The Kremlin’s attempts to influence the 2024 election in favor of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are accelerating, federal officials and researchers say. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes)
Russia’s attempts to influence the 2024 election in favor of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are accelerating, federal officials and researchers say, adding to a sea of misinformation about immigration and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, despite U.S. efforts to blunt the onslaught with indictments, seizures and public warnings.
After a group of prominent far-right influencers was exposed last month for taking money provided by Russian state media figures, they continued to promote falsehoods to their large followings, including debunked claims about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
Those tales originated with locals gossiping and were amplified online by figures on the American right and eventually by Trump. But researchers say Russian actors have piled on with even more exaggerated claims intended to scare more citizens about immigration and race, even after two Russian nationals were charged in early September with laundering money to covertly influence public opinion.
The U.S. government’s seizure of 32 web domains hosting fake Fox News and Washington Post stories similarly did not put an end to that separate Russian caper, researchers say. The automated accounts that spread links to those stories are now sharing links to new “doppelganger” articles on faked versions of established outlets, including some asserting the Secret Service’s “criminal connivance” in the latest apparent attempt to kill Trump.
Other researchers said last week they have discovered another Russian network touting a parade of lies about Harris, including that she is showing signs of Alzheimer’s and that her family has secret ties to “Big Pharma” and so would push puberty-blocking drugs.
Clint Watts, who heads Microsoft’s efforts against government disinformation, said that Russian trolls have moved to new websites to host bogus news stories, and that such influence efforts might work better now than before, simply because the presidential contest is heating up. “The audience is much more vulnerable the closer we get to Election Day,” he said in an interview.
The worst is probably still to come, said disinformation and cybersecurity scholar Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He said his biggest concern is not false information but “a real, newsworthy leak of files on the Harris campaign that will drive the news cycle.”
Federal prosecutors took action in early September against both the web of fake news sites and the Russian funding of well-known influencers. The conservative commentators involved have not been charged and said they had not realized that the company paying them as much as $100,000 each week was backed by people at Russia’s state-controlled RT propaganda network.
The continuing efforts from the trolls and automated accounts add weight to a warning by U.S. intelligence officials last week that Russia is amping up its efforts to return Trump to the White House. Russia hopes Trump will cut support for Ukraine, its top priority, intelligence officials said previously.
Though U.S. officials seized website addresses that had been hosting the fake news sites, affiliated social media accounts are now pushing new links to similar sites, researchers said.
A Sept. 24 tweet linking to a fake Fox News story about Haitians, for example, had drawn more than 900 retweets and not a single like two days later, a pattern that misinformation researchers say strongly suggests automated amplification by bots rather than humans. The story — headlined “Watch out for Kids, Cats and Cars: Alien Haitians Want to Take Everything from You” — went further than the falsehoods spread by Trump, claiming that a cat reported missing to police “was later seen butchered like a calf carcass in a migrant den.” In fact, the cat emerged unharmed from its owner’s basement.
A fake Washington Post story, tweeted the same day by another account in the network, described officials’ failure to stop Trump’s second alleged would-be assassin earlier as “true criminal connivance” and asserted than the suspect was “a fascist who shares the position of Ukrainian Nazis.” That post had more than 800 retweets and no likes. The accounts were identified by activist research group Antibot4Navalny.
Unusually, federal law enforcement authorities cited reams of internal Russian documents in their recent actions against Moscow’s disinformation campaigns, some of which had also been reported on by The Washington Post. Rid, who analyzed the documents, wrote Monday in Foreign Affairs that architects of multiple social media blitzes complained that because Meta kept removing accounts, X has become “’the only mass platform that could currently be utilized’ in the United States.”
An X spokesman said the company “remains alert to any attempt to manipulate the platform by bad actors and networks,” adding its efforts to parry them had “led to over 460 million accounts being suspended through the first six months of 2024.”
Other documents showed that the Russian government contractors behind the fake-news campaign known as Doppelganger pointed to U.S. media coverage and tech companies’ actions against them as evidence that they were feared and deserved more Russian government funding, Rid wrote.
New propaganda networks are still being discovered, such as one identified by disinformation tracking company Alethea that includes 77 X accounts posting original content and more than 400 that amplify those posts. That network has claimed that Harris is showing signs of Alzheimer’s; that her family’s secret ties to “Big Pharma” give her a financial incentive to push puberty-blocking drugs; and that she is a Marxist because her grandfather taught Marxist theory, Alethea said in research shared with The Post.
Following the FBI explication in a 277-page affidavit of the contracted influence campaign, the network began asserting that experts had concluded Ukraine was behind it. On Sept. 10, for example, X user “Jhon Piell,” on now-suspended account @salman1212120, posted a video citing Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative collaborative Bellingcat, as calling the operation “a complex and dangerous project of Ukraine.”
“Less than half an hour after the video’s publication, it was retweeted at least 76 times in under 60 seconds by a network of accounts, all with Turkish names, that had been created in batches between Sept. 2 and Sept. 8, 2024,” Alethea wrote.
Russia has long targeted Bellingcat and Higgins, who have exposed intelligence agents involved in assassination plots and disinformation. But it now is trying to muddy their work and hurt Harris at the same time. Higgins posted Wednesday that a fake Fox video claimed Higgins had found that an immigrant had assaulted one of Harris’s aides. In that case, the tweet jumped to more than 16,000 views in less than five minutes without any retweets or likes.
The number of views by actual human beings is hard to discern, as is evaluating the posts’ impact on voters. But even when lies are obvious, their proliferation can make truths harder to believe, disinformation experts said.
Russia is having at least some hits, such as a viral video that falsely accused Harris of a hit-and-run car accident. That got more than 7 million views.
Catherine Belton in London contributed to this report.
