After banning its athletes from competing in the Summer Olympics under the country’s flag, Russia has directed its fury at the games and this year’s host, Paris.
Russian propagandists A report released by Microsoft on Sunday found they made an hour-long documentary, falsified news reports and even imitated French and U.S. intelligence agencies to issue false warnings urging people to avoid the Games.The report describes in detail disinformation campaign created by a group the company calls Storm-1679. The campaign appears to have gained momentum since March, flooding social media with compact videos that have raised alarm over possible terrorist attacks and raised security concerns. The operation, although targeted at the Olympics, uses various techniques to spread disinformation that may also be used during the European and American elections.
The work began in earnest last summer with the release of a phony documentary about the International Olympic Committee that appropriated the Netflix logo and used an artificial intelligence-powered voice impersonating Tom Cruise. The committee managed to remove a video titled “Olympics Has Fallen” – a parody of the 2013 film “Olympus Has Fallen” – from YouTube. But attacks have continued, with ongoing efforts to discredit its leadership, the commission said in March, citing a campaign that used false recordings purporting to make phone calls to African Union officials on Russia’s behalf.
It appears that Storm-1679 is now making shorter videos that are easier to create. It used to focus on discrediting Ukrainian refugees in the West, but when French President Macron began publicly considering sending French soldiers to Ukraine, it moved to the Olympics. Microsoft estimates that Storm-1679 produces three to eight phony videos a week in English and French, many of them impersonating the BBC, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters. The group appears to be quick to respond to news reports, such as protests in Modern Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Others focus on perspective A terrorist attack in Paris.
Most videos pretending to be CIA and French intelligence recordings are relatively basic. They are different from anything the CIA has actually produced, but to unsuspecting Internet readers they may seem legitimate, using the agency’s logo and stark black-and-white typography. “They’re trying to cultivate an expectation of violence,” Microsoft’s Clint Watts said of the Storm-1679 group. “They want people to be afraid of going to the Olympics.” French officials and Microsoft say one of the group’s tactics appears to be an attempt to attract the attention of fact-checkers. “Content typically doesn’t get pushed from one platform to another, but when phony content is verified on accounts with a huge following, the content gets significantly more views and reaches recent, different audiences,” Watts said
