A Russian Disinfo Campaign Is Using Comment Sections to Seed Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theories
Links to the video were posted by multiple accounts with names like “Disobedient Truth” and “Private Patriot” in the comment section of outlets like Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit.
“More bad news for the Dems: Breaking: Tim Walz’s former student, Matthew Metro, drops a shocking allegation- claims Walz s*xually assaulted him in 1997 while Walz was his teacher at Mankato West High School,” the comments read.
The links posted in the comments came hours before the video was shared on social media platforms like X, where it racked up millions of views.
After the Bucks County video went viral, researchers quickly traced it back to Storm 1516. US intelligence agencies then confirmed Russia was behind the fake video.
Russian influence operations have, in the past, made use of comment sections to boost their narratives, including during their campaign to disrupt the 2016 elections. This is the first time this tactic has been reported as part of Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2024 presidential election.
“Replying in threads is a tactic that can have an impact with very little investment,” Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED. “By inserting disinformation into an unrelated conversation it might be seen, even if the account being used has no followers and was just created yesterday. It also doesn’t matter if the account you are using is caught and shut down because you haven’t lost an investment, you can just create another account five minutes later.”
The fake comments, Newsguard found, are also then used in reports from Russian state-backed media outlets to bolster claims about how Western audiences are responding to a particular incident.
After the Trump assassination attempt in July, Tsargrad TV published an article titled “Biden’s Trace in Trump’s Assassination Attempt. Americans Agree with the Kremlin’s Version: ‘Russians Are Right.’” The article outlined how Americans believe that the Biden administration played a part in the shooting, citing “comments to articles in Western media” as evidence.
NewsGuard’s researchers identified 104 articles in Russian state media that cited comments from Western news outlets as evidence to back up their claims between January and August of this year.
“This tactic allows bad actors to reduce the risk of detection and embed propaganda in a subtle, seemingly organic way, blending it into the casual commentary of supposed everyday Western readers,” Sadeghi said. “The repetition of the same claim across multiple formats and contexts can create a sense of familiarity that may lend the narratives an appearance of credibility.”
The network of accounts has also been used to seed other narratives, including one earlier this month where dozens of comments in the New York Post and Breitbart claimed, without evidence, that Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky had used Western military aid to purchase a car that once belonged to Adolf Hitler.
That claim has been spread by the network of inauthentic websites controlled by former Florida cop John Dougan, who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan’s network of websites have previously shared disinformation narratives from Storm-1516.
This article has been updated with comment from FOX News and Breitbart.
