SAN FRANCISCO — Russian propagandists are escalating attacks on the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris with false but widely circulated videos on social media, including one that featured an actor accusing Harris of a nonexistent hit-and-run that paralyzed a girl, Microsoft researchers said Tuesday.
That video was a viral hit, spread by X accounts with as a many as a half-million followers, despite first appearing on a newly minted San Francisco news outlet that soon vanished. Posts featuring the video racked up 7 million views on X alone, and were also on Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
Another video manufactured an assault on an attendee of a rally for Republican candidate Donald Trump, garnering millions of views, Microsoft said. One depicted a fake New York billboard with vulgar messages saying Harris wanted to change children’s gender. It drew hundreds of thousands of views on X.
In all, Microsoft called out three Russian government-backed groups in addition to those described in federal charges last week against employees at propaganda network RT.
One group was “adept at grabbing headlines with its outlandish fake videos and scandalous claims,” Microsoft said, while another “will likely only escalate its targeting of the Harris-Walz campaign in the lead-up to Election Day.”
Microsoft described those and other smear jobs in its regular report on election-influence attempts. It said there will be another report before the November election. The latest findings suggest that the Russian government has not been daunted by previous exposures and the disruption of websites that masqueraded as mainstream news sites to push falsehoods. They also belie Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent claim that he supports Harris in the election.
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Monday that it was banningpages for state-run television outlet RT after the United States said the outlet was involved in intelligence activities as well as propaganda and announced sanctions against related companies.
Two weeks ago, the Justice Department indictedtwo RT employees, accusing them of laundering nearly $10 million through shell companies to covertly run a Tennessee-based media firm that posted videos by prominent conservative influencers seeking to undermine support for Ukraine. Last week, State Department officials said the campaign was a small part of covert information operations run by RT.
RT and other Russian government outlets, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”
On Tuesday, Microsoft further outlined activity by six Russian hacktivist groups that claim to be independent but appear to work in tandem with the FSB security service, GRU military intelligence or other Russian government entities.
The Kremlin has denied involvement in any attempts to influence the American election.
Like the private companies Moscow is accused of using to sow disinformation without accountability, the hacking groups “offer a method for potentially laundering compromising information garnered from a hack-and-leak operation while maintaining a veil of plausible deniability,” Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center wrote. It said officials and the media “should be wary of overinflating the threat of these groups in the public forum yet should remain vigilant.”
In a similar vein, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI saidlast week that foreign actors were likely to claim false or exaggerated hacks of voter rolls or other election material to sow distrust of the process and results.
Microsoft also said a Chinese influence group, more interested in dividing and confusing Americans than pushing for one candidate, had gotten much faster in using current events on social media and was interacting with other users, mainly as if the account holders were U.S. Trump supporters.
“Directly after the attempted assassination of former President Trump [in Butler, Pa.] accounts began live re-posting content from influencers and commentators alleging Democrats’ involvement and released original short-form videos edited from news footage four to five hours later,” Microsoft said.