Russians behind fake video of U.S. ballots being destroyed

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) -- Russian actors were behind a viral video falsely showing mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in the swing state of Pennsylvania, US officials said Friday, amid heightened alert over foreign influence operations targeting the upcoming election.

The video, which garnered millions of views on platforms such as the Elon Musk-owned X, purports to show a man sorting through mail-in ballots from the state’s Bucks County and ripping up those cast for Trump.

On Thursday, the Bucks County Board of Elections declared the video as “fake,” saying that the envelope and other materials depicted in the footage are “clearly not authentic materials” belonging to or distributed by them.

In a joint statement on Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the video was part of a Russian disinformation operation.

“Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania,” the statement said.

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” it added.

The statement said Russia was expected to create and release more such content in an attempt to “undermine trust” in the integrity of the 5 November elections.

The video surfaced as American authorities brace for a surge in disinformation in the final days of a nail-biting election between Republican nominee Trump and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The video, also debunked by Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers, was connected to a Kremlin-aligned disinformation network known as Storm-1516, according to researchers including Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.

Linvill, who has closely studied the network, said the account on X — previously called Twitter — that distributed the video has regularly amplified other narratives from this network.

Storm-1516 has previously produced fake videos to discredit the campaign of Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, according to disinformation researchers.

Musk-Putin talk

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an avid supporter of Trump, was plunged into new controversy on Friday after a report that he is in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Wall Street Journal story, which has been denied by the Kremlin, comes days after the US Justice Department sent a letter to Musk’s America PAC warning that its $1 million giveaways to registered voters may violate federal law.

Musk, 53, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla and the owner of X, has thrown his millions, time and considerable influence into sending the former Republican president back to the White House since endorsing him in July.

The Journal said the Musk-Putin conversations touched on “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions,” although at one point the Russian leader asked the American billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov rejected the report, saying “it’s all untrue, absolutely false information.”

Putin had one contact with Musk before 2022, Peskov said, when they spoke on the phone.