Researchers uncover inflated views of fakes about US Democrats — The Japan Times
Researchers have uncovered a bot network that artificially inflated view counts for fake videos about Democratic Party candidates and American celebrities ahead of the US midterm elections. According to The Japan Times, researchers link the campaign to Matryoshka, also known as Operation Overload, an operation supported by the Russian Federation, an aggressor state.
Fake stories presented as news
Videos created using artificial intelligence began appearing on X in early September. In some clips using the likenesses of Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts and Cher, the celebrities allegedly criticized Democrats and called for people to join the #AllDemocratsAreCriminals campaign. Other videos contained false accusations of corruption and other misconduct against Democratic candidates.
Bloomberg analyzed 130 videos and fabricated newspaper pages published by the network from September 10 to October 9. A significant share of the materials was identified by the Antibot4Navalny research group; the findings were also confirmed and supplemented by the US organizations Graphika and dTeam.
Among the fakes were clips featuring the logos of ABC News and CBS News. One of them claimed that Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the Senate, paid OnlyFans models. A representative for Talarico denied this. Another clip baselessly claimed that Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff allegedly owns eight undeclared real estate properties.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Signs of artificial popularity
According to Antibot4Navalny's observations, the number of views on such posts could rise to 200,000 within the first hour and then abruptly stop growing. Researchers consider this atypical of organic content distribution. Most accounts that posted the clips had only a few followers and had shown no activity for years before that, while the number of likes and reposts remained insignificant.
For example, a video containing false claims about Talarico and Ossoff received 50,839 views in 20 minutes, but only one repost. Another clip, which baselessly accused Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar of receiving $72 million in suspicious donations, had 155,300 views, two likes and no reposts.
X platform response
X suspended 80% of the accounts that, according to Bloomberg, distributed Matryoshka materials about the midterm elections. Another ten accounts were removed after Bloomberg contacted the platform. At the same time, researchers note that new accounts appear after suspensions. In a post dated October 14, X reported suspending more than 13,000 accounts linked to suspected foreign influence operations by Iran, Russia and China.
