The Gab user who identifies herself as Nora Berka reappeared in August after a year of silence on the social media platform, reposting some strongly conservative political messages and writing a flurry of new messages in a hateful tone.
The posts mostly slander President Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes in obscene language. They also bemoaned the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, portraying the Ukrainian president as a caricature that follows exactly the mold of Russian propaganda.
The merging of political concerns was no coincidence. The account had previously been linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and again in 2020: the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, according to cybersecurity group Recorded Future.
It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, but more targeted, Russian effort launched before Tuesday’s midterms. As before, the aim is to fuel disaffection among conservatives and erode confidence in the American electoral system. Now, the campaign also appears to be aimed at weakening the Biden administration’s military assistance to Ukraine.
“It’s clear they’re trying to get them to stop sending aid and money to Ukraine,” said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations officer who now works at the corporate technology firm Providence Consulting Group.
Using accounts posing as angry Americans, the campaign has fueled the most divisive political and cultural disputes in the country today. She is directed against Democrats in the hottest races, including the Senate races in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and House can help Russia’s war effort.
The campaigns reveal not only how vulnerable the American political system still is to manipulation from abroad, but also how disinformation purveyors have adapted to efforts by major social media platforms to remove or minimize false or misleading content.
Last month, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning about the danger of disinformation being disseminated “through media channels on the dark web, online publications, messaging apps, spoofed websites, emails, text messages. and fake online profiles”. Disinformation can include allegations that election results or data have been hacked or compromised.
The agencies urged people not to like, comment on, or share online posts from sources that are unknown or of dubious reliability. They did not identify specific campaigns, but social media platforms and researchers investigating disinformation have recently uncovered several campaigns launched by Russia, China and Iran.
Recorded Media and two other social media research firms, Graphika and Mandiant, have identified a number of Russian campaigns using Gab, Parler, Getter and other newer platforms that pride themselves on creating unmoderated spaces in the name of freedom of speech. expression.
These are much smaller campaigns than the 2016 election, in which fake accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. But the efforts are no less harmful, the researchers said, when they reach gullible users who might help realize Russian goals.
“The audience involved is much smaller than other traditional networks,” said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst at Recorded Future who identified Nora Berka’s account. “But it is possible to interact with the public with much more selective influence operations, because the users of these platforms are generally conservative Americans, possibly more open to conspiratorial allegations.”
Many of the profiles the researchers identified were previously used by a news outlet calling itself the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens. Meta, which owns Facebook, has already linked this vehicle to Russian information campaigns centered on the Internet Research Agency.
The network appears to have disbanded since then, and many of the social media accounts linked to it have gone dormant after being publicly identified around the time of the 2020 election. The pages were activated again in August and September, calls to action as terrorist cells. sleepers.
According to Liston, Nora Berka’s account has many of the characteristics of an inauthentic user. There is no profile picture or biographical data. No one responded to a message sent to the account by Gab.
With more than 8,000 followers, the profile only posts about political topics and often spreads false or misleading posts. Most of them attract little interaction, but a recent post about the FBI received 43 reactions and 11 replies and was rebroadcast 64 times.
Since September, the account has repeatedly shared links with a previously unknown site, electiontruth.net, which Recorded Future said is almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.
Electiontruth.net’s first publications date back only to September 5th. Since then, the site has published articles deriding Biden and the top Democratic candidates almost daily, as well as criticizing Democratic policies on race, crime and gender, which it says are destroying the United States. “America Under Communism” is a typical title.
A recurring theme of the new Russian efforts is the argument that the US under Biden is throwing money away by supporting Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion that began in February.
Nora Berka, for example, posted a manipulated photo in September showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pole dancing in a bikini with Biden showering him with dollars.
“As working-class Americans struggle to buy food and fuel and find infant formula, Biden wants to spend another $13.7 billion on aid to Ukraine,” the account read. Not coincidentally, the post echoed a theme that has been gaining some traction among lawmakers and Republican voters who question the deployment of armaments and other military assistance.
“It’s no secret that Republicans — a large portion of Republicans — question whether we should be supporting what has been described as foreign adventures or the conflict of others,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council think tank’s Digital Forensics Lab, which has also been tracking influence operations launched by other countries.
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