In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss foreign malign influence operations during the 2024 US elections. As in 2016 and 2020, these recent elections were also a target of massive disinformation and hacking campaigns originating mostly from Russia and Iran.
1/17
First of all, my opinion is that these influence operations alone didn’t affect the elections so much, that they actually made a difference.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s win over Harris was clear and these short-term campaigns didn’t really change that much this time.
2/17
Yet, many of these online campaigns attacked both Harris and Walz on various social media platforms. Especially Walz became a big target after his nomination, and many Russian efforts attempted to defame him.
3/17
Many of these fake stories came from Russian propaganda group Storm-1516, an offshoot of late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s infamous Internet Research Agency. The group was discovered in 2023 by Darren Linvill’s team of media forensics researchers at Clemson University.
4/17
The group has a long history of publishing deepfakes and fake whistleblower videos, and the false sexual abuse claim of Tim Walz came from them. Storm-1516 was also behind the fake hit-and-run story about Kamala Harris. Trump’s allies have also spread these claims online,…
5/17
…including people like the Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec & far-right podcaster Candace Owens. Another large X account, “Black Insurrectionist” (who’s actually a white dude named Jason G. Palmer) also spread fake e-mails about this story, eventually nuking their account.
6/17
Another fake video showing a man searching through mail-in ballots from Pennsylvania and ripping up those with a vote for Trump was first posted in Oct 2024 from an account that promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory and has been linked to Storm-1516.
7/17
This smear campaign against Harris/Walz originates from John Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop and now Moscow resident who runs a massive network of AI-generated fake news websites. Dougan’s also behind most of the anti-Zelenskyy campaigns online:
8/17
Another Kremlin operation before the elections was of course the case of TENET Media, a Tennessee-based company that received 10 million dollars from Russia through various shell companies. This money was used to pay YouTubers for producing anti-Ukraine content.
9/17
TENET Media paid big influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson to produce and spread pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukraine content through their YouTube channels. All creators involved in this scheme claimed they didn’t know where the money came from.
10/17
In addition, there were several AI-driven botnets amplifying pro-Trump messages on X. Allegedly, many of these networks were shut down AFTER the elections, resulting in a loss of several hundreds or even thousands of followers, as reported by many large X accounts.
11/17
CNN reported on another incident in which American social media influencer @Alphafox78 was paid around 100 USD per post by a Russian, pro-Kremlin propagandist named Semen "AussieCossack" Boikov. Incidentally, Foxy has been quiet during the last few days.
12/17
Both campaigns were also targeted by Iranian hackers. They managed to hack several e-mail accounts of the Trump campaign, but unlike in 2016, most media outlets refused to publish any of the hacked information. Eventually, @kenklippenstein published the JD Vance dossier.
13/17
Like in 2016, spoiler candidate Jill Stein was also heavily promoted, this time to Muslim voters, by both domestic MAGA Republicans and foreign influence campaigns.
You can read more about Mrs. Stein here:
14/17
Of course, these operations are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds if not thousands of similar but smaller-scale campaigns that attempt to influence the US voters. X did absolutely nothing to stop them, and anyone drawn to conspiracy theories could even…
15/17
…question the platform’s owners motives for this. Like in 2016 and 2020, foreign influence operations mostly attacked Trump’s adversaries, so there is little to no incentive to try to weed them out before the elections.
16/17
“To the victor belong the spoils”, as they say, and none of this matters anymore now that Musk & Trump managed to win the race. If Trump decides to follow the Project 2025 path, there would be even less money and resources to fight against online disinformation.
17/17
My book titled “Vatnik Soup - The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation” has been published, you can order it here:
kleart.dk/webshop/p/vatn…
Or if you prefer Amazon:
amazon.com/Vatnik-Soup-Ul…
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