Troll factory stages accident video Russia targets Kamala Harris with fake news
A video on social media accuses Kamala Harris of a hit-and-run. She is said to have hit a girl in an accident in 2011, who has been in a wheelchair ever since. However, the clip is completely staged.
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- Russian trolls spread fake news about Kamala Harris.
- Microsoft claims to have uncovered the perpetrators of the disinformation campaign.
- A Kremlin-linked group called Storm-1516 has produced two fake videos.
According to research by software company Microsoft, Russian actors are stepping up their disinformation campaign against US presidential candidate Kamala Harris. A Kremlin-linked group called Storm-1516 has produced two fake videos since the end of August to discredit the election campaign of Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, the US company said on Tuesday. The association is a so-called troll factory responsible for manipulation and cyber attacks on the internet.
One video shows a group of alleged Harris supporters attacking a supposed participant at a Trump rally. The other video shows an actor spreading the fictitious claim that Harris injured a girl in an accident, who has since been paralyzed, and committed a hit-and-run. According to Microsoft, both videos reached millions of views.
According to Microsoft, the hit-and-run video was first uploaded to X on September 3. It shows a woman in a wheelchair telling an alleged TV station about an accident in 2011. As a 13-year-old girl, she was the victim of a car accident in San Francisco, the alleged victim reports. She claims to have spotted Kamala Harris behind the windshield of the vehicle. Harris is said to have looked at her, "then she turned her face away and drove on quickly", she reports. Since then, she has been paralyzed, according to the woman in the wheelchair. According to "ntv", this video alone is estimated to have been clicked on more than 2.7 million times.
Interference in the US election campaign
A second Russian group called Storm-1679, following its fake news campaign in connection with the Olympic Games in Paris, is now also focusing on the distribution of videos intended to discredit Harris, the Microsoft report continued.
At the beginning of September, the US accused Russia of large-scale attempts to manipulate the presidential election on November 5 and imposed sanctions against several people responsible for the Russian state broadcaster RT.