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Russia is using some familiar tactics in its efforts to manipulate American voters in the final run-up to Election Day. That is according to researchers who track online influence operations and U.S. lawmakers who have been briefed by the intelligence community. NPR's Shannon Bond reports.
SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: Russian-backed groups are pumping out fabricated claims about Democratic candidates, AI-manipulated videos of celebrities and fake posts imitating real news outlets. Lisa Kaplan of the threat intelligence company Alethea says it's what she expects from the Kremlin.
LISA KAPLAN: I increasingly have come to think of Russia as essentially a dark money pac. You know they're going to be running advertisements. You want to understand what's out there. You want to understand if they're actually effective in moving people in one direction or another.
BOND: This week, top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees said a classified intelligence report on foreign election meddling shows Russia is trying to generate a sense of chaos around the midterms. That's in line with Russian efforts to influence American elections going back to 2016. The goal is to exacerbate divisions, erode confidence in democracy and, crucially, undermine support for Ukraine.
DARREN LINVILL: At the end of the day, the main issue for Russia is and has to be Ukraine.
BOND: Darren Linvill at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub has tracked foreign propaganda campaigns for years, and he says the Russian playbook is consistent. A false claim or divisive narrative is seeded on social media or on a fake website posing as a news organization or think tank. It's spread by state media, by automated fake accounts or, increasingly, by paid influencers so that it ultimately gets picked up by and repeated by real people.
LINVILL: So they use influencers that know their audience, that are part of that audience, and they know how to give that audience a message that they want to hear.
BOND: That playbook was used this week with fraudulent videos making a baseless accusation against a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Linvill and other researchers attributed it to a Russian operation known for staging fake videos with actors and laundering their claims through influencer accounts with large followings. The same propagandists put out a string of videos in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. They made similar unfounded accusations against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and posted phony videos purporting to show ballots for President Trump being torn up. Linvill says the operation tries to glom onto narratives that are already circulating among Americans.
LINVILL: It is hard to persuade anybody of anything, ever, but what you can do is reinforce beliefs.
BOND: This election cycle, Russian operations have also spread messages about Democrats turning away from supporting Israel and fabricated news reports accusing Democratic candidates of corruption. Intelligence officials have long said that Russia has favored President Trump and targeted Democrats in its efforts to reduce support for Ukraine. Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters this week that Russia opposes candidates of either party who have backed Ukraine. The same Russian operations now active in the U.S. midterms have also targeted elections this year in France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, says Darren Linvill.
LINVILL: We're just the next in line, and they attack with these same themes, anything that's going to make a candidate seem degenerate, seem corrupt, seem incapable.
BOND: Lisa Kaplan of Alethea says this focus on polarizing issues in the final stretch of the election is less about shaping voters' views and more about inflaming anger or fear to affect turnout.
KAPLAN: In these final posts in the lead-up to the election, it's really more about evoking that emotion.
BOND: Researchers say they expect more false claims and fake videos to come and for these operations to focus on voting and ballot processing in the period immediately surrounding election day.
Shannon Bond, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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