Study finds Russian link to website blocked by Singapore government

SINGAPORE: Links between Russian sources and an inauthentic news site blocked by the Singapore government have been found by a new study from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS).
Released on Friday (Oct 25), the report titled Inauthentic Local Lifestyle And News Websites And The Challenge For Media Literacy was done by Mr Benjamin Ang, who heads the RSIS’ Centre of Excellence for National Security, and RSIS associate research fellow Dymples Leong.
It showed that the domain name of Alamak.io – one of the 10 websites identified by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) last week – has links to 5plus1.ru. The country-code top-level domain “.ru” is for Russian entities.
A reverse internet protocol (IP) search found that the 5plus1.ru website is associated with the same IP address as Alamak.io, the study showed.
“An online search on 5plus1.ru shows it to be linked to 5+1 Media, a Russian communications agency,” said Mr Ang and Ms Leong.
“The website states that it was founded in 2018 by graduates and teachers from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations University of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; and headed by founder Yuri Antsiferov.”
The site lists services such as targeted advertising, news monitoring and website development, with projects in the politics, fast-moving consumer goods, energy, government and tourism sectors.
The study also revealed that images on Alamak.io were obtained from Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia.
Through open-source tools, the RSIS duo could not identify the owners of Alamak.io, but found that the website was created on Mar 24 last year.
It masquerades as a Singaporean site by using the colloquial expression as its domain name and carrying Singapore-related news.
“‘Alamak’ is a colloquial word used in Singapore and Malaysia, often used as an interjection or expression to describe shock, worry, dismay, and disappointment,” said Mr Ang and Ms Leong.
“The usage of the term for the website appears to be intended to evoke familiarity and knowledge of the Singapore culture. It could also be so named to target at a Singapore or regional readership or demographic audience.”
Its news articles – which cover current affairs, lifestyle, trends and contributed opinions – were repurposed from other sources, including Singapore news outlets CNA and The Straits Times.
“Investigations found that the majority of the articles published on this website were likely to have been written with Al tools,” MHA and IMDA said last week.
“This website also published commentaries on sociopolitical issues, including one that falsely alleged that Singapore had allowed other countries to conduct their biological warfare research activities here.”
The website has also carried several articles written by Russia’s ambassador to Singapore Nikolay Kudashev, on issues such as Russia-ASEAN relations and with headlines like Replacing the Rules-Based Neocolonial Framework.
Mr Ang and Ms Leong noted that “many articles on Alamak.io were seemingly generated or written by artificial intelligence”, with a few articles deemed by AI detection software to have a probability of 98 per cent AI-generated text.
“This strongly suggests that the articles were AI-generated and raises questions about the lack of articles published by human authors on the website,” they said.
Although Alamak.io primarily features Singapore news, Mr Ang and Ms Leong were unable to identify any Singapore-based sources of ownership and funding.
“We were only able to determine that the website is linked to entities in Germany, Estonia, and Russia,” they said.
Unlike other local lifestyle and new websites they studied, there were no advertisements on Alamak.io or calls for subscription. As such, they could not determine the website’s business model or motivation.
“These findings do not conclusively indicate that the website is used for information manipulation, but they indicate that further observation is merited, such as if the website starts to feature content relating to Singapore’s politics or becomes part of an online hostile information campaign for foreign interference,” said the pair. 
Mr Ang and Ms Leong added that inauthentic websites like Alamak.io show how “a lack of transparent ownership and author attribution can enable foreign actors to mislead and misinform audiences on the source and the intention of articles from websites purporting to be ‘news’ sites”.
They said the website contains articles with a “foreign political angle”, that could be utilised to “manipulate public sentiment with narratives which might be detrimental to Singapore”. However, they noted that there has been no clear evidence so far.