# Social Design Agency The Social Design Agency (SDA) is a Moscow political-technology firm that runs influence operations abroad for the Russian Presidential Administration. It was founded on December 5, 2017 and is run by Ilya Gambashidze. Together with its sister company Structura National Technologies (founded December 12, 2017), it built [[Doppelganger]], the network of cloned Western news sites. The U.S. Justice Department says it worked "under the direction and control" of the Presidential Administration, with First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergei Kiriyenko directing. It is the clearest example in the vault of [[Political Technology]] — the Russian trade of manufacturing political reality — turned into an export business. ## What it runs - **[[Doppelganger]]** (2022–): cloned websites of outlets such as Le Monde, Bild and The Guardian, filled with fabricated articles and pushed by bot networks. - **[[Operation Undercut]]** (late 2023–): AI-voiced videos imitating Western media brands, aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine. [[Recorded Future]] attributes it to SDA. - **[[Operation Overload]]**: Clemson's Media Forensics Hub describes Matryoshka as "reportedly" one of SDA's wings, and Recorded Future notes shared infrastructure. **No government has attributed Overload to SDA.** - **U.S. election work, 2024:** a DOJ affidavit unsealed September 4, 2024 laid out SDA campaigns aimed at Americans — the "Good Old USA Project," a "Guerrilla Media Campaign" and a "Social Media Influencer Network" — with the stated aim of swaying the [[2024 Presidential Election]]. DOJ seized 32 domains. ## Sanctions | Date | Action | |---|---| | July 28, 2023 | EU sanctions 7 individuals and 5 entities, including SDA and Structura, over the RRN/Doppelganger campaign | | March 20, 2024 | U.S. Treasury (OFAC) sanctions SDA, Structura, Gambashidze and Nikolai Tupikin | | September 4, 2024 | DOJ domain seizures and unsealed affidavit | | October 28, 2024 | UK sanctions SDA, Structura, ANO Dialog, Gambashidze, Tupikin and Andrey Perla; says SDA built at least 120 spoof sites | | May 11, 2026 | UK sanctions 85 targets, including 49 SDA staff, over a plot to sway Armenia's June 7 election; says SDA is "almost certainly tasked by the Russian Presidential Administration" | ## The leaks **September 2024.** Files obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR and shared with RFE/RL showed SDA reporting its own output to its clients: 39,899 pieces of content from January to April 2024 and about 34 million bot comments. These are the agency's own claims to its paymaster, so they are as likely to be inflated as accurate. **"Projects 2026" (May 24, 2026).** OCCRP and partners — Delfi Estonia, the Dossier Center, Le Monde, Shomrim and others — published several dozen internal files and chat screenshots. They describe what SDA called "cognitive strikes," including the September 2025 pig heads left at nine Paris mosques and cultural centres. Kiriyenko appears as a decision-maker. The "Projects 2026" planning file lists eight projects, among them: - a fake independent think tank in four languages - self-populating "knowledge bases" built to outrank real sources in search — more than 200,000 pages for Germany and more than 50,000 for Armenia - 540 AI-generated videos a month for France Bloomberg later reported that the plan aimed at AI and search results. That puts the agency in the same "LLM grooming" business as the [[Pravda Network]]. ## Why it matters for the KB SDA shows the industrial side of [[Kremlin Disinformation]]: a contractor with staff writers, translators, video producers, output quotas and progress reports to a deputy chief of staff. Its 2024 plan for American audiences targeted swing-state voters, gamers, American Jews and Hispanic Americans with content favorable to [[Donald Trump]]. That is a documented case of a foreign state choosing a side in a U.S. election and paying a vendor to act on it. ## See Also - [[Doppelganger]] - [[Operation Undercut]] - [[Operation Overload]] - [[Pravda Network]] - [[Political Technology]] - [[Kremlin Disinformation]] - [[Russian Influence]]