2 days Ago By Ali Swenson
New York: The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young black woman who claimed US Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralysed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago. In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent any more” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon”. Immediately after the video was posted on September 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary.
The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarised articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals.
And the video and the text story on the website spelt the alleged victim’s name differently. An image of the debunked hit-and-run claim video. Credit: Screenshot The caution was warranted, according to a new Microsoft threat intelligence report, which confirms the fabricated tale was disinformation from a Russia-linked troll farm.
The tech giant’s report released on Tuesday details how Kremlin-aligned actors that at first struggled to adapt to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race have now gone full throttle in their covert influence efforts against Harris and Democrats. It also explains how Russian intelligence actors are collaborating with pro-Russian cyber “hacktivists” to boost allegedly hacked-and-leaked materials, a strategy the company notes could be weaponised to undermine US confidence in the November election outcome. The findings reveal how even through dramatic changes in the political landscape, groups linked to America’s foreign adversaries have redoubled their commitment to sway US political opinion as the election nears, sometimes through deeply manipulative means.
They also provide further insight into how Russia’s efforts to fight pro-Ukrainian policy in the US are translating into escalating attacks on the Democratic presidential ticket..
