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A Russian troll farm was behind false claims Kamala Harris was involved in a 2011 hit-and-run accident and other inflammatory stories that spread online, according to a report from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.
A Kremlin-aligned group, dubbed Storm-1516 in the report, created a fake San Francisco-area website in August to publish a video featuring a paid actor talking about the alleged incident.
In the video, a young Black woman claimed she “cannot remain silent anymore.”
The site was taken down shortly after being created, and a CBS News fact-check found no public records, news reports, or police information to back up the 2011 story, but that didn’t stop millions of people from seeing it on social media, according to the report.
“As the election approaches, people get more heated,” Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “People tend to take in information from sources they don’t really know or wouldn’t even know to evaluate.”
The troll farm also posted a fake video showing two Black men beating up a bloodied white woman at a Trump rally.
Another Russian group, meanwhile, allegedly spread online claims about Harris’s stance on gender-affirming surgeries, using images of a fake Times Square billboard.
The Independent has contacted the Harris campaign and the Russian Embassy in the U.S. for comment.
On Monday, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta said it was banning Russian state media organization from its platforms.
“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta said in a statement.
Russian officials told the AP “Such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable.”
Earlier this month, Dimitri Simes, a Russia expert and former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, was indicted for allegedly breaking U.S. sanctions by working for Russian state TV.
He denies wrongdoing.
