Among the prominent accounts sharing the video was Russian Market, which has 330,000 followers and is operated by the Swiss social media personality. Vadim Loskutovknown for praising Russia and criticizing the West. The video was also shared by Tara Reade, who defected to Russia in 2023 in a bid to obtain citizenship. Reid also accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993.
The video, investigators told WIRED, was also manipulated in an attempt to avoid online detection. “Doppelganger operators cropped the video at arbitrary points, so they are technically different in milliseconds and are therefore likely to be considered unique and distinct videos by abuse protection systems,” researchers at Antibot4Navalny told WIRED. .
“This one is unique in its ambiguity,” Fink said. “Maybe it is a well-known Russian band, or maybe not, maybe a deepfake, or maybe not, maybe it has references to other politicians, but maybe not. In other words, it is a clearly Soviet-style propaganda video. “Ambiguity allows for multiple competing versions, which means hundreds of articles and arguments online, leading to more people eventually seeing it.”
As the Kremlin intensifies its efforts to undermine the US elections in November, it is becoming increasingly clear that Russia is willing to use emerging artificial intelligence technologies. A new report released this week from threat intelligence company Recorded Future highlighted this trend by revealing that a campaign, which has been linked to the Kremlin, has been using generative artificial intelligence tools to push pro-Trump content on a network of fake websites.
The report details how the campaign, called CopyCop, used artificial intelligence tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the content with a right-wing bias, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic. Check that it supposedly has more than 1,000 journalists, all of them fake and also invented by AI.
Issues pushed by the campaign include mistakes made by Biden during speeches, Biden’s age, poll results showing a lead for Trump, and claims that Trump’s recent criminal conviction and trial were “without impact” and “a total disaster.”
It’s still unclear how much impact these sites are having, and a WIRED review of social media platforms found very few links to the network of fake websites that CopyCop has created. But what the CopyCop campaign has shown is that AI can boost the spread of misinformation. And experts say this is probably just the first step in a broader strategy that will likely include networks like Doppelganger.
“Estimating engagement with one’s own websites remains a difficult task,” Recorded Future analyst Clément Briens tells WIRED. “AI-generated content is not likely to attract attention at all. However, it serves to help establish these websites as credible assets when they publish specific content such as deepfakes (that are) amplified by established Russian or pro-Russian influence actors with existing followers and audiences.”