Securing Democracy Dispatch

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According to US intelligence assessments, Russia and Iran seek to influence the 2024 US presidential election outcome, but the People’s Republic of China (PRC) remains more cautious. But all three countries share a common goal: stoking “division and polarization” in the United States, Co-Managing Director Rachael Dean Wilson told CNBC.

A series of conferences and screenings of pro-Kremlin “documentaries” in Italy this year suggests that Russia has identified visual propaganda as an effective way to influence Italian citizens’ views, Program Coordinator Louis Savoia and Senior Manager for Europe and Fellow Vassilis Ntousas wrote.

“When you have more radicalized people, more willing to believe divisive, corrosive narratives, that’s an opportunity for [foreign actors]” seeking to manipulate US public opinion ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Senior Fellow Bret Schafer told Foreign Policy.

Russian diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week:

• Prisoner Swap: Russian state media and government officials presented an alternate reality of the prisoner swap that took place last week between the United States and Russia. Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer turned politician—and a beneficiary of an earlier prisoner swap—told RT that the United States “hunts Russians around the world to encourage a swap”. One of the freed Russian prisoners also complained of the “terrible conditions” and “constant humiliation” he allegedly endured in a US prison. Soon after the release, RT once again served as a promotional vehicle for Russian intelligence leaks, running “exclusive” footage allegedly showing Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich engaged in espionage. Multiple outlets also ran commentary from Western validators claiming that the swapped prisoners were likely “CIA assets”, including Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter.  
• UK Riots: After riots broke out last week in the United Kingdom following false reports that a migrant was responsible for the stabbing deaths of three young girls, Russian intelligence-linked News Front claimed that the riots were the result of the “globalist policy” of “mixing races, people, and religions”. Along similar lines, Sputnik ran an article blaming “political and media elites” for turning the country into a tinderbox. That article also quoted former far-right UK Member of the European Parliament Nick Griffin, who oddly suggested that the “US Deep State may be stoking the fire”. Unsurprisingly, many Russian outlets and accounts amplified comments from X owner Elon Musk, who predicted that civil war in the United Kingdom is “inevitable”. 

The PRC’s diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week: 

• Doping Drama: PRC state media pushed back vehemently against allegations that Chinese swimmers were resorting to performance-enhancing drugs. Last week, they mentioned “doping” more than 80 times in posts on platforms monitored on Hamilton 2.0. The Global Times accused the United States of “politicizing doping”, CGTN Español commented that anti-doping was becoming an “extension of [US] hegemony in international politics”, and Xinhua bemoaned the alleged “hypocrisy and unfair reporting from western media”.
• UK Riots: Last week, PRC state media devoted many articles and posts, mostly factual, about the far-right riots taking place in the United Kingdom. Xinhua relayed a British professor’s words that a “tsunami of lies” was fanning the protests, CGTN highlighted the hundreds of arrests, and several PRC outlets emphasized UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s promise to set up a “standing army” to tackle the riots. CGTN explained that the country was “divided politically”, with British Muslims “deeply anxious”. At the same time, the Global Times implied that the underlying rationale for the riots “resonate […] with some ordinary people”.

Russian information operation uses social media, AI to denigrate Paris Olympics: Russian linked social media accounts are targeting the 2024 Olympic Games, portraying Paris as crime-ridden, falsely claiming athletes have been hospitalized after swimming in the Seine river, and amplifying a video generated by artificial intelligence (AI) depicting French President Emmanuel Macron denouncing the games against a backdrop of rats and trash. The video was shared by at least 30,000 Russian bot accounts and translated into 13 languages. Senior Fellow Bret Schafer said, “The most predictable thing about the Paris Olympics was that there would be a concerted effort by both overt and covert Russian accounts to smear the games and its host. Russia has used disinformation to target Olympic Games going back at least four decades, and when you combine that track record with France’s support for Ukraine and the International Olympic Committee’s decision to ban Russia from the games it was inevitable that we’d see Russia trying to spoil the party.”

DOJ to share information about foreign election threats to tech companies: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reaffirmed its commitment to sharing intelligence on foreign election interference to social media companies after a recent US Supreme Court ruling rejected challenges to US government officials’ ability to communicate with platforms about their content moderation policies. Co-Managing Director David Salvo told the Dispatch, “It is encouraging that US government agencies are maintaining their information sharing with technology platforms. These channels of communication are imperative. There are real threats from nation-state actors that exploit the platforms to undermine Americans’ confidence in the integrity of our electoral process. These channels exist not to impede freedom of speech or silence authentic American voices, but to ensure the platforms have all information at their disposal to shut down avenues through which foreign adversaries wage interference campaigns.”

PRC-linked social media campaign spreads deepfake of the Philippines’ president: A covert PRC-linked social media campaign across X and YouTube amplified a deepfake video depicting Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. appearing to use illegal drugs, which went viral despite being debunked by Philippine authorities, researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found. Research Analyst Etienne Soula said, “Information war is politics by other means. For months, relations between the Philippines and the PRC have degraded over Manila’s refusal to give in to Beijing’s claims over disputed islands in the South China Sea. Given that the degradation flowed from the change in leadership in the Philippines after the elections, it is not surprising, if regrettable, to see the PRC resort to information manipulation to discredit President Marcos, Jr. domestically.”

In Case You Missed It

• A bipartisan group of US senators introduced a bill that would make individuals and technology companies liable for AI-generated content that portrays another person’s voice, face, or body without their consent.
• Five US secretaries of state are sending an open letter to X owner Elon Musk asking him to correct the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok, after it shared false information about ballot deadlines for the 2024 US presidential election.
• Lawyers at the DOJ accused TikTok of gathering data on American users’ opinions on social issues like gun control and abortion and storing this information on servers accessible to ByteDance employees in the PRC. 
• The US Environmental Protection Agency lacks a comprehensive strategy and culture to protect water infrastructure from foreign hackers, a government watchdog report said.

“What was going through my mind was that, oh, this is exactly what [the PRC] wants to do, but without rolling back the updates such that we could reboot our systems. … A war in Asia will be accompanied by very serious threats to Americans—the explosion of pipelines, the pollution of water systems, the derailing of our transportation systems, the severing of our communications.”

—Jen Easterly, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CyberScoop in comments published on August 7.

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