By james art However, the claims didn’t go viral until last week and the release of the deepfake video.
Darren Linville, co-director at Clemson University’s Center for Media Forensics, tells WIRED that he immediately recognized this tactic as part of a well-established Russian disinformation game.
“There’s no doubt that this is Storm-1516,” said Linville, whose team uncovered the network last fall.
Linville says the account that first shared the AI-altered video bears all the hallmarks of previous Storm-1516 campaigns. “It’s standard for them to create an X or YouTube account to initially post stories,” Linville says.
The campaign organized by Storm-1516 often begins with the publication of a fake story and video by a whistleblower or citizen journalist, outlined the US mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in July. The disinformation is “amplified by other seemingly unrelated online networks,” the US mission said. The claims then take on a life of their own, being shared and reposted by unwitting social media users who likely have no idea where the videos originated.
Fake stories can also be picked up by other media that cover viral stories on social media. In the case of Walz’s claims, they ended up on MSN, a news aggregator site owned by Microsoft.
In the past, Storm-1516 relied on a network of fake news websites run by Dougan to push its narratives. On Saturday, a story referencing the RedPill78 interview, the Black Insurrectionist posts and the deeply fake video was posted on over 100 Dougan websites simultaneously.
This was first discovered by Alex Liberty, a researcher who tracks the activity of Russian propaganda networks and who agrees with Linville’s claim that the deepfake video bears all the hallmarks of a Storm-1516 campaign.
“We believe this may be a coordinated campaign in [an] are trying to make multiple false allegations of the same nature against Tim Walz through different channels and in different formats to bring an image of legitimacy to the narrative,” Liberty told WIRED.
Mackenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, agrees.
“The false narrative appears to be part of a broader campaign being pushed by pro-Kremlin media and QAnon influencers ahead of the November 5, 2024 US election to portray Waltz, whose political appeal is as an ordinary teacher and coach, as a pedophile who had inappropriate relationships with minors,” Sadeghi wrote in an analysis of the deepfake video.