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Editor’s note:
Here in Kyiv, we know all too well that Russia’s war isn’t being waged solely with missiles and drones. It’s also happening online with fake accounts, synthetic voices, and AI-generated videos.
Exposing these covert attacks is a long and painstaking process that requires time and resources. We continue to monitor Russia’s actions and provide you with high-quality coverage.
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OUR LEAD STORY:
KYIV, Ukraine – You open up social media to check on some news. You watch one video from the New York Times, another from ABC News.
Then, the algorithm presents another couple of videos that sport the same familiar logos, featuring stories about A-list celebrities being paid to support the Democrats, some with the hashtag ‘#AllDemocratsAreCriminals ’. Some of them show celebrities like Julia Roberts talking about these issues. These have to be legit, right?
They aren’t. The stories are false, as are the views on the video. The content originated not from professional journalists in the US but professionals in influence operations in Russian state-sponsored organizations like Storm-1516.
“The Storm [1516] has entered the game, their main power - fake videos, where they use [a] deepfake in order to discredit celebrities and political candidates in order to lessen their support,” said Yuliia Dukach, strategic development manager and analyst at private intelligence company Molfar Intelligence.
Russia has long used bots on social media to meddle in Western countries’ elections. Most notable in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, Moscow has taken a similar approach to other countries, including Denmark, Germany, Moldova, France, and others.
But the Kremlin no longer has to rely on real people to spread disinformation by manually posting comments and blog posts; there’s no need anymore for a “troll factory” like the notorious Internet Research Agency that wreaked havoc online in the 2010s. Now, most ‘Kremlinbots’ are nothing more than an AI chat-bot programmed with Kremlin narratives. And Russia creates them by the thousands.
With the midterm elections coming up in the U.S., Russia has increased covert activity to try to influence public opinion before Americans turn out to vote on Nov. 3, with the Trump administration’s grip on Congress at stake. According to a recent investigation conducted by Bloomberg, Russia has been using fake AI election videos to push disinformation about Democrats ahead of the elections. The accounts were attributed to a Russian operation known as ‘Matryoshka,’ and the videos themselves had signs of inflated views, meant to create the illusion online of the stories being more popular than they really were. Politico reported that Russian influence operations have targeted candidates who are supportive of Ukraine in particular.
Recognizing such covert influence operations is especially crucial now that new technologies allow them to be quickly scaled up and spread throughout the globe, all with the ultimate goal of undermining public trust in democracy and sowing chaos and dysfunction in the West.
Behind thousands of bots masquerading as regular Americans and spewing pro-Kremlin narratives lies a much larger strategy of destabilization.
After the paywall:
How Russia uses AI to help with influence operations;
What does exactly the term ‘bots’ mean;
How the US lowered its defense against foreign disinformation.
