Russian operators are getting much better at manipulating social media, boasting their fake accounts are only detected roughly 1% of the time.

Russian operators have increasingly been targeting social media and search engines in an effort to manipulate everything from public perception to the war in Ukraine to elections. While tech companies are trying to combat such manipulation, boasts by those operators in recent Discord chats would seem to indicate these efforts have had little impact.

“Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning,” Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told The Washington Post. He did say he thought the 1% claim was likely exaggerated.

As the Posthighlights, even if that figure is exaggerated, there’s still enough margin for Russian operators to be far more successful than anyone ever thought possible.