By james art Links to the video were posted by multiple accounts with names like “Disobedient Truth” and “Private Patriot” in the comments section of outlets like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit.
“More bad news for Democrats: Breaking: Tim Walz’s former student, Matthew Metro, denies shocking allegation — claims Walz sexually assaulted him in 1997 while Walz was his teacher at Mankato West High School,” read the comments.
The links posted in the comments came hours before the video was shared on social media platforms like X, where it racked up millions of views.
After the Bucks County video went viral, researchers quickly traced it back to Storm 1516. U.S. intelligence agencies then confirmed that Russia was behind the fake video.
Russian influence operations have used comment sections in the past to push their narratives, including during their campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. This is the first time the tactic has been reported as part of Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2024 presidential election.
“Threading is a tactic that can have an impact with very little investment,” Darren Linville, co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, told WIRED. “By inserting misinformation into an unrelated conversation, it can be seen even if the account being used has no followers and was just created yesterday. It also doesn’t matter if the account you’re using is caught and closed because you haven’t lost an investment, you can just create another account five minutes later.”
The fake comments, Newsguard found, are then also used in reports by Russian state media to support claims about how Western audiences reacted to a particular incident.
After the assassination attempt on Trump in July, Tsargrad TV published an article with the title “Biden’s trail in the assassination attempt on Trump. Americans agree with the Kremlin’s version: “The Russians are right.” The article outlines how Americans believe the Biden administration played a role in the shooting, citing “comments to Western media articles” as evidence.
NewsGuard researchers identified 104 articles in Russian state media that cited comments from Western news outlets as evidence to support their claims between January and August of this year.
“This tactic allows bad actors to reduce the risk of detection and embed propaganda in a subtle, seemingly organic way, blending it into the casual commentary of supposed everyday Western readers,” Sadeghi said. “Repetition of the same statement in multiple formats and contexts can create a sense of familiarity that can give narratives an air of credibility.”
The network of accounts has also been used to fuel other narratives, including one earlier this month where dozens of op-eds in the New York Post and Breitbart claimed, without evidence, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used Western military aid to buy a car , which once belonged to Adolf Hitler.
This claim was spread by a network of fake websites controlled by ex-Florida cop John Duggan, who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan’s network of websites has previously shared disinformation stories from Storm-1516.
This article has been updated with commentary from FOX News and Breitbart.