Kremlin-affiliated Russian troll farms are running disinformation campaigns that aim to interfere with this year’s US presidential elections, and according to Microsoft, they’re focusing their efforts on discrediting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The company has published a new report detailing the movements of two troll farms being monitored by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.
These Kremlin-backed actors apparently struggled to find the right approach shortly after President Biden stepped down as a candidate, but in late August and early September, one of them started circulating inauthentic videos that managed to generate millions of views. One video depicted a supposed attack by Harris supporters on Trump rally attendees. Another video used an actor to accuse Harris of being involved in a 2011 hit-and-run incident that paralyzed a 13-year-old girl. The second video, which went viral, was released by a days-old website pretending to be a San Francisco based media outlet.
Meanwhile, the second troll farm stopped producing content about the 2024 Paris Olympics games and started creating videos showing Harris in a bad light. One fake video showed a New York City billboard claiming that Harris wants to change children’s gender. It was initially published on Telegram, before being shared on X and getting more than 100,000 views within just a few hours.
Microsoft warned that people should expect more Russian-made disinformation materials, including more staged and AI-edited videos, to circulate online as we get closer to the election. Earlier this month, the US government indicted two employees of Russian state media outlet RT, accusing them of planning to pay a Tennessee company $10 million to spread 2,000 propaganda videos on social media. The Treasury Department also sanctioned ANO Dialog, a Russian nonprofit that was allegedly involved with a campaign known as “Doppelganger,” to create fake websites that would appear to American readers as legitimate major news sites. Microsoft said in its new report that it suspended more than 20 accounts connected to ANO Dialog.
Meta also recently banned RT and other Russian state media outlets “for foreign interference activity.” According to its notes, which the company shared with Engadget, it had seen Russian state-controlled media try to interfere with foreign governments and to evade detection in the past. It said that it expects them to keep trying to “engage in deceptive influence attempts across the internet.”
It’s not just Russia that’s trying to influence the outcome of this year’s US presidential elections, though. Microsoft, Google and even the feds published reports back in August that Iranian hackers had been trying to spear-phish several advisers of the Biden-Harris and Trump campaigns. Microsoft also found campaigns made to sway votes in the US by groups connected with the Iranian government. One such group created a website that attacks and insults former President Donald Trump.
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