Russian Disinformation Campaign Sets Sights On Us Midterms 6757543 4

A Russian disinformation operation has turned its attention to the US midterm elections, unleashing a series of deepfake videos that depict celebrities attacking Democrats, researchers said, with more expected to come. The videos spread late last week across social media with hashtags such as "#AllDemocratsAreCriminals," and showed Hollywood actors chastising the Democratic Party in self-recorded statements branded with CNN's logo.

"Today in America, there isn't a single child who isn't under threat from Democrats," a voice-cloned version of How I Met Your Mother star Alyson Hannigan is shown saying in one. Another portrays Emma Caulfield saying Democrats "drink our blood." In a third, Sarah Jessica Parker appears to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Democrats "Nazis."

The clips were created using stolen footage from the internet. One fake of Julia Roberts layered fabricated audio over a 2023 Gucci campaign. Others were built on top of recordings uploaded to Cameo, a service that lets celebrities sell personalized videos to fans.

A CNN spokesperson objected to the "unauthorized" use of the network's branding, saying the videos "are not CNN content and have no affiliation with CNN."

Disinformation researchers said the deepfake videos appear to be the work of Matryoshka, or Operation Overload, a Kremlin campaign known for littering social media with doctored videos that impersonate news organizations, and then amplifying them using inorganic bot activity.

The online collective Antibot4navalny first attributed the deepfakes to Matryoshka due to their familiar pattern of distribution and amplification across social media.

French prosecutors said last month they were also probing suspected Russian deepfakes and fake video reports targeting the main two centrist candidates in year's presidential elections.

While the campaign's work often has minimal impact – and X, Bluesky and TikTok have removed some of the posts – experts said the videos signal which US races and issues Russia intends to target in the elections that could flip the balance of power in the US Congress. And the operation appears to be ramping up.

Antibot4navalny spotted other fabricated CNN video reports smearing Democratic candidates, including Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico.

The group also alerted AFP to additional inauthentic video reports that emerged Monday, seeking to discredit MS NOW's debunking of the celebrity deepfakes. The posts wove disinformation journalist Brandy Zadrozny into the narrative, falsely claiming she had retracted her coverage on the burgeoning campaign.