The Russian Operation Using AI Fakes to Target Voters

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1:44Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. The video shows a man in a car, seatbelt on, talking directly to the camera.

2:10He says he sells Bugattis and that a famous woman just bought one. Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The man said he was pleased to welcome Zelenska into the Bugatti family.

2:32The video, bolstered by a picture of a receipt for 4.5 million euros, took off. It was scandalous. The Ukrainian president's wife buying a luxury sports car while her country is at war and asking for Western aid. It also wasn't true. If you look at it closely, you see there's something wrong with the video. It looks like it's been altered. Stephanie Baker is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. There are weird skips in the video. His head doesn't look like it's moving together with the rest of his body. and the video shows an invoice from Bugatti, but it has misspellings, including the town where this sale took place.

3:22When Stephanie reached out to Bugatti, they confirmed that the report was a fabrication. Bugatti actually said, we normally do not comment on clients, but we feel that this is so wrong that we're going to come out and say, she is not a client and this is not a true story. But the video had already done its job. It was picked up by quite a few people. It was shared by an influencer. And it came in the context of a few other stories alleging luxury spending by Olena Zelenska. The Bugatti video, Stephanie found, was just one piece of a much broader disinformation campaign. Stephanie has written extensively about Russia.

4:06And over months of reporting, she and Bloomberg data journalist Pri Bengani linked nearly 200 posts like this one to a Russian influence operation that researchers call Storm 1516. We've just been monitoring this operation for the past year, cataloging and mapping how many fake stories that they've spread, who are the network of influencers, and what are the sort of characteristics or fingerprints, if you will, of one of these Storm 15-16 videos. And what are those fingerprints? They usually carry some kind of pro-Kremlin narrative, alleging Ukrainian corruption or corruption allegations against Western politicians who've been very supportive of Ukraine.

4:53They often are presented as news reports or whistleblowers who have uncovered information that other news outlets don't want to report on. And generally they are claims that cannot be verified through other means from reputable sources. Stephanie says, post by post, Storm 1516 is waging a global disinformation campaign, seeding doubts about Zelensky, Western politicians, and reality itself. And the volume of this disinformation has been going up, thanks to better and cheaper AI, and fewer online guardrails. Stephanie found that twice as many posts bearing Storm 1516's fingerprints went out in the first quarter of this year compared to last.

5:42They've used social media and the lack of regulation of social media to really churn out these narratives on an industrial scale. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, inside the Russian influence operation, Storm 1516.

6:08When exactly did Storm 1516 start disseminating disinformation and why? They started in August 2023. Elon Musk buys X in October of 2022 and dismantles a lot of the trust and safety measures that X had put into place under the previous ownership, fires a lot of content moderators, and this Russian disinformation operation really takes off. And they really started with Ukraine, which is, of course, Russia's most important target, because they know that if military aid continues flowing to Kiev, that's going to make it much harder for the Kremlin to win this war. But after Ukraine, they started broadening it out.

6:54They did target the U.S. election. They spread numerous fake stories about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. They made false allegations that there were illegal immigrants voting in the state of Georgia. But then when Trump won, they really turned their focus to Europe. And then they started targeting European leaders with allegations of corruption. And to be clear, none of these stories are true. None of them are true. No, I mean, the most ridiculous of them is that President Macron was spending 148 million euros to build a private underground bunker in the event of World War III.

7:35You know, and again, they produced a fake document. They alleged a Swiss company that had already gone into bankruptcy was involved. So these were these are false tales, but they go viral. Who is behind Storm 1516? It's a very murky operation, and I'll tell you what we know, and there's a lot that we don't know. Western officials believe it is backed by Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. A Ukrainian intelligence assessment that I saw tied it specifically to a GRU unit called 29155 that has been responsible for various sabotage operations and assassinations, including the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018.

8:18and they have provided funding for servers and AI software to produce a lot of these narratives. It's overseen overall from the Kremlin by Putin's first deputy chief of the presidential administration, a man named Sergei Kirienko, who kind of sets the overall broad goals for the Russia's disinformation campaign. And then there are specific individuals in Russia that are helping to carry it out, including an ex-Florida cop. But of course, the key people in this operation are the influencers. Several influencers are known to share Storm 15, 16 content. You know, there's the production side and then there's the distribution side.

9:03So the distribution side is one of the things we tried to focus on because I think that's where you can get the most kind of accountability. And you worked with other researchers on this analysis. Tell me a little bit about the team. that was tracking Storm 15, 16 alongside you and Bloomberg reporters? We worked with Clemson University's Darren Linville, who runs a media lab, and he was the first to identify this as a distinct new operation in late 2023. So we were tracking everything and we were double-checking everything that we found with other researchers to make sure that, you know, others were in agreement, that a particular narrative or video that we had found was indeed the work of Storm 1516.

9:51And of course, Stephanie, Russia has a pretty long history of misinformation and disinformation. I'm wondering what's new about what you found and about Storm 1516's tactics and reach. The history of this is fascinating. The most famous conspiracy theory that Moscow planted was in the Soviet period when they spread the lie that HIV was cooked up in a U.S. lab. So they've been doing this for years and years. But I think the new thing is the use of AI and exploiting what is really a weakness, I think, particularly in the U.S. tech system, which is the lack of regulation of social media. And people are really willing to believe a lot of these stories.

10:35They are not necessarily trying to convince people to believe in things that they don't already think might be true. They're trying to reinforce ideas and views that they know a U.S. audience or a European audience would find very receptive. I'm wondering if you could walk us through a typical Storm 1516 post. The one I'll go through is a false story about Olena Zelenska. And so that story started with an Instagram video from a woman who claimed to be a former Cartier employee. She brandished a receipt that she claimed proved that Olena Zielenska spent$1.1 million on jewelry during a trip to New York.

11:23But Olena Zielenska and her husband were actually in Canada on the day of the receipt. but the Instagram video was picked up by a Nigerian website and they ran it as a factual story but it was run under a label of paid content so someone paid them to post that a phony website run from Moscow with with a lot of just generic news and fake news called DC Weekly picked up the story and it was picked up by various influencers on social media and spread from there. And that was one of the cases where Darren Linville at Clemson University documented how it actually changed the conversation online. And he measured that in the week after that story ran, it accounted for 11 % of the conversation about the Zelensky's, which is a huge number if you think about it, in terms of being able to change the nature of the conversation online about who are the Zelensky's, what were they doing, and crucially with a false allegation that they were misspending Western aid money.

12:31And Stephanie, you've identified two kind of recent game changers for Storm 1516. There's the fact that X has pulled back on content moderation and the advent of more highly sophisticated AI technology. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how these two factors really work to expand Storm 15-16's reach and elevate their tactics. It's one of the most fascinating parts of this story. When I started looking at this a year ago, some of the AI doctored videos that we came across were, with a trained eye, pretty crude. And I think the technology has gotten so sophisticated now, it's so much harder to spot just in the past year.

13:14And it's very hard for an ordinary user who's scrolling on a phone to identify what is fake and what is real. I think X had a pretty good content moderation system in place a few years ago. But what X has decided to do in lieu of content moderation is to rely principally on community notes, which is a user-generated system of marking a particular post or video and raising questions about the factual accuracy of it. But what we found in our reporting is that less than 20 % of the almost 200 narratives that Storm 1516 spread had any kind of community note warning readers that this was false. And what has X said in response to your reporting and the issue that you've identified with the system.

14:05They did not respond. One of X's top government affairs officials testified before the UK parliament in March, and he said that X had taken down 800 million accounts in 2024 alone. Now, he did not identify how many of those were related to Russia, but he said that there was a coordinated campaign by Russia to flood the zone with a particular narrative. X has taken down about 20 accounts that we identified as frequent shares of Storm 15-16 content from the time that we started this investigation to when we published. But there are dozens of users of accounts out there that have regularly spread Storm 15-16 material that is patently false, and there's been no action taken against them.

15:00So how does Storm 1516 fit into the Kremlin's broader geopolitical aims? What impact has it had? And can it be stopped? That's next.

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18:16Stephanie, what are the goals of Storm 1516? Are their aims primarily political? I think Russia's goal is really to advance a pro-Kremlin narrative that Ukraine is corrupt, that Europe is corrupt and doomed to failure, and that support for Ukraine should stop because Russia is going to win the war anyway. And I think they really want to undermine democracy in Europe and the U.S. because I think they view that as a threat to Putin's own role. But ultimately, they are chaos agents. I think they really want to disrupt. And it doesn't really matter necessarily if it's left or right. They want to just encourage people to question established truths.

19:06Why is that useful for Russia? Well, anything that undermines European and U.S. democracy would therefore undermine those politicians that have been very staunch in their support for Ukraine and who have repeatedly called Russia a security threat. And how effective has this disinformation been in advancing those goals, both in terms of sowing chaos and pushing particular political candidates? It's really hard to assess impact and how much a particular narrative has changed people's views. Pollsters generally don't ask questions about debunked claims. And you can't really draw a direct line between one particular video advancing a false narrative and an electoral outcome.

19:54However, I think that that doubt that maybe, for instance, in the U.S., that the election wasn't fair, that some of their stories feed into that narrative and reinforce it, I think they've been more successful in some cases than in others. They backed Viktor Orban, who lost Hungary's election in a resounding vote. And we documented how the number of false narratives and videos targeting Petr Magyar, the then opposition leader and now leader, really ramped up right ahead of the Hungarian election. So obviously he won by a lanceline, but I think even where pro-Kremlin candidates lost, I think those narratives did influence voters on the margin and they shifted the conversation to really highlight anti-EU debates.

20:51You know, the AFD, for instance, in Germany, the far right party doubled their vote share compared to the last election. And we know that there were various narratives coming from Russia trying to support them. Now, is that down to a particular video? I think it's really hard to say. But it's kind of like small doses of poison in a water supply. You don't really know how it's affecting you until it builds up. And I think that's why it's so dangerous that there's been so little action taken against some of these disinformation videos. How has the Kremlin responded to your reporting? What do they say about Storm 1516?

21:30I've gotten denials from Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, before on other things. So I was expecting a denial on this and he just declined to comment. What is the role of governments and regulators in this space? The U.S. has really stepped back in terms of doing anything on tech regulation or exposing covert nation state disinformation. The U.S. government had several agencies that they'd set up to expose this stuff. The FBI had a task force. The U.S. intelligence agencies had a task force. And the State Department had an agency as well. And all of those have now been dismantled. And the EU did fine X 120 million euros in December as part of a broader investigation into misinformation.

22:20That investigation is still ongoing. But I think it's really down to the EU and the Digital Services Act to really police some of these big social media firms. And Stephanie, what you've identified is a global problem. You found that about a third of these fabricated stories targeted elections. So I'm wondering what your takeaway is when it comes to future elections in the U.S., specifically like the midterms that are coming up in November. What role could disinformation play? I think they're going to target the midterms aggressively. There's no reason to think that they wouldn't. There's a lot riding on that election.

23:01And we saw them do it in 2024. I don't see any reason why they would hold back this year. And I think the real concern is that there are no dedicated government agencies monitoring this in the way that we had before. Unless someone's calling out these videos or narratives, many people will believe them. You did see in 2024 the FBI and several other government agencies issuing public statements warning about these narratives about immigrants voting in Georgia, false allegations against candidates. But I don't know if that's going to happen this time. And I think it's really important that it does.

23:41This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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