A Russian disinformation campaign is targeting the midterms, and specifically Democrats, in what seems to be the first attempt by the Kremlin-backed operation to meddle in this year’s elections.

The campaign is simple, and designed to reach voters on social media. In a series of doctored selfie videos posted to various platforms, Hollywood actors appear to disavow the Democratic Party and urge viewers to vote Republican.

“When I hear about Democrats, I immediately think of corrupt Nazi whores,” a bogus Sarah Jessica Parker says. “If you love America, never vote for Democrats.”

The videos are real — one clip featuring Julia Roberts is lifted from Gucci’s 2023 Chime for Change campaign for gender equality, and others were ripped from personalized videos the actors recorded for fans on Cameo. But the audio is fake, seemingly cloned from the actors’ voices with artificial intelligence and laid over a reel of right-wing bogeymen: Pride parades, Jeffrey Epstein, stock footage of drug deals and homeless encampments.

In one of the manufactured videos posted to X, Bluesky and TikTok, Roberts is made to say that Democrats and Big Pharma are conspiring to push a sinister trans agenda. In another, Emma Caulfield appears to call Democrats vampires who drink the blood of children. A manipulated clip of Christopher Lloyd of “Back to the Future” has him railing against Black Lives Matter, and a voice-cloned Ed Begley Jr. calls Democrats “perverts.”

The videos are all branded with unauthorized CNN logos in the top left corner and push viewers to share the clips and join the #AllDemocratsAreCriminals campaign. The campaign hasn’t gone viral; the most popular posts garner just dozens of interactions and were first flagged by @antibot4navalny, an anonymous group of analysts tracking Russia-related influence operations.

The campaign is familiar to disinformation researchers and bears all the marks of a longtime Kremlin-backed operation. Referred to interchangeably as Matryoshka, Operation Overload and Storm-1679, the campaign is known for seeding social media with manipulated videos that bear the branding of real news outlets and law enforcement agencies to spread false narratives and erode public trust across Europe and the United States. It uses bot networks and has been known to send the clips directly to fact-checkers and newsrooms — a debunking from the media can amplify the messages.

The network seems to be targeting specific candidates in midterm races. On Friday, @antibot4navalny flagged a new batch of falsely CNN-branded videos targeting specific Democrats, including Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, James Talarico in Texas, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Mary Peltola in Alaska, Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. The false claims include that Talarico hates Hasidic Jews, that Pappas funded doctors who approved gender transitions for children, and that Brown’s business harmed Ohio’s bee population.

“This is Russia’s opening salvo in their attack on the U.S. midterm elections,” Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor and the co-director of its Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, told MS NOW. “In the past year they have burned through Moldova, Armenia, Romania, France, Sweden and Germany, as well as others. Now it is our turn.”

Linvill tracked the new videos and shared data showing that the campaign has used bot networks recognizable from other Matryoshka campaigns, which targeted European elections. He stressed that as a means of reaching and engaging Americans, the Matryoshka campaign is presently unimportant, its audience negligible.

“The fact that they use Cameo is hysterical. I mean, Christopher Lloyd?! How dare they. Those absolute bastards,” he joked.

Most of the videos were shared on X, which has yet to act against the accounts posting the videos. Bluesky has suspended seven accounts that posted the content, all of which appear to have been hacked from previously real users and repurposed for the campaign.

X did not immediately return a request for comment. Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, said in an email to MS NOW that the company “immediately removed” the fake videos, as part of its prohibition of “coordinated inauthentic activity designed to mislead users or manipulate the information environment.”

Russian efforts to meddle in U.S. elections are not new, nor is Russia’s preference for Republicans, including Donald Trump. If this operation’s well-documented election campaigns elsewhere are any precedent, there is more to come.

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From MS Now.