NEW YORK β Foreign adversaries show continued determination to influence this yearβs presidential election β and there are signs their activity will intensify as Election Day nears, Microsoft said in a report Wednesday.
Russian operatives are doubling down on fake videos to smear Democratic Vice President Kamala Harrisβ campaign, while Chinese-linked social media campaigns are maligning down-ballot Republicans who are critical of China, the companyβs threat intelligence arm said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Iranian actors who allegedly sent emails aimed at intimidating U.S. voters in 2020 are surveying election-related websites and major media outlets, raising concerns they could be preparing for another scheme this year, the tech giant said.
The Microsoft logo is seenΒ April 12, 2016 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris.
The report serves as a warningΒ β building on others from U.S. intelligence officialsΒ β that as the nation enters this critical final stretch and begins counting ballots, the worst influence efforts might be yet to come.
U.S. officials say they remain confident that election infrastructure is secure enough to withstand any attacks from American adversaries. Still, in a tight election, foreign efforts to influence voters are raising concern.
Microsoft noted that some of the disinformation campaigns it tracks received little authentic engagement from U.S. audiences, but others were amplified by unwitting Americans, exposing thousands to foreign propaganda in the final weeks of voting.
Russia, China and Iran reject claims they seek to meddle with the U.S. election.
"The presidential elections are the United States' domestic affairs. China has no intention and will not interfere in the US election," the Chinese Embassy said in a statement.
"Having already unequivocally and repeatedly announced, Iran neither has any motive nor intent to interfere in the U.S. election; and, it therefore categorically repudiates such accusations," read a statement from Iran's mission to the United Nations.
A message left with the Russian Embassy was not immediately returned Wednesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian shake hands Wednesday during their meeting on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia.
The report reveals an expanding landscape of coordinated campaigns to advance adversaries' priorities as global wars and economic concerns raise the stakes for the U.S. election around the world.
It details a trend also seen in the 2016 and 2020 elections of foreign actors covertly fomenting discord among American voters, furthering a divide in the electorate that has left the nation almost evenly split just 13 days before voting concludes.
"History has shown that the ability of foreign actors to rapidly distribute deceptive content can significantly impact public perception and electoral outcomes," Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, said in a news release. "With a particular focus on the 48 hours before and after Election Day, voters, government institutions, candidates and parties must remain vigilant to deceptive and suspicious activity online."
The report adds to previous findings from Microsoft and U.S. intelligence that suggest the Kremlin is committed to lambasting Harris' character online, a sign of its preference for another Donald Trump presidency.
Russian actors have spent recent months churning out both AI-generated content and more rudimentary spoofs and staged videos spreading disinformation about Harris, Microsoft's analysts found.
Among the fake videos were a staged clip of a park ranger impersonator claiming Harris killed an endangered rhinoceros in Zambia, as well as a video sharing baseless allegations about her running mate Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials also attributed to Russia this week.
Another Russian influence actor has been producing fake election-related videos spoofing American organizations from Fox News to the FBI and Wired magazine, according to the report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands Tuesday prior to a welcome banquet for the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia.
Over the last several months, China focused on down-ballot races, and on general efforts to sow distrust and democratic dissatisfaction. A Chinese influence actor widely known as Spamouflage has been using fake social media users to attack down-ballot Republicans who publicly denounced China, according to Microsoft's analysts.
Candidates targeted included Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, all of whom are running for reelection, the report said. The group also attacked Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
Iran, which has spent the 2024 campaign going after Trump with disinformation as well as hacking into the former president's campaign, hasn't been stymied by ongoing tension in the Middle East, according to the Microsoft report.
Groups linked to Iran weaponized divided opinions on the Israel-Hamas War to influence American voters, the analysts found. For example, an Iranian operated persona took to Telegram and X to call on Americans to sit out the elections due to the candidates' support for Israel.
Even as Russia, China and Iran try to influence voters, intelligence officials said Tuesday there is still no indication they are plotting significant attacks on election infrastructure as a way to disrupt the outcome.
If they tried, improvements to election security means there is no way they could alter the results, Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told The Associated Press this month.
Intelligence officials on Tuesday also warned that Russia and Iran may try to encourage violent protests in the U.S. after next month's election, setting the stage for potential complications in the post-election period.
What are 'inauthentic influencers,' and what's their role in an election where democracy is on the ballot?
What are 'inauthentic influencers,' and what's their role in an election where democracy is on the ballot?
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"Biden's plan exposed on the news. Illegals voting in 2024 election. Take the poll & get your Free Trump gift! #Trump2024," a June advertisement on Facebook and Instagram from Patriot Sanctuary reads.
Accompanying the debunked statement that falsely implied President Joe Biden planned to have undocumented immigrants vote for him in the 2024 election is the Newsmax video where the claim originated and a call to actionβtake a poll and claim your free "In God We Trust" Trump hat and gold coin before they run out.
At the end of the poll, the user is prompted to enter credit card information on a page similar to other reported scams that promise free American flags and then make unsolicited charges to users' cards.
As candidates ramp up messaging ahead of the election, both Democrats and Republicans are leaning into the influencer economy, pushing their messages about how each will lead the country if elected in November. But, another kind of influencer has been running ads on popular social networks and may have changed the way you think about political subjects without you even realizing it.
They've been dubbed "inauthentic influencers," faceless networks of pages like Patriot Sanctuary entirely unaffiliated with legitimate political campaigns. They run paid advertisements to push misleading claims and, often, scams.
Collabstr analyzed the latest reports from the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship's ElectionGraph project to illustrate how so-called inauthentic influencers have sought to manipulate the decisions of voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
IDJC partnered with analytics company Neo4j to analyze trends in the Facebook social graphβa map of the connections between pages, users, and personal information underlying social networks. The report draws on an analysis of advertisements run on Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. It's worth noting that Neo4j performed its analysis before Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party candidate.
Researchers described finding a "massive amount of manipulation and misinformation targeting Americans" through what it calls inauthentic influencers on social media platforms. These are not your typical influencers marketing cosmetics and sneakers. Instead, they're networks of seemingly independent accounts with names like "Liberty Defender Group" and "Truly American" running nearly identical, coordinated political advertisements with no disclaimer.
In many cases, researchers found these networks pushing factually inaccurate and misleading claims as well as outright scams. Sometimes they're linked by common credentials like phone numbers and addresses, connections that aren't obvious to the users who see their ads in their feeds.
Inauthentic influencers potentially reach millions with manipulative content
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Ultimately, the IDJC identified 158 networks of these accounts collectively representing $8.5 million in ad spending and 504 million impressions from September 2023 through April 2024.
An impression is a count of every time a post appears on a user's screen while scrolling on a social networkβwhether or not they liked, shared, commented, or interacted with it at all. It provides the broadest possible picture of the impact a single post may have had on users.
For comparison, the analytics service Databox estimates that the entire apparel and footwear industry achieved 460,000 impressions via Facebook ads in one month in 2023. If extrapolated over the period of the IDCJ study, that could amount to roughly 3.68 million impressionsβa fraction of the more than 500 million impressions made by inauthentic influencers.
Researchers categorized pages according to independent reviews by team members, Google searches to determine political party affiliation, and the Ad Fontes media bias scale. The team found that conservative-leaning pages spent $2.1 million more on ads over the period studied and recorded 315.4 million more impressions than progressive-leaning pages. And accounts falling into these ideological categories targeted different groups of Meta users across Facebook and Instagram.
Targeting older users in highly populous and swing states
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Those partisan pages were equally likely to target older users over younger ones with their posts, but there were differences in the gender of users targeted. Researchers drew a parallel between how progressive pages aligned with national political trends in targeting more women with their ads than men and how conservative-leaning pages targeted men more heavily.
The ads tended to push misleading information about different topics based on their ideological leanings, too. Among conservative influencer networks identified, immigration, the economy, safety, and foreign policy were the top issues. For progressive pages, the economy was an important issue, too, along with health and social issues, including abortion access, according to researchers.
MAGA swag and health benefits scams
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Aside from Donald Trump-related swag and financial scams from conservative-leaning pages, researchers found that progressive-leaning pages also commonly pushed health benefits-related scams to users they targeted with ads.
Facebook has since shut down the Patriot Sanctuary page and others identified in research from the IDJC, which makes its database of political ads on Meta available publicly. Researchers warn, however, that when one page is closed, another tends to pop up in its place.
Data from Meta also paints an incomplete picture of the networks of dishonest actors that could be working to fleece concerned citizens and manipulate voters. The company is the only major ad platform or social network that allows approved organizations access to its advertising data for study. Social networks, including X, formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok, do not offer the same access.
"It underscores that tech platforms need to do more to allow academics and journalists access to platform data so that political actors can be held to account with the American public," lead researcher Jennifer Stromer-Galley said in a statement.
Story editing by Carren Jao. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Collabstr and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
