A pedestrian looks at his smartphone on an embankment with the Kremlin in the background, in central Moscow, October 8, 2026. Researchers who track online influence operations say Kremlin-backed groups are renewing tactics they used to sow distrust and discord in previous elections in the United States and around the world.
Igor Ivanko/AFP via Getty Images
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Igor Ivanko/AFP via Getty Images
Russian operatives are spreading fabricated claims about Democratic candidates, AI-manipulated celebrity videos and fake messages masquerading as real news outlets in an attempt to influence American voters in the run-up to Election Day.
Researchers who track online influence operations and lawmakers briefed by the intelligence community say Kremlin-backed groups are renewing familiar tactics they used to sow distrust and discord in past elections in the United States and around the world.
“It’s a carnival out there,” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters this week. “They do everything they can to generate a feeling of chaos and anarchy.”
The aim is to exacerbate divisions, erode trust in democracy and, above all, undermine US support for Ukraine.
“Ultimately, the main problem for Russia is and must be Ukraine,” said Darren Linvill, co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who has tracked foreign propaganda campaigns for years.
Linvill says the Russian manual is consistent. A false statement or divisive narrative is spread on social media or on a fake website masquerading as a news agency or think tank. It is spread by state media, fake automated accounts or, increasingly, by paid influencers, in the hope that it will be seen and repeated by real people.
“The same way marketing companies pay an influencer to spread, you know, ‘Nike is a great shoe,’ the Russians are doing it with fake news and made-up lies,” he said. “They use influencers who know their audience, who are part of their audience, and who know how to deliver to that audience a message that they want to hear,” Linvill said.
A Russian operation leveraged that model this week to spread a baseless accusation against a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Linvill and several other research groups attributed them to Russian operators whom the research community dubbed Storm-1516. He is known for staging fake videos with actors and whitewashing their allegations through widely followed influencer accounts.
Two fraudulent videos targeting the Senate candidate were posted Tuesday on X by an account created last month and with little following. The account’s X profile indicated it was based in the United States, but the social media platform publicly flagged it as possibly using a proxy such as a virtual private network, which could conceal its location.
The videos were likely created using artificial intelligence, according to Graphika, a research company that analyzes online communities. Linvill said one of the hallmarks of the Storm-1516 videos is the use of real actors whose faces are swapped using AI to look like someone else.
The post was immediately shared by a network of 15 Linvill accounts reported as bots. About 12 hours later, one of the videos was shared in new posts by three highly followed X accounts, which researchers said had already amplified other stories attributed to Storm-1516. One of them solicited paid partnerships on
One of the two fake videos was viewed about 857,000 times in 24 hours, according to an analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company. By Wednesday evening, the account that first posted the videos and one of the major accounts that shared the claim had been suspended by X, and the other two major accounts that had amplified it had their posts removed.
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Storm-1516 released fraudulent videos making similar baseless accusations against Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and purporting to show torn ballots for President Trump.
Linvill says the operation attempts to build on narratives already circulating among Americans. “It’s hard to persuade anyone of anything,” he said. “But what you can do is strengthen your beliefs.”
During this election cycle, Russian operations also spread messages that Democrats are abandoning support for Israel and fabricated reports accusing Democratic candidates of corruption.
“I have increasingly come to view Russia as essentially a dark money PAC,” said Lisa Kaplan, founder of Alethea. “You know they’re going to run ads. You want to understand what’s out there. You want to understand if they’re actually effective at moving people in one direction or another.”
Intelligence officials have long said Russia favors Trump and targets Democrats in its efforts to erode U.S. support for Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Himes and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters that they had seen a recent classified intelligence report on foreign election interference showing that Russia opposed candidates from both parties who supported Ukraine.
Himes stressed that although Russia and other foreign countries sought to influence voters, there is no indication that they may have interfered with the voting mechanism itself.
“There is nothing to suggest that there is any capacity or intent to interfere, even though there is a fairly robust environment of influence,” Himes said.
The same Russian operations currently active in the U.S. midterm elections have also targeted this year’s elections in France, Germany and elsewhere. They used AI-generated audio and impersonated politicians, celebrities and media outlets, Graphika said in a new report on Friday.
“They’ve applied this model in half a dozen other countries in the last six months across Europe. We’re just next in line,” Linvill said. “They attack with the same themes. Anything that can make a candidate appear degenerate, corrupt, incapable.”
Alethea’s Kaplan says this focus on polarizing issues in the latter part of the election is less about shaping voters’ opinions than about stoking anger or fear and affecting turnout.
“In these latest messages in the run-up to the election, it’s more about evoking that emotion,” she said.
Researchers tracking Storm-1516 and other groups say they expect more false claims and fake videos, and that these operations are focused on voting and ballot processing in the period immediately after Election Day.
NPR’s Eric McDaniel contributed to this report.
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