Russian operatives are pumping out fabricated claims about Democratic candidates, AI-manipulated videos of celebrities and fake posts impersonating real news outlets in an effort to influence American voters in the final run-up to Election Day. Researchers who track online influence operations and lawmakers who've been briefed by the intelligence community say Kremlin-backed groups are renewing familiar tactics they've used to sow distrust and discord in previous elections in the U.S. and around the world. "It's a carnival out there," Rep.
Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking member on the House intelligence committee, told reporters this week. "They're throwing everything out there to generate a sense of chaos and anarchy." The goal is to exacerbate divisions, erode confidence in democracy and, crucially, undermine U.S. support for Ukraine. "At the end of the day, the main issue for Russia is and has to be Ukraine," said Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, who has tracked foreign propaganda campaigns for years.
Linvill says the Russian playbook is consistent. A false claim or divisive narrative is seeded on social media or on a fake website posing as a news organization or think tank. It's spread by state media, automated fake accounts or, increasingly, paid influencers, in the hopes that it gets seen and repeated by real people.
"In the same way that marketing companies will pay an influencer to disseminate, you know, 'Nike's a great shoe,' the Russians do it with false information and made-up lies," he said. "They use influencers that know their audience, that are part of that audience, and they know how to give that audience a message that they want to hear," Linvill said. A Russian operation put that playbook to work this week to spread a baseless accusation against a Democratic U.S.
Linvill and several other research groups attributed them to Russian operators the research community has dubbed Storm-1516. It's known for staging fake videos with actors and laundering their claims through influencer accounts with large followings. Two fraudulent videos targeting the Senate candidate were posted on Tuesday on X by an account created last month that had few followers.
The account's X profile said it was based in the U.S. but the social media platform publicly flagged it as possibly using a proxy such as a virtual private network, which could disguise its location. The videos were likely created using artificial intelligence, according to Graphika, a research company that analyzes online communities. Linvill said a hallmark of Storm-1516 videos is the use of real actors whose faces are swapped using AI to look like someone else.
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