the cofounder of NewsGuard to explain the forces that have created a chaotic, polarized world in which the truth—the shared belief in basic facts—that allows democracies and civil society to function has been so severely eroded. NewsGuard rates the reliability of websites and associated online media and has covered everything from healthcare hoaxes to Russian disinformation campaigns.

In early 2023, NewsGuard reported on a documentary produced by the FSB Russian security service and carried on its YouTube-affiliated channels in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The completely fake documentary depicted a lab run by the United States in Ukraine that was producing bioweapons to be targeted at Russia.

The fake Russian FSB bioweapons claim had not received much attention initially when it was posted in December 2021 on the YouTube account of someone named John Dougan. However, the “report” about the supposed weapons lab, pre-positioned online three months before the Russian invasion, was then cited by Russian officials in explaining to their countrymen and the world the urgent need for the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. When NewsGuard reported a year later that YouTube had never taken down videos pushing Russian propaganda, despite its promises when the war started to do so, YouTube finally removed those that NewsGuard had listed, including the bioweapons lab video. Dougan and the Russian FSB security service were apparently not pleased. They launched a series of threats against me directed at my home in New York.

On Friday, March 10, 2023, a thirty-one-minute video was posted on YouTube with the headline “US Govt Using 3rd Parties to Censor Free Speech and Spread Disinformation!” Reading from a teleprompter and sitting in front of a backdrop showing photos of what appeared to be scenes of war-caused carnage, the narrator, Dougan, began by accusing the U.S. government of spreading massive amounts of disinformation. Speaking calmly, with a plain American accent, and clearly at ease using the teleprompter, he then explained that a new enemy was assisting the American government in its disinformation campaigns.

“With the advent of social media,” he said, “it’s becoming harder for the US government to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people, and so they need a mechanism to quash dissenting opinions and the presentation of facts. . . . They are pressuring social media companies to engage in egregious acts of censorship.”

One of the government’s weapons for applying that pressure, Dougan declared, was NewsGuard—“a company that is . . . engaged in a smear campaign against me and fellow YouTuber Mike Jones, pressuring YouTube to have our content removed.”

That content, he explained, included “revelations” in a recent video report that he and Jones had done featuring what he said was an undercover “walk-through” of a bioweapons lab in Ukraine financed by American pharmaceutical companies. “Yes, we were there,” he said. He also talked about “my October 4 revelations” that he had filmed of “American navy divers seen under very suspicious circumstances” in the North Sea just before the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up. And he reminded viewers of a third report he had done in December 2020 purporting to document the U.S.-run bioweapons labs in Ukraine. That video, he said, showed his journalism skills because he was “ahead of the curve” in reporting what the Russians only revealed four months later when, citing Dougan’s earlier YouTube documentary, the Kremlin used the weapons lab as a key rationale for invading Ukraine.

In other words, Dougan’s trailblazing, independent journalism—achieved, he said, because “we are in a position to travel to places where other Western journalists refused to go and where they refuse to report on”—had informed Russia and the world about the bioweapons threat in Ukraine.

Contrary to Dougan’s claim, NewsGuard was not acting on behalf of the U.S. government, nor had it pressured YouTube to do anything. But NewsGuard had issued that report nineteen days before Dougan taped this YouTube video. It was headlined, “Full-length Russian propaganda films justifying the war proliferate on YouTube, despite the platform’s ban on Russian state-funded media.” The report revealed that since the Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun a year earlier, the Russian propaganda outlet RT had produced fifty films spreading disinformation on “more than 100” YouTube channels about Ukraine and the war. The films included false reports that Ukraine committed genocide against Russian speakers in Ukraine’s Donbas region, that Western sanctions against Russia following the invasion have had little effect on Russia’s economy while devastating the economies of Western countries, and that “Nazism” is rampant in Ukraine. These were elaborately produced videos, billed as documentaries.

More important, the NewsGuard report explained how these pseudo documentaries had managed to evade YouTube’s ostensible ban on RT propaganda: RT had paid for them to be produced but was allowing them to be rebranded and posted on YouTube channels—including many whose accounts were listed as belonging to an American, John Dougan. NewsGuard proved that by finding that the Dougan videos were identical to videos that had first been posted on RT before YouTube banned the RT versions.

Within days of NewsGuard issuing its report, most of Dougan’s RT-financed videos were taken down, including the December 2020 “documentary” about bioweapons labs in Ukraine. It was about two weeks after that that Dougan posted his video about NewsGuard.

“NewsGuard is owned by a man by the name of Steven Shill, excuse me, Steven Brill,” Dougan’s YouTube video continued. “Brill is a far left-leaning Democrat that owns a sprawling . . . estate right down the road from the Clinton crime family in Westchester County, New York.” At that moment a camera shot showing an aerial view of my home appeared.

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Dougan then produced what he said was proof that I was working for the government. He played portions of a tape-recorded phone call in which someone had called me, identified himself as an FBI agent, and asked for my cooperation in an investigation the bureau was conducting into Russian disinformation on YouTube. In the recording, I responded, “We’d be delighted to help.”

As I watched Dougan that Friday morning on YouTube play the recording, I now realized what a strange, unsettling phone call that I had received two weeks earlier had really been about. On Friday, February 24, someone had called my unlisted home phone just before 7:00 a.m. and identified himself, with a name that was garbled, as being “with the bureau.” When I asked, “What bureau?” he had hesitated, then answered, “The Washington bureau of the FBI. . . . We’re investigating reports of Russian videos on YouTube, and we would like to come see you.” I was immediately suspicious, both because of his hesitation initially to say he was with the FBI (impersonating an FBI agent is a crime) and because it seemed that agents wouldn’t call someone at home so early to make an appointment; if the matter was that urgent, they would just show up. So I told him to put the request in writing and email it to me at my office and, “if appropriate,” we would be delighted to help, whereupon I gave him my office email address. In his telling on YouTube, Dougan made much of the fact that I gave the supposed agent my “personal company email address.”

He said it was evidence of my eagerness to cooperate. In fact, my email is listed prominently on NewsGuard’s website. In much of the rest of the video he talked about my wife and one of my daughters. I had occasionally received death threats via the NewsGuard website contact email or on the office telephones, as had many of my colleagues, which had required us to add some extra security protocols at our office. This call—a man with a muffled voice calling on my unlisted home number saying he wanted to come see me—seemed much more serious. Within hours I was in contact with agents from an FBI counterterrorism unit, and they immediately opened a case.

That the caller had identified himself as an FBI agent especially interested them. At their request, we culled through emails and voicemail messages to me and the rest of the staff separating out the threats (“We know where your office is and you will all die soon”) from simple name-calling and sent the whole batch to the bureau. They began tracking down the senders of the death threats. At the same time, they put in motion a process to get my home phone records from the phone company so they could track down that call impersonating an agent.

Four days later, on February 28, my wife was shaken when she played back a voicemail recording of a message left for me on our home phone by what seemed to be the same person. This time, after again mentioning my daughter, he dropped the FBI pose and said he knew “everything about you guys,” accused me of “selling out your country,” and said that “when you die, and it won’t be long, you’re getting close to that age, people will realize exactly what you were.” We sent the FBI an audio file of the recording.

Ten days later, on the morning I saw the Dougan YouTube video with the aerial shot of my home, I sent it to the lead FBI agent on our case. She called immediately to say that she had been about to call that morning to tell me that they had traced back the two phone calls. They had been from the same person. The man at the other end of the phone both times had been John Dougan, who was in Moscow.

In further briefings, I learned that Dougan, a former marine, had been an officer in the Sheriff ’s Department in Palm Beach County, Florida, until 2016, when he fled to Russia and was granted asylum after being targeted in a computer hacking scheme. Since then, I was told, he had become well known to the FBI and, as they put it, “our sister security agencies” as a Russian operative who specialized in producing some of the Russians’ most elaborate disinformation campaigns and narrating them as if he were an independent American journalist. Relatedly, it appeared that the aerial video of my home in Dougan’s video was not a simple Google satellite shot. Instead, it had probably been taken by a drone that someone had hired. [Note: In a subsequent conversation with NewsGuard, Dougan denied he had hired a drone for this aerial shot.] I was also told that those same sister agencies reported that Dougan was still in Russia.

“So he poses no imminent threat to you,” the lead agent on the case said. But he knows where I live and the Russians must have people all over the United States, I said. And he must have followers here on his YouTube channel that could act on their own. The FBI agents agreed. This was more serious than a few random crank emails. In a meeting a few days later with three agents and my wife sitting at our dining room table, we agreed on a multifaceted security plan to be implemented by a private security company.

I now live in a home surrounded by twelve motion-detecting security cameras, monitored remotely by the security service, and filled with dead-bolt window and door locks and other reminders of Dougan’s video—which produced multiple new death threats, but never anything that the FBI, which has continued to stay on the case, has tracked to anyone or anything posing what they consider a substantive threat. One caller “has made dozens of calls like this,” one agent told me. “You’re on quite a list. He’s got mental health issues, and apparently has a few drinks every night and sits down and calls someone new. He doesn’t live anywhere near you,” he added, “and we talked to him. He is not much of a threat.”

Some of the rest of Dougan’s video is worth reviewing because, given that the FBI had identified him as a Russian agent, it illustrates the kinds of sweeping conspiracy theories the Kremlin specializes in promoting. After he noted that I lived “right down the road from the Clinton crime family” (the Clintons are about ten miles away), here’s how this American fugitive turned Russian disinformation operative connected the dots for his followers:

Brill went to Yale like a lot of other high-profile war hawks, liars, and disinformation perpetuators and general deep state assholes, like both of the Bushes, Hillary and Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Hunter Biden, [the Russian dissident] Alex Navalny, Janet Yellen, Dick Cheney, Steve Mnuchin, and John Bolton, not to mention his own wife went to Yale. Now, what most people don’t realize is that Yale happens to be a primary CIA recruiting ground for the deep state assholes, and like all dirty assholes they love to stick together.

At least it was comforting to know that state actors working for one of our primary adversaries were peddling conspiracies that were crazy beyond what anyone in our government would ever believe or try to push.

Or so I thought until a few hours later on the same day that we discovered Dougan’s YouTube rant. At about 2:30 p.m., as my wife and I were still digesting Dougan’s Russian-made YouTube video accusing me and my company of censoring speech at the behest of the U.S. government, our general counsel received an email from Jim Jordan, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, declaring,

The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and the extent to which the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech. Certain third parties, including organizations like yours, may have played a role in this censorship regime by advising on so-called “misinformation” and other types of content—sometimes with direct or indirect support or approval from the federal government. Whether directly or indirectly, a government-approved or -facilitated censorship regime is a grave threat to the First Amendment and American civil liberties.

The House Judiciary Committee, which I remembered as the somber panel that had made history with its bipartisan vote to begin impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, was accusing NewsGuard of the same thing that the Russian disinformation apparatus had just accused us of, and on the same day.

Chairman Jordan’s letter had come after his committee had held a hearing in which the star witnesses were two journalists turned advocates, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. They had used electronic files of communications between government officials and Twitter staff given to them by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, to make the case that a “censorship-industrial complex” of nonprofits, cybersecurity companies, and media reliability assessors like us were being paid by the government to help censor conservative content on social media platforms by pressuring the platforms to remove it. Although objective, third-party studies had found that, if anything, the social media platforms gave conservatives a disproportionate voice, Taibbi and Shellenberger were able to cherry-pick emails and other documents that Musk provided them to make the case that the government had colluded with the social media platforms to suppress conservatives.

None of this had anything to do with NewsGuard because (1) none of the major social media companies used NewsGuard; (2) we advocate not for blocking anything but, rather, for the platforms to give users information about the reliability of those publishing what the platforms are feeding their users; and (3) we had no contracts with the government to provide our ratings of websites. Nonetheless, Shellenberger and Taibbi named my company as part of their censorship-industrial complex, and after the hearing in which they appeared, one committee member, Matt Gaetz of Florida had said, “If we do not take a look at NewsGuard, we have failed.”

Chairman Jordan’s letter requested that we provide the committee with copies of every letter, email, memo, or text message that we had used to communicate internally or with government officials or any technology company or social media platform “referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, demonetization, or reduced circulation of content.”

In effect, the committee was asking for pretty much every document or message NewsGuard had created since its inception. Beyond the First Amendment issues related to a unit of the government examining our journalist-analysts’ communications in the course of their reporting, and beyond the potential compromise related to handing over all of our proprietary sales and marketing materials, as well as our proprietary Nutrition Labels, to a seemingly hostile source known for leaking, these requests represented a potentially crushing cost in legal fees and fees related to searching and gathering all of these materials. We also knew that not responding to the “request” could result in a subpoena forcing our compliance.

The first cost was hiring a lawyer from among those who had carved out a specialty representing clients in congressional investigations. We found a partner at a law firm that we used in defending (always successfully) the limited threats of libel suits that we had faced. He was a Republican and a former member of the George W. Bush administration who knew members of the committee and, more important, its key Republican staff members.

We were determined to convince the committee that they had picked the wrong target. We submitted a long memo detailing our nonpartisan process and ratings, explaining that our work for the government only involved helping the Defense Department’s Cyber Command monitor disinformation campaigns by foreign adversaries.

We never received a subpoena for the massive trove of other material. Yet even this limited encounter resulted in our relatively small company having to bear significant, unbudgeted legal fees, just as the Dougan threat had necessitated large and ongoing security costs.

When I had mentioned to the lead FBI agent working our case that we had gotten that letter from the Judiciary Committee, she asked that I give her a heads-up if we were going to have to testify, “because that will raise the threat level, and we’ll have to coordinate with the Capitol Police.”

Through the spring of 2023 vile emails continued coming in to NewsGuard accusing us of communism, globalism, pedophilia, and other offenses, plus some new physical threats. They seemed to escalate when something particularly bothered the unhinged crowd. We noticed a spike, for example, when Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. That night, one angry emailer grouped us with “BLM, ANTIFA, HOMO SOROS AND LIBTARD RUPERT MURDOCH” and promised, “WE THE PEOPLE . . . AREN’T GOING TO SIMPLY SHUT YOU DOWN, WE ARE GOING TO BURN YOU DOWN AND REMOVE EACH EMPLOYED ENTITY FROM BREATHING VIABILITY.”

Sometimes, the threats aimed at us that spring were bizarre. Ten days before we received the March 10 letter from Chairman Jordan, we got one from Jimmy Patronis, who identified himself as the “Chief Financial Officer” of Florida. “As you may know, I sit on the Florida Cabinet along with Governor Ron DeSantis,” he began. “Over a year ago, the State of Florida began untethering itself from Environmental, Social, and Governance standards—otherwise known as ESG metrics.” Echoing DeSantis’s anti-ESG crusade, which was a center-piece of the Florida governor’s war with private businesses over their allegedly “woke” policies, Patronis then declared NewsGuard to be part of the ESG movement and, as with DeSantis’s much-heralded war with the Walt Disney Company, threatened a private company exercising its First Amendment rights:

NewsGuard is promoting a ratings system for quality of information, as though you are some kind of arbiter of truth. This activity is similar to other organizations who ranked and categorized businesses as part of corrupt ESG practices….As we’ve studied ESG, we have come to learn the tricks of the trade—and your recent engagement falls right in line with similar efforts to de-fund Conservative organizations who are competing in the realm of ideas….In short, your enterprise may….be subject to legislative scrutiny in the upcoming legislative session.

We replied politely that we had nothing to do with the ESG movement. Patronis’s letter was ridiculous to the point of being comical. Yet it should also be understood for the authoritarian message it sent, from a man who was, as he noted, in the cabinet of a then-leading presidential candidate. Patronis was threatening a private company, NewsGuard, for giving other private companies—advertisers—information that they might use to decide how they spent their advertising dollars in the private marketplace. He was wrong that NewsGuard was targeting conservative websites for advertising boycotts. However, that is not nearly as troubling as his effort to assert power over the services and speech of private parties whom he perceived as being on the other side in an us-against-them war.

About a year earlier, I had received what should have been an early warning that picking sides was now what mattered most in tribal America, not right or wrong. NewsGuard had just negotiated an agreement with the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten, to allow all of her member-teachers and their students access to NewsGuard’s browser extension so that they could improve their news literacy skills by seeing how we applied our nine journalistic criteria to score the trustworthiness of news sites. Within days, we received a letter from Jim Banks, then the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, accusing us of “clear liberal bias” and noting that this alliance with the AFT is “equally troubling” because the union “has demonstrated a bias for the radical left’s ideology.” He then asked us to reply to a series of questions about how we conducted our work—the answers to which were readily available on our website.

Given what had been my contentious history with Weingarten and the AFT, I had naively thought that our agreement would be seen as a coup demonstrating that in times of crisis even adversaries could come together. My reply to Banks said, in part,

I’ve published numerous…books and articles, including…The Rubber Room (in The New Yorker) and Class Warfare (Simon & Schuster). Reporting on The Rubber Room and Class Warfare is how I met Randi Weingarten…The New Yorker article and the book . . . was a no-holds-barred look at the numerous problems I perceived were associated with teachers’ union contracts. Ms. Weingarten and I disagreed vehemently. We appeared at numerous forums debating each other, often fiercely. But we were civil. We respected each other. We even grew to like each other while not changing an iota of our positions. That is what a democracy is supposed to be about.

So, how did our agreement with the AFT come about? Randi and I agreed that at a time when democracy is being undermined by online misinformation affecting everything from our confidence in healthcare science, to elections, to knowing whether Ukraine is ruled by Nazis, news literacy and an informed democracy that gives people, especially children, the basic tools to discern fact from dangerous fiction is more important than our differences about education policy. She looked past the fact that we gave high ratings to education news sites that are often critical of her union. We resolved that once we can get more people believing in the same set of inalienable facts, we can go back to the work and to the joy of democracy: debating policy.

Banks never replied, and his staff sat stone-faced when we did a Zoom meeting. The one exchange I remember was when one legislative aide remarked that we had given a low rating to an antiabortion site, which must mean that we were biased. I answered that as our Nutrition Label explained, the site got a low score not because it was antiabortion—many other sites that took the same position got high ratings—but because it repeatedly wrote that abortions caused breast cancer, which was misinformation that had been debunked by medical experts. “Yes, but you did give them a negative rating and they are pro-life,” was his reply. The political position was what mattered, not the false fact used to back that position.