A group publishing pro-Russia propaganda online is impersonating legitimate news outlets in an attempt to disseminate disinformation, Politico reported, citing misinformation tracking organization NewsGuard.
The effort, known as Storm-1679, creates websites that mimic real news outlets and uses those sites to push fake news stories. They have published disinformation designed to look like stories from ABC News, the BBC, and Politico, among others. The group has also used artificial intelligence to proliferate fake videos, often hooked to major news events. To some degree, their efforts are working. People — including right-wing influencers — have fallen for them.
One such video, a fabricated E! News report, claimed this past February that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) paid movie stars to visit Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022. It was posted to social media with the caption: “USAID was using our tax dollars to send celebrities to UKRAINE to increase Zelensky’s popularity around the world and, in particular, the U.S…. BURN USAID TO THE GROUND. We don’t need it under any department.”
Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk fell for the scam. Both reposted the video on X.
“The video is not authentic and did not originate from E! News,” the outlet said in a statement to Reuters at the time.
“It typically tends to surge and launch a wave of fakes around a particular news event,” Ivana Stradner, a researcher on Russia at the D.C. think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Politico.
NewsGuard is tracking 556 domains “that have promoted false claims about the Russian-Ukraine conflict.” Some of those domains are official Russian state media sources, but others are not official Russian state propaganda. They are “anonymous websites, foundations, and research websites with uncertain funding — at least some of which may have undisclosed links to the Russian government.”
Fake stories that these domains have perpetuated include that the U.S. has bioweapons labs in Eastern Europe, that Nazism is spreading in Ukraine politics and society, and that a civilian massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, was staged.
While the threat of disinformation and AI fakes increases, the Trump administration is phasing out efforts to combat it.
The State Department, under Sec. Marco Rubio, shut down the agency’s office that battles against foreign disinformation. Rubio claimed — without evidence — that the office was spending “millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has also ousted federal workers who combatted disinformation related to U.S. elections.
Stradner told Politico these rollbacks are “a dream come true for Putin.”
