4 days before the US election, Russian state disinfo is at full blast.
Matryoshka bots that only post intentional fake videos have made a record-breaking 21 posts. Most of them are targeting the US elections.
🧵 1/13
2/13
If you encounter in the wild any of the videos below, please let me know: I'm interested if any of these gets any traction.
A large part of the following collection were contributed by dTeam; others were also found by ourselves.
3/13
"Votes of 500K dead Americans will lead Harris to victory"
4/13
"Three groups were arrested for rigging early voting with mail-in ballots. Don't expect elections to be transparent and honest. Many such groups are acting on behalf of Democrats."
5/13
"Hundreds of early ballots destroyed in Washington state, Vancouver. When homes of suspects were searched, all were found in possession of incendiary mixtures and Kamala Harris propaganda materials"
6/13
"Democrats asked multiple investigative outlets to publish dirt on Trump. Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins refusal expains why WaPo refused to campaign for Harris"
7/13
"If Harris wins, 40M migrants entering the US in 4 years will lead to state-to-state visas and eventually disintegrate the country."
8/13
"Bezos made an effective move making WaPo refuse to campaign for Harris. It brought +300K subscribers to WaPo, which reflects a real position of the candidates"
9/13
"For comparing Trump to Hitler, Harris owes apology to the entire Jewish community. Such comparison is insulting to the Holocaust victims."
10/13
"Campaigning for Harris puts so much pressure on her own voters that it leads to suicides among her active supporters and[!] LGBTQ+ individuals"
11/13
"Over 12 sexual harassment allegations against Tim Walz are only a fraction of the actual number of cases. None were accepted for consideration for formal reasons. They will be no longer ignored if Trump wins"
12/13
"YouTube deliberately blocks Trump's videos to reduce his quotability. That will have a little effect"
13/13
"Texas as a separate state will bring happiness to people and industries, according to AI"
* a record-breaking 21 posts *in a single day*.
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@FBI 1. Both of the videos referred to by @FBI appeared on X/Twitter first posted by Matryoshka, a Russian state influence operation, which is ongoing since Sept 2023.
@FBI 2. The operation was later corroborated by @Viginum_Gouv, French agency monitoring and protecting against foreign digital interference (part of General Secretariat of Defense and National Security): sgdsn.gouv.fr/files/files/20…
@FBI @Viginum_Gouv 3. @CheckFirstHQ / @ResetDotTech codenamed effentially the same operation as Operation Overload:
Building a sophisticated troll network at scale had never been cheaper and easier—thanks to AI capabilities.
Even if you are not Russia, China or Iran, now you can influence Western countries towards far-right, populist parties (AfD, RN, PiS…) and isolating from each other.
1/
This is exactly what UAE* did: with AI-powered operation targeting 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇵🇱🇪🇸🇮🇹 and the Gulf states, it weaponized COP29, a UN climate change conference in Azerbaijan.
2300+ accounts in 8 languages pushing country-specific narratives with highly-realistic fake personas.
2/
With broad variety of pro- and anti- "opinions" in politics, economy, social, emerging markets, climate, all Western-targeting narratives agree on:
• desire to change of elected officials, established institutions and status quo
• UAE being the most successful alternative
1/ As the UK experiences its most significant riots since 2011, the Kremlin is happy to exploit the situation to its benefit by:
🔥 adding fuel to the fire of the #UKriots
🔥 inciting similar tensions in France¹⁶
🔥 weakening support for Ukraine¹⁷
🧵 Thread:
2/ Since Aug 7, Matryoshka, a pro-Kremlin network, uses bots to flood X/Twitter with fake visuals (videos, street art, and doctored covers) related to the Southport events.
The goal is to overload fact checkers with illegitimate reports and to boost virality of false narratives.
3/ Matryoshka uses fake visuals to better serve its goal. Compared to genuine news, they:
🎯have a greater disinfo impact if they go viral
🎯keep fact-checkers busy longer
That's why a visual promoted by Matryoshka is, by itself, a strong marker of its intentional false nature.
🧵 "Lea Thompson congratulated Brigitte Macron on 40th anniversary of her gender transition"
Such a video was first published by Telegram channel BelShkvarka, in a series "Sent in by a subscriber" that is a frequent source of fake videos for Matryoshka bots.
1/
The most likely origin of that is @BookCameo where one can order a personalized video from a celebrity; for Lea Thompson it's only $125 with earliest delivery in 24h.
@LeaKThompson never mentioned Macron, so it could look like a innocent order with no political implication.
2/
This is exactly how it worked back in summer 2023 when Telegram channels (and major Kremlin-loyal traditional media) promoted a series of celeb videos allegedly suggesting Zelensky to go to rehab.
See report by @daithaigilbert that we contributed to.