A “Kremlin-aligned troll farm” racked up millions of views for a fake TV news video featuring a paid actor who falsely claimed Kamala Harris was involved in a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011, according to new research by Microsoft.
The tech giant said in a report released Tuesday that the video, made by a group it dubbed Storm-1516, suggests Russian election interference efforts in the 2024 election have pivoted to target the Harris-Walz campaign after initially stumbling when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July.
“Russian influence operations initially struggled to pivot operations aimed at the Democratic campaign following President Biden’s departure from the U.S. 2024 presidential race,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “In late August, however, elements of prolific Russian actor Storm-1516 began producing content implicating vice-president Harris and Governor Walz in outlandish fake conspiracy theories.”
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The hit-and-run video was published on a website set up to look like a San Francisco news outlet called KBSF-TV—no such outlet exists—that was set up just days before. After it was shared on social media, the video racked up seven million views on X alone and was widely shared on TikTok.
The video features a woman—named “Alicia Brown” in the video but “Alisha Brown” on the fake KBSF-TV site—who claims she was hit by Harris, who then “drove off quickly,” as Brown walked home with her mother after they saw Pirates of the Caribbean at the movies.
A voiceover claims Brown suffered injuries to her “pelvis, ribs, and spine,” had to undergo 11 surgeries, and lost the ability to walk. CBS News, however, found at the time that an X-Ray shown in the video was taken from a medical journal, and a picture of a car crash in the video was taken from a 2018 accident in Guam.
Microsoft said Storm-1516 produced another video that falsely “depicts an attack by alleged Harris supporters on what the video’s amplifiers claim is a Trump rally attendee,” adding that the group “intended this video, which received millions of views, to inflame political divides by stirring racial and political tensions.” BBC News and researchers at NewsGuard have linked the operation to a former Florida deputy sheriff turned fugitive who fled to Moscow when he was investigated for hacking and extortion.
A second Russian group now making videos to spread conspiracy theories about Harris, which Microsoft dubbed Storm-1679, previously focused on spreading fears of violence at the Paris Olympics. One video it produced showed a fake New York City billboard with false claims about Harris’ policies and was viewed more than 100,000 times on X in the four hours after it was first posted on Telegram.
Microsoft warned that Storm-1516 is already “adept at grabbing headlines with its outlandish fake videos and scandalous claims” and Storm-1679 “will likely only escalate its targeting of the Harris-Walz campaign in the lead-up to Election Day.”
“Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections,” Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at a hearing about 2024 elections risks in May.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department filed money-laundering charges against two employees of Russian state media outlet RT for allegedly funneling millions of dollars to Nashville-based Tenet Media to make online content to influence the election, which in turn duped right-wing influencers into unknowingly working for covert Russian operations.
Meanwhile, federal judges were warned Tuesday to be mindful of their cybersecurity because foreign actors could try to influence election cases at a meeting of the Judicial Conference.
“We know from public reporting out of the intelligence community that foreign adversaries see this election season as an opportunity to spread misinformation and to sow doubt about the workings and stability of our national government,” 7th Circuit Judge Michael Scudder, who leads a committee in charge of information technology for the federal courts, told reporters in Washington, D.C. “My report emphasized that we must presume the judiciary faces this same risk.”
