Last week, a video claiming to be a hoax went viral on social media Someone ripped up the ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Within hours, the clip went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views following a now-deleted post on X.
In a departure from past practice, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies quickly released a statement the day after the video was released, saying Russian operatives had “produced and enhanced” the material as part of a broader campaign to divide Americans and “raise baseless questions.” . About the integrity of US elections”.
The swift response underscored how intelligence and FBI officials are developing a new strategy to combat the onslaught of disinformation from Russia and other foreign adversaries.
Intelligence agencies and the Justice Department, scarred by their own experience eight years ago when the Kremlin’s election meddling campaign caught federal authorities off guard, are moving faster to expose and disrupt disinformation operations to try to unbalance foreign actors, according to current and former officials.
Instead of flagging suspected foreign disinformation posts to social media companies, U.S. authorities are increasingly declassifying information related to foreign election interference, seizing Internet domains and issuing indictments that expose the mechanics of Russian and Iranian information warfare, officials and researchers said. .
“There’s no doubt they’re going to move faster and keep the intelligence confidential to try to deal with the problem,” said a congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
But it’s unclear whether the new playbook will be effective amid a continuing wave of election-related disinformation from Russia, Iran, China and Cuba.
Paul Kolbe, the former head of the Central Eurasia Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Russia’s disinformation campaign has had little impact on its spying services from time to time.
“They see themselves as getting a free pass on a lot of this,” Kolbe said. “If it gets exposed, great. They haven’t lost their agent and are just switching to another platform. It’s really easy: just keep playing, keep moving and keep playing hit-and-run.”
U.S. officials admit there is no magic bullet to defeat the disinformation campaigns emanating from Moscow or Tehran, but they believe they have a formula that will help limit its impact.
“The Good Old USA Project”
Last month, the Biden administration announced a series of measures against Russia’s disinformation campaign. The proceedings included an indictment of Russian agents who allegedly funneled money to conservative influencers at a Tennessee media company while concealing the money’s origin. Officials also imposed sanctions on Russians accused of orchestrating information warfare and announced the seizure of Internet domains used for fake news sites as part of Russia’s “Doppelganger” campaign.
As part of the FBI’s testimony regarding the takedown of web domains, US authorities He released many internal documents of Russia — To lift the lid on the Kremlin’s information warfare plans and discussions.
In an internal memo titled “The Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States,” organizers of the propaganda project explained how to deploy fake news through manufactured social media accounts and news sites.
“For this to be effective, you must use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of real information,” the classified memo said. “At the same time, you have to keep repeating that this is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show you.”
The instructions, according to US officials and court documents, were part of what the Kremlin-backed team called the “Good Old USA Project”, a joint campaign aimed at spreading false information on social media to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy in the 2024 election.
U.S. officials believe that shedding light on Russia’s covert influence operations has made life difficult for the Kremlin by exposing some of their tactics and associates, and even embarrassed Kremlin leaders by revealing how they exaggerated the influence of their work.
Matthew Olsen, Assistant Attorney General for Homeland Security. said in his speech Exposing the disinformation effort last month also “sends a clear message to our adversaries—we’ve got information about your networks, we know what you’re doing, and we’re determined to hold you accountable.”
According to Bret Schaefer of the Alliance for the Security of Democracies, a foreign propaganda watchdog, Russian agents indicted by U.S. authorities likely won’t appear in any U.S. courtroom, but the case could deter Americans from accepting lucrative offers from Kremlin information operators.
Schafer said the revelation of the details of the Russian operation “scared them a little in terms of how much the intelligence community knew.”
Fake videos and millions of views
Last month, Russia resumed Operation Doppelganger after the Kremlin’s high-profile crackdown on fake news sites. Dozens of fake news sites that were taken offline are now back with slightly tweaked URLs.
As with much of Russia’s disinformation production, obscure news sites have not attracted much attention and audience engagement has been modest, according to a review of social media by experts and NBC News.
“In terms of audience engagement, it seems to be very low,” said Esteban Ponce de León, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank. Digital Forensics Laboratory. “There is a lot of content. They have been making a lot of news articles in recent weeks. The question is who reads those articles.”
However, some pieces of Russian disinformation are getting attention and taking off, like last week’s manufactured video promoting a false claim of ballot tampering in the key state of Pennsylvania.
In a video released this month on X, a former high school student allegedly accused Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz of sexually assaulting her decades ago when she was a teacher at a Minnesota high school. The fact-checkers discredited the video as an unfounded smear.
The man in the video who mispronounced the name of the high school in the clip is not who he claims to be, according to fact-checking information. US intelligence officials later said Russian “actors of influence” were behind the fake news. The video has become an established lie over the past eight years claiming that Democratic politicians are pedophiles.
On October 13, X shared a fake video with 4.5 million views.
The episode illustrates how foreign and domestic disinformation often reinforce each other as Russia and other regimes seek to jump over divisive narratives already circulating in the country’s political bloodstream. Experts say not since the Vietnam era of the early 1970s has the United States presented such a rich target for foreign influence operations with a deeply polarized society suffering from a growing distrust of government and other institutions.
Native lies
No matter how far-reaching efforts by Russia and other countries to sway US elections are, the biggest threat to the country’s democratic health comes from lies created and propagated by Americans, according to former intelligence officials and researchers who have investigated the issue.
Trump and his online allies have published lies that are now accepted by large numbers of his supporters. Experts say that the most damaging of these lies is the baseless claim that the 2020 elections were “stolen” and that this year’s elections will be accompanied by massive fraud.
According to the latest Gallup poll, the number of Republican voters who trust the accuracy of the election results has steadily declined, with only 28% saying they believe the votes were counted, compared to 44% in 2020.
But US law requires federal authorities to hand-in-hand domestic lies under America’s free speech protections. Under intense legal and political pressure from Republican critics, social media companies in recent years have downsized or eliminated teams that remove inflammatory or conspiratorial content.
A combination of “stolen” election conspiracies, growing foreign disinformation campaigns and domestic lies about the laissez-faire approach of tech firms threatens to undermine the foundations of American democracy, experts and lawmakers say.
According to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, democracies are based on shared understandings that competing political factions will accept the results of an election and try to regain power at the next opportunity.
If a large part of the population believes that the results of the country’s elections are illegitimate, “the basis of our assumptions about how our system works is called into question,” he said.
“Now you’re starting to question the very foundations of the structure that survived the Civil War and survived Vietnam up to this point,” Jamieson said.