Russia-Linked Influence Group is Pro-Trump
NOTE: I generally try to steer away from politics in this blog but this year that is going to be hard to do. There is no way that either social media or the legal process is going to be able to curb the disinformation coming from all sides. I have another post that I am going to do on the disinformation campaign going on against private industry.
This is only going to get more active as we get closer to November. Using generative artificial intelligence and fake news sites, the Russia-linked influence group CopyCop is working to spread manipulated political content at scale.
The group is an equal-opportunity influence-op, targeting political leaders in France, Ukraine and the European Union last month.
CopyCop has shifted to US-based servers to not appear to be connected to Putin. It is registering new domains here to stand up fake content sites. With AI and automation they can stand up new websites faster than we can even identify them, never mind warn people. And, the law likely makes it impossible to get these sites taken down.
Right now they are focusing on ex-President Trump and current-President Biden.
For example, they are highlighting mistakes President Biden made during speeches and criticizing the Biden administration’s failure to curb inflation. At the same time they are downplaying ex-President Trump’s felony convictions and saying that it will have no impact on the elections.
Their process is to scrape real content from mostly US conservative websites mixed with Russian propaganda sites and then use generative AI mix them together to make content that they want. This is the poster child for fake news.
CopyCop also uses generative AI to create fake journalist profiles. Researchers found at least a thousand of these profiles.
The AI-washing, to coin a term, of actual content, makes it much more difficult to trace the fake news back to the source, such as from Russian propaganda sites.
They also use fake accounts on Twitter to publish more fake news pushing whatever their agenda is.
To amplify the effects of this propaganda campaign, the different Russian actors promote each other’s content on social media.
Recently one of these influencing operations ran a campaign where it posted thousands of fake anti-Ukraine quotes, which they credited to random celebrities (who are likely not even aware that they are being used as click bait) such as Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson and Elton John.
There are likely two reasons they are doing this.
One is simply to create conflict and division. If Russia can divide the U.S. they can likely do more evil things than if we were focused on them. That has been a Russian objective for a long time.
The other is to push to elect a President that they think will be pro-Russia or at least not actively opposing them.
That candidate is likely Trump as he seems to be less likely to want to play on the world stage. In his first term he threatened to leave NATO and the UN, which if that happened, Russia would certainly try to fill that void. He has also said that he would stop supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, which would certainly be welcome in Moscow. It has been said many times – without any evidence – that Russia has dirt on Trump that would allow them to manipulate him. Who knows. They are certainly not going to reveal that hand until and unless he gets re-elected. At that point, IF they do have dirt on him they will quietly reveal, privately, bits and pieces of that dirt and threaten to leak it out unless he does their bidding.
So much of this is speculative.
What is NOT speculative is thar Russia is funding a disinformation campaign on a significant scale and trying to get a candidate who would allow them to expand their global influence and not cause them much grief.
Disinformation is significantly easier to do than hacking the election software as was suggested had been done after the 2020 election. To do that at a sufficient scale to effect the outcome is extremely difficult.
Credit: The Record
by 