Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election on Nov. 5, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts.
The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said.
A similar effort is underway in Europe. France, Germany and Poland said this on Mar. 2024, that Russia has launched a barrage of propaganda to try to influence European parliamentary elections in June.
With Donald Trump opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine and claiming that he once warned a NATO leader that he would “encourage” Russia to attack a NATO ally if it didn’t pay its share in defense spending, the potential rewards for Russian President Vladimir Putin are high, according to Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.
U.S. officials are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a “deep fake” audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a “hack and leak,” such as the politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016.
The type of pro-Russia online propaganda campaigns that thrived on Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now routine on every major social media platform, though it’s rare for individual accounts to go as viral now as they once did.
Those influence operations often create matching accounts on multiple sites, which vary drastically in their moderation policies. Accounts from one pro-Russia campaign that Meta, the owner of Facebook, cracked down on late last year, an English-language news influencer persona called “People Say,” are still live on other platforms, though some are dormant.
Moscow and its proxies have long sought to exploit divisions in American society. But experts and former U.S. officials said Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the country’s deepening political polarization and sharp cuts in disinformation and election integrity teams at X and other platforms provide fertile ground to spread confusion, division and chaos.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Russia primarily targeted the Democratic Party to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine, as it most likely blames Biden for forging a unified Western alliance backing Kyiv, according to a recently released U.S. intelligence assessment.
In what appears to be an effort to deepen divisions, Russia has amplified the political dispute between the Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over security at the Texas border over the past month. Russian politicians, bloggers, state media and bots have promoted the idea that America is headed to a new “civil war.”
It was a quintessential move by a Russian regime with a long tradition of trying to manipulate existing political rifts, like immigration, to its advantage, experts said.
But there’s so far no sign that Russia’s disinformation operation in Texas has had any significant impact, said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council.
“So far, Russian operations targeting the U.S. have been opportunistic. They see whatever narrative is rising to the top, and they try to push it,” Brooking said. “Disinformation isn’t created in a vacuum. The more polarized a country is, the easier it is for foreign actors to infiltrate and hijack its political processes.”
Russia’s deployment of fake accounts to influence Trump votes casts a shadow over the democratic process. This manipulation highlights the urgent need for enhanced cybersecurity and media literacy measures to protect the integrity of future elections, reinforcing the importance of preserving a transparent and trustworthy democratic system.
