US election 2024
Microsoft: Russian trolls spread fake news about Kamala Harris

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is apparently the target of disinformation campaigns
© Matt Rourke/AP / DPA
Microsoft claims to have uncovered who is behind videos with false information about Kamala Harris. The group is called Storm-1516 and comes from Russia.
After President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, “Russian influence operations” initially struggled to shift their actions against the Democratic camp, Microsoft said in a blog post on Tuesday. However, in late August, Storm-1516 began producing content linking Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, to “outrageous fake conspiracy theories” in an attempt to discredit them.
Misleading video about Kamala Harris
Storm-1516 is known, according to experts, for producing misleading videos in which actors pose as whistleblowers or journalists who spread scandalous misinformation. In the case of the alleged hit-and-run video, Microsoft says the group paid an actor to appear as the man who was falsely said to have been paralyzed since the accident. It also set up a fake website for a nonexistent news channel called “KBSF-TV.” The fabricated story was spread via this site and also circulated on social media, such as X.com. In total, the video was viewed an estimated 2.7 million times.
US election 2024
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The US Department of Justice recently filed a lawsuit against two employees of the Russian state broadcaster RT on charges of money laundering in connection with alleged attempts to influence the elections in seven weeks. The social media group Meta, in turn, decided to ban RT and other Russian state media worldwide from its online networks Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads. The US company justified the ban with “foreign interference activities” using fake news.