Whistleblower video alleging Arizona vote rigging is part of Russian disinformation campaign - On Nov. 4, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed that Russian actors manufactured the video
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2024/4015-pr-29-24
Russian actors “manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an interview with an individual claiming election fraud in Arizona, which involved creating fake overseas ballots and changing voter rolls to favor Vice President Kamala Harris. The Arizona Secretary of State has already refuted the video’s claim as false,” the agencies said in a joint statement.
Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, shared the video on X and is the one conducting the interview in the video. Terada served two years in a U.S. prison for money laundering in connection to cocaine smuggling and is now seen in Russia as “an example of U.S. injustice,” according to a report on Russian disinformation from Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.
/nosanitize
https://open.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&c
Terada’s X account was suspended after publishing the video.
According to Microsoft, which tracks cybersecurity threats, Storm-1516 “consistently launders narratives through videos seeding scandalous claims from fake journalists and nonexistent whistleblowers and amplifying that disinformation via inauthentic news sites
(PDF report)
Clemson University’s report links the Foundation to Battle Injustice to Storm-1516, a Russian group previously credited for creating a fake video showing Haitian people illegally voting in Georgia, a video falsely implicating Vice President Kamala Harris in a decade-old hit-and-run, an impersonation video used to maliciously accuse Tim Walz of sexual abuse, and a fake video of ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.