Microsoft says Russian troll farms are targeting the Harris-Walz campaign
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Kremlin-linked Russian troll farms have been running misinformation campaigns aimed at interfering with this year’s US presidential elections, and according to Microsoft, they are focusing their attention on discrediting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The company has published a new report detailing the activities of two troll farms being monitored by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.
These Kremlin-backed actors struggled to find the right approach immediately after President Biden stepped down as the candidate, but in late August and early September, one of them began circulating inauthentic videos that garnered millions of views. One video depicted an alleged attack by Harris supporters on Trump rally attendees. Another video used an actor to accuse Harris of being involved in a 2011 hit-and-run incident that left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed.
The second video, which went viral, was released by a day-old website pretending to be a San Francisco-based media outlet. Meanwhile, the second troll farm stopped making content about the 2024 Paris Olympic Games and started making videos that showed Harris in a bad light.
One fake video featured a New York City billboard claiming Harris wants to change the gender of children. It was initially published on Telegram, then shared on X and received more than 100,000 views in a matter of hours.
Microsoft warned that people should expect more Russian-made misinformation content, including more staged and AI-edited videos, to circulate online as the election approaches. Earlier this month, the US government charged two employees of Russian state media outlet RT with planning to pay a Tennessee company $10 million for spreading 2,000 propaganda videos on social media.
The Treasury Department also banned ANO Dialog, a Russian nonprofit that was allegedly connected to a campaign called “Doppelganger” to create fake websites that would appear to US readers as legitimate major news sites. Microsoft said in its new report that it has suspended more than 20 accounts associated with ANO Dialog.
Meta recently banned RT and other Russian government media outlets “for foreign interference activity.” According to its notes, which the company shared with Engadget, it had observed that Russian state-controlled media had tried to interfere with foreign governments in the past and avoid detection. It said it expected they would continue to try to “engage in efforts to exert deceptive influence on the Internet.”
However, Russia is not the only one trying to influence the outcome of this year’s US presidential elections. Microsoft, Google and even the federal government published reports in August that Iranian hackers were trying to spear-phish several advisers to the Biden-Harris and Trump campaigns. Microsoft also detected Iranian government-linked groups running a campaign to influence votes in the US. One such group created a website that attacks and insults former President Donald Trump.