WASHINGTON (AP) — A video claiming to show voter fraud in Georgia is fake and the work of “Russian influence actors” is determined to undermine confidence in the integrity of next week’s presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.
The announcement that the video was fake represented an effort by the FBI and other federal agencies, four days before Tuesday’s election, to combat foreign disinformation by publicizing it rather than letting it spread unchecked for days. It follows a similar statement last week, which also attributed a widely circulated video falsely depicting ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania to Russian actors.
The 20-second video in question, which began circulating on the social media platform Kamala Harris.
He shows several purported Georgia IDs with different names and addresses, and an Associated Press analysis of the information on two of the IDs confirms that it does not match registered voters in Gwinnett or Fulton counties, the two counties he mentioned.
Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Thursday evening that the video is “clearly fake” and is likely the product of Russian trolls “trying to sow division and chaos on the eve of the elections.”
Intelligence officials reiterated those findings Friday, saying the video was crafted by “Russian influence actors” and was part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise baseless questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke division among Americans .”
The intelligence community expects Russia will “create and release additional media content aimed at undermining confidence in the integrity of the election and dividing Americans” in the days before the election and weeks and months afterward, the joint statement said. from the FBI. the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The post that originally popularized the video was no longer available Friday morning, but copycat versions of the video continued to be widely shared with false claims that it showed election fraud.
The video is similar in style and distribution method to other videos created by Storm-1516, also known as CopyCop, a well-known Russian disinformation network that has created several fake videos this election, Media co-director Darren Linvill said. Forensics Hub at Clemson University, which has been investigating the group.
