Among the high-profile accounts that shared the video was Russian Market, a social media site with 330,000 followers run by Vadim Loskutov, a Swiss social media personality known for praising Russia and criticizing the West. The video was also shared by Tara Reade, who defected to Russia in 2023 to seek citizenship. Reade has also accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993.
The researchers also told WIRED that the videos were manipulated to avoid online detection: “Doppelganger’s operators trimmed the videos at random points so that, technically, they differ by a few milliseconds, and therefore anti-abuse systems would likely see them as separate videos,” the Antibot4Navalny researchers told WIRED.
“This video is unique in its ambiguity,” Fink said. “It may or may not be a well-known Russian band, it may or may not be a deepfake, it may or may not refer to other political figures. In other words, it’s clearly a Soviet-style propaganda video. This ambiguity has led to multiple competing versions, which has generated hundreds of articles and discussions online, and ultimately led to more people seeing the video.”
As the Kremlin steps up its efforts to disrupt the U.S. presidential election in November, it is becoming increasingly clear that Russia is prepared to use emerging AI technologies. A new report released this week by threat intelligence firm Recorded Future highlighted this trend, revealing that a campaign allegedly linked to the Kremlin is using generative AI tools to push pro-Trump content on a network of fake websites.
The report details how a campaign called CopyCop used AI tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the right-wing biased content, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic Review. These websites claim to employ more than 1,000 journalists, but the journalists are all fake and created by AI.
Among the topics the campaign has cited are Biden’s speech gaffes, Biden’s age, polling results showing Trump in the lead, and claims that Trump’s recent conviction and trial were “impactless” and a “total mess.”
It’s still unclear how influential these sites are — WIRED’s search of social media platforms found few links to CopyCop’s network of fake websites — but the CopyCop campaign proves that AI can be a powerful enabler for the spread of disinformation, and experts say it’s just the first step in a broader strategy that will likely include networks like Doppelganger.
“Inferring involvement with the websites themselves remains a difficult task,” Recorded Future analyst Clement Briens told WIRED. “The AI-generated content likely won’t attract much attention at all, but the purpose is that it helps these websites establish themselves as trusted assets that can be amplified by Russian and pro-Russian influencers with existing followers and audiences as they publish targeted content such as deepfakes.”
