Russian Propaganda Unit Appears to Be Behind Spread of False Tim Walz Sexual Abuse Claims

The claims, however, didn’t go viral until last week and the release of the deepfake video.

Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED that he immediately recognized this tactic as part of Russia’s well-established disinformation playbook.

“There is little doubt this is Storm-1516,” says Linvill, whose team uncovered the network last fall.

Linvill says the account that first shared the AI-altered video bears all the hallmarks of previous Storm-1516 campaigns. “It is standard for them to create an X or YouTube account for initial placement of stories,” says Linvill.

The campaign orchestrated by Storm-1516 often begins with the posting of a fake story and video from a whistleblower or citizen journalist, the US mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe outlined in July. Disinformation is “amplified by other seemingly unaffiliated online networks,” the US mission stated. The claims then take on a life of their own, shared and reposted by unwitting social media users who likely have no idea of where the videos originated.

The fake stories can also be picked up by other media outlets that cover viral social media stories. In the case of the Walz claims, they ended up on MSN, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft.

In the past, Storm-1516 has relied on a network of fake news websites run by Dougan to push its narratives. On Saturday, a story that referenced the RedPill78 interview, the Black Insurrectionist posts, and the deepfake video was published on over 100 of Dougan’s websites simultaneously.

This was first discovered by Alex Liberty, a researcher who tracks the activity of Russia’s propaganda networks and who agrees with Linvill’s assertion that the deepfake video bears all the hallmarks of a Storm-1516 campaign.

“We believe that it might be a coordinated campaign in [an] attempt to bring numerous false accusations of the same nature against Tim Walz through different channels and in different formats in order to bring an image of legitimacy to the narrative,” Liberty tells WIRED.

McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, agrees.

“The false narrative appears to be part of a wider campaign pushed by pro-Kremlin media and QAnon influencers ahead of the November 5, 2024, US elections aimed at portraying Walz, whose political appeal is as an everyman schoolteacher and coach, as a pedophile who had inappropriate relationships with minors,” Sadeghi wrote in an analysis of the deepfake video.