Microsoft said Tuesday that Russian operatives have in recent weeks intensified their online attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign by producing and disseminating videos promoting “outlandish conspiracy theories” aimed at stoking US racial and political divisions.
One of the inauthentic videos, which Microsoft said had been viewed millions of times, claimed to show Harris supporters attacking an attendee of a Donald Trump rally. Another video falsely claimed that Harris paralyzed a young girl in a 2011 hit-and-run accident. Russian operatives promoted the latter story through a website pretending to be a local San Francisco media outlet, Microsoft researchers said.
Both videos were still accessible on X as of Tuesday afternoon, with one post of the video garnering 1.5 million views on its own. CNN has requested comment from the social media platform.
🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/
It’s hilariously depressing how the generation that raised us to “not believe everything you read on the internet” now believes everything they read on the internet.
It sucks how easily fake videos and articles simply become the new talking points and common “knowledge” of republicans. Not that democrats are immune to misinformation, but it is so easily spread on the right.
Well how else are you gonna expose the plight of the modern American without fabricating stories and backing them up with AI-generated video?!
What bothers me is how predictable all this was when AI really started catching on. We all saw this coming from a mile away and lo and behold here it is doing exactly what we thought it would.
It’s a well documented phenomenon that mentally well people with half decent critical thinking skills typically don’t support right wing politics. It generally preys on the gullible.
The OP article is a synopsis of a synopsis, now so shallow and devoid of nuance to be meaningless.
Russia and Iran have both undertaken cyber influence operations headed into the 2024 presidential election. In our last report, published on August 8, we detailed how Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations sought to undermine the Republican campaign through targeted hack-and-leak operations, covert social media personas, and imposter US news sites. In the past two months, Microsoft has observed a notable shift in Russian influence operations tactics reflecting the changing U.S. political environment. Specifically, we have observed Russia pivot towards targeting the Harris-Walz campaign, with actors disseminating fabricated videos designed to sow discord and spread disinformation about the new Democratic nominee Vice President Harris.
Source and an abbreviated summary from MS.
The lengthy report for those with the interest and technical competance.
Understanding propaganda, both external and internal, has become critically important to our collective future. Please, read more books: 1984; The Engineering of Consent; The Manufacturing of Consent. Then, do more than vote and engage others locally when doing it.
Its so weird how outlandish is gobbled up. Its like being in the eighties but half the population insists the weekly world news is the real source of truth and votes based on its articles.
~~They’re going to start making AI videos to support every conspiracy theory the right wing believes. We think it’s bad now that they believe racist lies about eating cats and dogs with no evidence, just wait until the bespoke AI video clips of black folks cooking a cat start showing up. This won’t be limited to fake videos o’s of politicians making gaffes. ~~
My bad for headline skimming, this is literally what they’re doing now.
Remember folks, read the content, don’t do what funderpants done did.
