WASHINGTON –
A video purporting to depict voter fraud in Georgia is faux and the work of “Russian affect actors” decided to undermine religion within the integrity of subsequent week’s presidential election, U.S. intelligence officers mentioned Friday.
The announcement that the video was faux represented an effort by the FBI and different federal companies, 4 days earlier than Tuesday’s election, to fight international disinformation by calling it out quite than letting it unfold for days unchecked. It follows an analogous assertion final week that additionally attributed to Russian actors a extensively circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.
The 20-second video in query, which started circulating on the social media platform X on Thursday afternoon, reveals somebody who describes himself as a Haitian immigrant speaking about how he’s aspiring to vote a number of occasions in two Georgia counties for Vice President Kamala Harris.
He flashes a number of purported Georgia IDs with completely different names and addresses, and an Related Press evaluation of the data on two of the IDs confirms it doesn’t match any registered voters in Gwinnett or Fulton counties., the 2 counties he talked about.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger mentioned Thursday night time that the video is “clearly faux” and sure the product of Russian trolls “trying to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election.”
Intelligence officers echoed that discovering Friday, saying the video was manufactured by “Russian affect actors” and was a part of “Moscow’s broader effort to boost unfounded questions in regards to the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions amongst Individuals.”
The intelligence neighborhood expects Russia, within the days earlier than the election and weeks and months after, “to create and launch extra media content material that seeks to undermine belief within the integrity of the election and divide Individuals,” mentioned the joint assertion from the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company and the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence.
The publish that initially popularized the video was not out there on Friday morning, however copycat variations of the video had been nonetheless being shared extensively with false claims it confirmed election fraud.
The video in its type and methodology of dissemination is just like different movies created by Storm-1516, also referred to as CopyCop, a identified Russian disinformation community that has created a number of faux movies this election, in line with Darren Linvill, co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson College, who has researched the group.
