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What's happening: Journalistic investigations, a Microsoft report, and the US Government have all warned that Russia, Iran and China are interfering in the 5 November U.S. presidential election. According to these reports, they are doing so with disinformation narratives against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, or by “hacking” documents from Republican Donald Trump's campaign.
Why it is important: This is not the first time that the US authorities have accused another state of trying to influence their electoral process with disinformation. These same foreign threats were repeated in the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections, according to US intelligence. The US think-tank Atlantic Council has created a database recording accusations of foreign interference for the 2024 elections.
Disinformation: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report in mid-September explaining how Russia, Iran and China “use generative artificial intelligence to further their respective efforts to influence US elections”. Something we have already warned about at Maldita.es.
Russia: fake websites against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz
The ODNI claims that Russia has used texts, images, audios and videos of “prominent figures” in US politics “to boost the former President’s [Trump] candidacy and denigrate the Vice President [Harris] and the Democratic Party, including through conspiratorial narratives”. The US agency also indicates that Russian actors have spread disinformation on immigration issues.
Microsoft reports on the findings of the US Office of National Intelligence, and identifies disinformation amplified by Russia. For example, a video of Harris at an election rally in which she allegedly said that “Trump can't even die with dignity”. This content, details the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, was created with artificial intelligence (AI) and spread in mid-September “on Telegram channels and Twitter (now X) profiles in Russian”. And it arrivedin English in the US later that month through a Russian state-run RT news agency correspondent. The technology company claims it was a deepfake (hyper-realistic videos in which a person's face and voice are manipulated). Microsoft says that Russia has mainly focused on disinformation against the Harris-Walz ticket.
Another piece of disinformation verified by Maldita.es, and which is now attributed to Russia, is related to a false accusation against Harris in which it was claimed that in 2011 she ran over a 13-year-old girl in San Francisco (California) and left her in a wheelchair. In Maldita.es we collected several pieces of evidence showing that it is disinformation imitating an alleged television channel that doesn’t exist. Microsoft in its analysis links it to ‘Storm-1516’, a Russian influence operation network.
This same network, according to an investigation by the technology magazine Wired, is also behind the disinformation narrative that Kamala Harris' vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz is a “pedophile”. This conspiracy theory has been amplified by Donald Trump's entourage and QAnon conspiracists, says Wired. At Maldita.es we have debunked the alleged evidence that Walz abused a minor when he was a teacher. These contain errors and come from accounts known for spreading disinformation.
Another disinformation content we have verified is a video attributed to an alleged former student of Walz in which he accuses him of sexually assaulting him. Maldita.es found that the video was manipulated and NewsGuard also links it to a Russian disinformation campaign, which GnidaProject, a Russian research institute, also attributes to ‘Storm-1516’.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has repeatedly warned of how Russia is trying to influence elections. In a document published in September, it describes how the Kremlin invests money in influencers, AI-generated content, social media ads and hacking accounts. One example of what the DOJ mentions is Tenet Media, a YouTube political influencer agency that US prosecutors are investigating for being funded by two RT employees.
Iran: “hacks” on Donald Trump's campaign
Another warning from the US government relates to Iran.The Office of National Intelligence says it has evidence that Iran has used artificial intelligence to generate social media posts and write “inauthentic news articles” impersonating English and Spanish-language media websites.
The goal, the ODNI details, is to provoke “polarisation” among US voters on issues related to the conflict in Gaza or presidential candidates.
On 27 September, the Justice Department accused three Iranian nationals of being “Islamic Revolutionary Guard hackers” and of hacking into Donald Trump's campaign documents. Some media outlets, such as Politico, received anonymous emails with documents that attributed to Trump's election team information about how he had selected J.D. Vance as his vice presidential nominee. For its part, Microsoft said the “hacking” stemmed from “a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor”.
China: campaigning against Republican candidates
The Office of National Intelligence places China as the third country that is trying to influence US public opinion. According to the bureau, the Chinese regime is using AI for “broader influence operations seeking to shape global views of China and amplify divisive U.S. political issues”, but not specifically in the 5 November elections.
Microsoft points to election-focused disinformation campaigns. Specifically, it claims to have identified messages from a person linked to the Ministry of Public Security, in which he criticizes Republican candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate. In addition, the FBI announced on 25 October that it is investigating “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure”. Several US media reported that hackers linked to the Chinese government had hacked into Trump's and Vance's mobile phones, and that similar actions had affected aides to the Harris campaign.
Previous interferences detected in the 2016 and 2020 elections
US authorities also denounced interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. In the first, a Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Russia used Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, the WikiLeaks website and other third parties to try to influence the election and help Donald Trump. In addition, Democrats and Republicans detailed that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton”, Trump’s rival.
A University of Nebraska study mandated by the Senate analyzed social media data linked to the 2016 election. Its findings suggested that “Instagram is likely to be a key battleground” in these campaigns. Another finding is that foreign interference focused on posting “scam messages” on Twitter about how to vote and creating confusion about voting rules, campaigns in support of third-party candidates that split the vote, and attempts to demobilize citizens with slogans such as “stay home on Election Day, your vote doesn’t matter”.
In the same direction, another study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison links this interference to a “Kremlin-linked Russian operative”, with “sophisticated digital campaign strategies and tactics”, which “demonstrates a clear understanding of political/election campaign strategies”. Another study by the University of Texas has looked at Russian maneuvers in the US, whose workings were also detected in “attacks against Estonia in 2007” and “against Ukrainian political systems since 2014”. A study by The Lancet detailed that although the interference did exist, “only 1% of users” on Twitter were exposed to 70% of these interferences, which especially affected Republicans, and that it cannot be determined that it caused “changes in attitudes, polarization or voting behavior”, the researchers conclude.
In 2020, the National Intelligence Council also detected foreign interference in the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The ODNI's first conclusion is that “no foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process”, although they did identify the dissemination of disinformation to denigrate the Democratic nomination. In 2020, interference from Iran or China was also detected. On that occasion, however, Beijing's interference was aimed at stability in the relationship with the US, which made it more targeted against Trump's campaign.
