Russia was behind a video falsely claiming Haitian immigrants had voted illegally in Georgia with fake IDs in Moscow's ongoing bid to undercut Americans’ confidence in the 2024 election results, U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity officials said Friday.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told MSNBC that a forensic analysis clearly showed Russia was behind the video, the second one in a week from Moscow designed to sow division in the United States before next week’s election.
“We can definitively report that it is Russian produced and specifically designed to go viral, to undermine American confidence in the security and integrity of our elections,” Easterly said when asked about the video.
It was the second piece of sophisticated Russian disinformation in a week to gain traction online that falsely asserted voter fraud in a key swing state. Easterly said she expected more attempts by Russia and foreign adversaries to spread false information before and after Election Day.
“This is all about spewing disinformation designed to undermine trust in our elections, and to sow partisan discord, and we cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy,” Easterly said.
The first video falsely claimed to show a person ripping up filled-in ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. U.S. intelligence officials said the video was Russian-made and designed to shake public faith in the democratic process.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and CISA said in a statement on Friday that Russian influence operatives “manufactured” the bogus Georgia video and that it resembled previous disinformation put out by Moscow.
In addition, Russian cyber operators produced a video that falsely accused “an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer,” the agencies said in a joint statement, without elaborating.
Emerson Brooking, who studies disinformation at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank, said the recent videos showed how Russia was now creating its own false material that was getting traction online, unlike the last presidential election.
“That’s really a sea change from 2020 when we see these foreign networks amplifying domestic disinformation and misinformation, but not producing their own,” Brooking said.
The original material quickly attracted a large audience on X.
“It is much more likely that Americans are sharing content produced or directed by Russians than in 2020,” he added.
The two recent videos falsely claiming voter fraud and the destruction of ballots all involved nonwhite actors, and that was not a coincidence, Brooking said.
“There’s this undercurrent of racial animus, which these attempts are also trying to activate,” he said.
Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has suggested on Thursday that the false video about voter fraud in his state was likely the work of a foreign adversary. He called on the owner of X, Elon Musk, to remove the video from the social media platform.
After being caught flat-footed by Russian information warfare in the 2016 election, federal law enforcement and intelligence officials say they are trying to move faster this time to expose and disrupt foreign disinformation operations.
Federal authorities were countering foreign disinformation by “flooding the zone with accurate information,“ Easterly, of CISA, said in her interview on MSNBC.
“We’ve been putting out information about how our foreign adversaries are specifically using tactics to try and undermine the integrity of our elections," she said.
“There is a fire hose of disinformation that Americans have been subjected to,” Easterly said. “So it’s not a surprise that there are some who question the integrity of our election processes,” referring to the large volume of false election-related information circulating on social media.
Easterly also said that if prominent Americans repeat Russian propaganda and disinformation aimed at eroding public faith in the electoral process, it could cause serious damage to the country’s democracy.
“It is incredibly irresponsible for anyone of power or influence, regardless of party or politics, to be spewing Russian propaganda, designed to undermine American confidence in the security of our election,” she said. “It’s corrosive to our democracy."