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According to experts, many videos try to seduce right-wing voters with false messages about President Biden.
By Julian E. Barnes and Steven Lee Myers
Julian Barnes, who covers U. S. intelligence agencies, and Steven Lee Myers, who covers disinformation, reported on Russian efforts for the 2024 presidential election.
Last month, a video purporting to tell the story of a web troll farm in Kyiv targeting the U. S. election began circulating on social media.
Speaking in English with a Slavic accent, “Olesya” tells in the first user how she and her colleagues first worked with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Then, he says, after the stopover in the United States, mysterious people who “were probably from the CIA. “”, the organization began sending messages to the American public about President Biden.
“We were told that our new target was the United States of America, especially the upcoming elections,” the woman explains in the video. “In short, we were asked to do everything we could to save Donald Trump from winning the election. »
The video is one component of an effort to muddy the political debate in the run-up to the U. S. election.
U. S. officials say the video is consistent with Russian disinformation operations, as Russian-aligned warriors appear to be refining their strategy. Some of the old tactics from 2016 or 2020 can simply be reused, with additional improvements.
An investigation of the video by U. S. intelligence agencies found that “Olesya’s” voice synthetically generated, an intelligence official said Thursday, a possible sign of how Russian operatives are combining new techniques with old tactics.
While there have been widespread fears about the role artificial intelligence could play this year in misleading voters, current and former officials have said the videos pose one of the most immediate threats.
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