A Russian disinformation operation is deploying an army of bots to inflate view counts of fictitious posts about celebrities and Democratic candidates ahead of the US midterm elections, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
The underlying content appeared from early September: AI fabricated video clips of well known actors and musicians, including Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts and Cher, attacking Democrats, some urging people to join a campaign under the hashtag AllDemocratsAreCriminals, alongside clips making false allegations of corruption against Democratic candidates. Researchers at Graphika and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have attributed the posts to Matryoshka, also known as Operation Overload, a Russian state backed operation that floods social platforms with fabricated material dressed as genuine news. AFP reported in September that the clips were built from footage taken elsewhere online, including celebrity recordings from the Cameo service and a 2023 fashion campaign, with cloned audio, altered lip movement and a CNN logo stamped on top. CNN has said the videos have no affiliation with the network, and several of the actors featured have said publicly that the words are not theirs.
The bot layer is what changes the scale. Fabricated clips on their own reach whoever stumbles on them; coordinated inauthentic accounts boosting view counts are designed to push the material into recommendation systems and make fringe content look like a trend. US intelligence assessments reported last month concluded that the Kremlin has again authorised a digital influence campaign around the election season, while finding no evidence of attempts against voting machinery itself.
Status: reported operation, attributed by independent researchers to a known Russian campaign; no US government attribution of the bot amplification had been published when this edition closed.