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Joseph Menn at the Wash­ing­ton Post reports;

Russia’s attempts to influ­ence the 2024 elec­tion in favour 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 tac­tic, researchers say. The auto­mat­ed accounts that spread links to those sto­ries are now shar­ing links to new ​“dop­pel­gänger” 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 siezed 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 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 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 Dop­pel­gänger 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.

https://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​t​e​c​h​n​o​l​o​g​y​/​2​0​2​4​/​1​0​/​0​1​/​r​u​s​s​i​a​-​i​n​f​l​u​e​n​c​e​r​s​-​p​r​e​s​i​d​e​n​t​i​a​l​-​e​l​e​c​t​i​o​n​-​2024/