The claims, however, did not go viral until last week and the publication of the deepfake video.
Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED he immediately recognized this tactic as part of Russia’s well-established disinformation playbook.
“There’s no doubt this is Storm-1516,” Linvill, whose team discovered the network last fall, tells WIRED.
Linvill says the account that first shared the AI-altered video has all the hallmarks of previous Storm-1516 campaigns. “It’s standard for them to create an X or YouTube account for the initial placement of stories,” Linvill says.
The campaign orchestrated by Storm-1516 often begins with the publication of a false story and video by a whistleblower or citizen journalist, the United States mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. outlined in July. Disinformation is “amplified by other seemingly unaffiliated online networks,” the US mission stated. The claims then take on a life of their own, shared and reposted by unwitting social media users who likely have no idea where the videos originated.
Fake stories can also be picked up by other media outlets that cover viral stories on social media. In the case of Walz’s claims, they ended up on MSN, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft.
In the past, Storm-1516 relied on a network from fake news websites run by Dougan to drive their narratives. On Saturday, a story referencing the RedPill78 interview, the Black Insurrectionist posts, and the deepfake video was posted on more than 100 Dougan websites simultaneously.
This was first discovered by Alex Liberty, a researcher who tracks the activity of Russian propaganda networks and agrees with Linvill’s assertion that the deepfake video has all the hallmarks of a Storm-1516 campaign.
“We believe this could be a coordinated campaign in an attempt to present numerous false accusations of the same nature against Tim Walz through different channels and in different formats to give an image of legitimacy to the narrative,” Liberty tells WIRED. .
McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, agrees.
“The false narrative appears to be part of a broader campaign fueled by pro-Kremlin media and QAnon influencers ahead of the Nov. 5, 2024, U.S. election, aimed at portraying Walz, whose political appeal is of an ordinary school teacher and coach, as a pedophile who had inappropriate relationships with minors,” Sadeghi wrote in an analysis of the deepfake video.
