U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that Moscow was behind a fake San Francisco TV channel that spread outright lies about a supposed hit-and-run incident involving Kamala Harris.
Microsoft had previously identified a “Kremlin-aligned troll farm” as the creators of the fictional Bay Area news outlet KBSF-TV, which used a paid actor to create a fake broadcast report about the non-existent incident that racked up millions of views on X and was widely shared on TikTok.
On Monday, FBI officials and representatives of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters that “Russian influence actors” were indeed “responsible for staging a widely reported video in which a woman claims she was a victim of a hit-and-run car accident by the vice president,” the Herald-Sun reports.
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“This content is also consistent with Russia’s broader efforts to boost the former president’s candidacy and denigrate the vice president and the Democratic Party, including through conspiratorial narratives,” one official apparently added.
Microsoft noted in its earlier report that Russian influence actors had regained their momentum in efforts to destabilize the Democrats’ campaign after seemingly losing their footing after President Joe Biden’s shock withdrawal from the race in July.
It comes after the DoJ filed a raft of money laundering charges against two employees of RT, a Russian state-run news outlet, for allegedly funneling millions into Tenet Media, based in Nashville, in exchange for creating online content designed to sway voters ahead of the November polls.
Several right-wing influencers, including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, claim they were duped by the scheme, maintaining they had no knowledge of the origin of those funds.
