International Courant
Kremlin-affiliated Russian troll farms are operating disinformation campaigns that intention to intervene with this 12 months’s US presidential elections, and in keeping with Microsoft, they’re focusing their efforts on discrediting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The corporate has printed a brand new report detailing the actions of two troll farms being monitored by the Microsoft Risk Evaluation Heart.
These Kremlin-backed actors apparently struggled to seek out the fitting strategy shortly after President Biden stepped down as a candidate, however in late August and early September, certainly one of them began circulating inauthentic movies that managed to generate hundreds of thousands of views. One video depicted a supposed assault by Harris supporters on Trump rally attendees. One other video used an actor to accuse Harris of being concerned in a 2011 hit-and-run incident that paralyzed a 13-year-old woman. The second video, which went viral, was launched by a day-old web site claiming to be a San Francisco based mostly media outlet.
In the meantime, the second troll farm stopped producing content material concerning the 2024 Paris Olympics video games and began creating movies exhibiting Harris in a foul mild. One faux video confirmed a New York Metropolis billboard claiming that Harris needs to alter youngsters’s gender. It was initially printed on Telegram, earlier than being shared on X and getting greater than 100,000 views inside only a few hours.
Microsoft warned that individuals ought to anticipate extra Russian-made disinformation supplies, together with extra staged and AI-edited movies, to flow into on-line as we get nearer to the election. Earlier this month, the US authorities indicted two workers of Russian state media outlet RT, accusing them of planning to pay a Tennessee firm $10 million to unfold 2,000 propaganda movies on social media. The Treasury Division additionally sanctioned ANO Dialog, a Russian nonprofit that was allegedly concerned with a marketing campaign often called “Doppelganger,” to create faux web sites that would seem to American readers as reliable main information websites. Microsoft stated in its new report that it suspended greater than 20 accounts linked to ANO Dialog.
Meta additionally lately banned RT and different Russian state media retailers “for overseas interference exercise.” In line with its notes, which the corporate shared with Engadget, it had seen Russian state-controlled media attempt to intervene with overseas governments and to evade detection up to now. It stated that it expects them to maintain making an attempt to “interact in misleading affect makes an attempt throughout the web.”
It is not simply Russia that is making an attempt to affect the result of this 12 months’s US presidential elections, although. Microsoft, Google and even the feds printed stories again in August that Iranian hackers had been making an attempt to spear-phish a number of advisers of the Biden-Harris and Trump campaigns. Microsoft additionally discovered campaigns made to sway votes within the US by teams linked with the Iranian authorities. One such group created an internet site that assaults and insults former President Donald Trump.
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