Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US news

A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation, and it’s spoofing reputable organizations — including news outlets, nonprofits and government agencies — to do so.

According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign — which has been tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center as Storm-1679 since at least 2022 — takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO.

This year, the group has focused on flooding the internet with fake content surrounding the German SNAP elections and the upcoming Moldovan parliamentary vote. The campaign also sought to plant false narratives around the war in Ukraine ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, said in an interview that since early 2024, the group has been publishing “pro-Kremlin content en masse in the form of videos” mimicking these organizations.

“If even just one or a few of their fake videos go viral per year, that makes all of the other videos worth it,” she said.

While online Russian influence operations have existed for many years, security experts say artificial intelligence is making it harder for people to discern what’s real.

Storm-1679 developed a distinct technique in 2024 for combining videos with AI-generated audio impersonations of celebrity and expert voices, according to Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

One high-profile example of this tactic surfaced ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics and included a fake documentary series featuring Netflix’s logo and an AI-generated deepfake voice of actor Tom Cruise as the narrator. And in December 2024, the group used these tools to generate fake videos impersonating trusted sources like journalists, professors and law enforcement to sow seeds of distrust toward NATO member countries and Ukraine.

“They are just throwing spaghetti, trying to see what’s going to stick on a wall,” said Ivana Stradner, a researcher on Russia at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.

Sadeghi said that “timing and the news cycle” — events like elections, sporting events or wars — play a big role in Storm-1679’s operations. “It typically tends to surge and launch a wave of fakes around a particular news event,” she said.

And while the majority of these videos rarely gain traction and are quickly debunked, the content occasionally takes off. The group was behind a fabricated E! News video in February that claimed the U.S. Agency for International Development paid for celebrities to visit Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

The video, which featured the entertainment media outlet’s logo and branding, was eventually shown to be fake — but not before Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk shared the sham report to their millions of followers on X.

“It’s problematic because if they fall for this, why would you expect someone else not to fall for this?” Stradner said.

E! News told Reuters after the posts had been shared by Trump Jr. and Musk that the video was not authentic and didn’t come from them.

A spokesperson for BBC said the broadcaster is aware that Storm-1679 “impersonates BBC News and our journalists,” adding that BBC advises people to “check that any content posing as BBC journalism is on a BBC News platform.”

ABC News, E! News, and Netflix did not immediately respond for comment on the incidents.

As these disinformation efforts grow larger and AI tools continue to advance, the Trump administration has been scaling back the federal government agencies tasked with cracking down on disinformation.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the department’s key office fighting foreign disinformation campaigns. Rubio accused the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Office — formerly known as the Global Engagement Center — of spending “millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”

At the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also halted its efforts to crack down on misinformation domestically related to U.S. elections.

“Washington’s decision to scale back its information operations efforts is a dream come true for Putin,” Stradner said.

Spokespeople for the State Department and CISA did not respond to requests for comment.