San Francisco Frontiers - Russian disinformation campaign sets sights on US midterms

The videos spread late last week across social media with hashtags such as "#AllDemocratsAreCriminals," and showed Hollywood actors chastising the Democratic Party in self-recorded statements branded with CNN's logo.

"Today in America, there isn't a single child who isn't under threat from Democrats," a voice-cloned version of "How I Met Your Mother" star Alyson Hannigan is shown saying in one.

Another portrays Emma Caulfield saying Democrats "drink our blood." In a third, Sarah Jessica Parker appears to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Democrats "Nazis."

The clips were created using footage stolen from elsewhere on the internet. One fake of Julia Roberts layered fabricated audio over a 2023 Gucci campaign. Others were built on top of recordings uploaded to Cameo, a service that lets celebrities sell personalized videos to fans.

"I feel violated," Caulfield, known for her role in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," told AFP of the video using her image. "This isn't me and worse, this cheap imitation is a soulless idiot."

"I had no idea this was happening," added "Better Call Saul" actor Ed Begley Jr, whose Cameo submission was altered to depict him bashing Democrats as "perverts."

"I want to say on record that I wholeheartedly disagree with everything that the video says."

"Runaway Train" star Eric Roberts, who saw his own Cameo footage similarly distorted to portray him attacking Democrats over transgender issues, told AFP the statements "are not my words and do not represent my beliefs."

"I am deeply troubled that my likeness was manipulated and used to deceive the public," he said.

A CNN spokesperson also objected to the "unauthorized" use of the network's branding, saying the videos "are not CNN content and have no affiliation with CNN."

- 'The first salvo' -

Disinformation researchers said the deepfake videos appear to be the work of Matryoshka, or Operation Overload, a Kremlin campaign known for littering social media with doctored videos that impersonate news organizations, and then amplifying them using inorganic bot activity.

"This is what I believe to be the first salvo in Russia's targeting" of the November vote, said Clemson University's Darren Linvill, an expert on Russian influence campaigns.

"The Russians have targeted every US election with some kind of social media campaign since 2016," Linvill told AFP. "I was fully expecting it."

The online collective Antibot4navalny first attributed the deepfakes to Matryoshka due to their familiar pattern of distribution and amplification across social media.

Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an Institute for Strategic Dialogue analyst who has tracked Russian efforts to target elections across Europe, said the fabricated voiceovers and misuse of CNN's logo are also low-effort tactics consistent with Matryoshka.

"The use of Cameo videos is not new," he said. "They have used it in the regional and local German elections, in the Hungarian elections, in the Armenian elections."

French prosecutors said last month they were also probing suspected Russian deepfakes and fake video reports targeting the main two centrist candidates in next year's presidential elections.

While the campaign's work often has minimal impact -- and X, Bluesky and TikTok have removed some of the posts -- experts said the videos signal which US races and issues Russia intends to target in the elections that could flip the balance of power in the US Congress.

And the operation appears to be ramping up.

Antibot4navalny spotted other fabricated CNN video reports smearing Democratic candidates, including Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico.

The group also alerted AFP to additional inauthentic video reports that emerged Monday, seeking to discredit MS NOW's debunking of the celebrity deepfakes.

The posts wove disinformation journalist Brandy Zadrozny into the narrative, falsely claiming she had retracted her coverage on the burgeoning campaign.

R.Baker--SFF