With its athletes barred from competing in the Summer Olympics under the country’s flag, Russia has turned its fury on the Games and this year’s host, Paris.
Russian propagandists have created an hour-long documentary, spoofed news reports and even mimicked French and US intelligence agencies to issue fake warnings urging people to avoid the Games, according to a report released on Sunday by Microsoft.The report details the disinformation campaign created by a group the company calls Storm-1679. The campaign appears to have accelerated since March, flooding social media with short videos raising alarms about pos sible terrorist attacks and stoking fears about safety. The operation, while aimed at the Games, is using various techniques to spread disinformation that could also be employed in European and US elections.
The work began in earnest last summer with the release of a fake documentary about the International Olympic Committee, expropriating Netflix’s logo and using an artificial-intelligence-powered voice impersonating Tom Cruise. The committee succeeded in having the video titled “Olympics Has Fallen” — a spoof of the 2013 film “Olympus Has Fallen” — removed from YouTube. The attacks have continued, though, with persistent efforts to discredit its leadership, the committee said in March, citing a campaign that used fake recordings of what purported to be telephone calls by officials of the African Union on behalf of Russia.
Storm-1679 now appears to be making shorter videos that are easier to create. It used to focus on disparaging Ukrainian refugees in the West, but after French Prez Macron began to publicly consider sending French troops to Ukraine, it shifted to the Olympics. Microsoft estimates that Storm-1679 produces three to eight faked videos a week, in English and French, with many impersonating the BBC, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters. The group appears to respond quickly to news events, su ch as protests in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Others focus on the prospect of a terror attack in Paris.
Most of the videos pretending to be from CIA and French intelligence are relatively simple. They are unlike anything CIA has actually produced, but to unsuspecting readers online, they could appear legitimate, using the agency’s logo and stark white-on-black typography. “They are trying to cultivate an anticipation of violence,” Clint Watts of Microsoft, said of the group Storm-1679. “They want people to be fearful of going to the Olympics.” French officials and Microsoft say one of the group’s tactics appears to be trying to get the attention of factcheckers. “The content doesn’t normally travel from one platform to another, but when their false content is fact-checked by accounts with a large following, the content gets far more views and in front of new and different audiences,” Watts said