Ukraine And Russian
Russian information efforts to sway American elections and possibly weaken support for Ukraine have been found by researchers.
Stephen Lee Myers : Steven Lee Myers, a disinformation writer who has reported from China and Russia, is located in San Francisco.
Nov. 6, 2022
After disappearing from the social networking site for a year, Nora Berka, a Gab user, reappeared in August and posted a number of comments with distinctly conservative political overtones before launching into a tirade of her own.
The posts mostly and occasionally vulgarly disparaged Vice President Biden and other important Democrats. They bemoaned the expenditure of tax payer money to aid Ukraine in its conflict with Russian invaders and painted the Ukrainian president as a caricature right out of Russian propaganda.
There was no chance that the two political issues coincided.
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| The structure in St. Petersburg that houses what is purported to be the Russian Internet Research Agency Researchers in cybersecurity have connected the organisation to a fresh Russian disinformation campaign. |
According to the cybersecurity company Recorded Future, the account had previously been connected to the same covert Russian organisation that meddled in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.
It is a component of what the team and additional researchers have dubbed a fresh, if more focused, Russian operation in advance of Tuesday's midterm elections. The objective remains the same: to incite conservatism among voters and to erode confidence in the American election process. This time, it also seems to be an attempt to discredit the substantial military support provided to Ukraine by the Biden administration.
Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official who is now with Providence Consulting Group, a commercial technology company, said: "It's obvious they are attempting to get them to shut off supplies and money to Ukraine."
The effort has fueled the nation's most contentious political and cultural issues by employing accounts that impersonate angry Americans like Nora Berka.
It calculated that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could aid the Russian war effort and has deliberately targeted Democratic candidates in the most competitive contests, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
The campaigns demonstrate not only how susceptible the American political system is to foreign influence, but also how misinformation propagandists have changed and adapted in response to major social media platforms' efforts to either delete or downplay incorrect or misleading content.
A warning about the danger of misinformation being spread by "dark web media channels, online journals, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages, and fake online personas" was released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency last month. Disinformation could contain assertions that election results or data have been hacked or compromised.
Other Social Media Research Firms
The organisations warned individuals to avoid like, commenting on, or sharing online content from unidentified or dubious sources. However, social media companies and scholars who monitor misinformation have recently found a number of campaigns by Russia, China, and Iran. They did not name any specific initiatives.
It was discovered by Recorded Future and two other social media research firms, Graphika and Mandiant, that a number of Russian operations were using platforms like Gab, Parler, Getter, and other more recent ones that take pride in fostering unmoderated spaces for free speech, like Getter and Parler.
These initiatives are significantly smaller than those during the 2016 election, when phoney accounts used Facebook and other big platforms to reach millions of people from all political perspectives. But contacting impressionable users who can contribute in achieving Russian objectives makes the activities no less harmful, according to academics.
Having discovered the Nora Berka account, Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future, noted that "the audiences are much, much less than on your other standard social media networks." However, because the users of these sites are typically American conservatives who are maybe more receptive to conspiratorial theories, you can engage the audiences in far more focused influence operations.
A news organisation calling itself the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens had previously used a large number of the accounts the researchers discovered. Facebook and Instagram's parent company Meta previously connected the news organisation to Russian information activities based on the Internet Research Agency.
Many of the social media profiles linked to the network remained silent after being publicly recognised around the 2020 election, and it appears to have subsequently collapsed. In August and September, the accounts started to become active once more after being roused like sleeper cells.
Many of the traits of an unreliable user are present in Nora Berka's Gab account, according to Mr. Liston. There is no profile picture or personal information. A message sent through Gab to the account received no response.
The account, which has more than 8,000 followers, only discusses political subjects and frequently disseminates inaccurate or misleading information. Most posts attract minimal interaction, but one about the F.B.I. recently received 64 reposts in addition to 43 responses and 11 replies.
The account has frequently shared links to electiontruth.net since September, which Recorded Future claimed was almost certainly associated with the Russian effort.
The earliest entries on (Electiontruth net) only go back to September 5. Since then, it has published pieces almost daily making fun of President Biden and major Democratic candidates while denouncing racial, criminal justice, and gender policies that it claims are ruining the country. One common headline read, "America under Communism."
The bylines on the pieces all use pseudonyms, such as Andrew J, Truth4Ever, and Laura. Mr. Liston claims that Bitcoin accounts were used to register the domain name for the website.
Cross Market
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| Cotter, Arkansas's coffeehouse is listed as Electiontruth.net's point of contact. The Cotter Bridge Market has taken the place of the former cafe. The proprietors of the market denied having any knowledge of the website. Credit... |
Electiontruth.net lists a cafe within a renovated gas station in Cotter, Arkansas, a community of 900 people on a bend in the White River, as its point of contact. However, the cafe has since closed and been replaced with Cotter Bridge Market, a deli and produce store whose proprietors claimed to be unaware of the webpage. A comment request made on the website received no response from Election Truth.
Links to electiontruth.net, according to Mr. Liston, appeared to be closely coordinated with accounts on Gab associated with the Russians.
In a different effort, Graphika pinpointed a recent run of cartoons that emerged on the discussion platform patriots.win, Gettr, Gab, and Gettr. The drawings, created by a cartoonist by the name of "Schmitz," mocked Democrats in the most competitive governor's and senate contests.
Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, a Black senator, was the focus of one with racist undertones. Another erroneously asserted that Ohio's Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan would free "all Fentanyl distributors and drug traffickers" from prison.
According to Graphika, the cartoons didn't garner a lot of attention or go popular on other platforms.
Arguments that the United States under President Biden are wasting money by aiding Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion that started in February are a recurrent topic of the new Russian attempts.
For instance, Nora Berka published a doctored image of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky as a bikini-clad poll dancer receiving dollar dollars from Vice President Biden in September.
Joe Biden wants to give Ukraine $13.7 billion extra in help as working class Americans struggle to obtain infant formula and pay for food and gas. By coincidence, that post echoed a viewpoint that has gained some support among Republican voters and lawmakers who have questioned the distribution of weapons and other forms of military aid.
When contacted for comment regarding the Russian attempts, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency did not provide any.
Gab did not reply to a request for comment, and Mr. Brookie described the restored accounts as "recidivist conduct."
As before, it might be challenging to determine just how these accounts would affect voters on Election Day. At the very least, they contribute to the "manufactured chaos" that Edward P. Perez, a board member with the neutral OSET Institute, characterised the country's political system.
The fractures in American society are already such a fertile ground for disinformation, he added, so today's efforts may be smaller and still accomplish the desired effect. In the past, Russians aimed to grow sizable followings for their fake accounts on the major platforms.
According to Mr. Perez, a former employee of Twitter, "after 2016, it looks that foreign nations can afford to take some of the foot off the gas because they have already sufficiently stoked domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them."
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