Last week, a video popped up on social media falsely claiming to show someone ripping up ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In a matter of hours, the clip went viral, pulling in hundreds of thousands of views after a now-deleted post on X. 

In a break with past practice, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials decided to quickly issue a statement the day after the video appeared, saying Russian operatives “manufactured and amplified” the material as part of a wider campaign to divide Americans and “raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election.”

The swift response underscored how intelligence and FBI officials have forged a new strategy to combat the onslaught of false information from Russia and other foreign adversaries. 

Scarred by their experience eight years ago when a Kremlin election interference campaign caught federal authorities off guard, intelligence agencies and the Justice Department are moving faster to expose and disrupt disinformation operations to try to knock foreign actors off balance, according to current and former officials.

Instead of relying on flagging suspected foreign disinformation posts to social media companies, U.S. authorities are declassifying information about foreign election interference in an unprecedented way, seizing web domains and issuing indictments that have exposed the mechanics of Russian and Iranian information warfare, officials and researchers said.

“There’s no question they are moving more rapidly and declassifying intelligence to try to get ahead of the problem,” a congressional aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

But it’s unclear whether the new playbook will prove effective amid a relentless wave of election-related false information coming from Russia, Iran, China and Cuba. 

For Russia’s spy services, the occasional outing of a disinformation campaign has little effect, said Paul Kolbe, former Central Eurasia division chief at the CIA.

“They see themselves as getting a free pass on most of this,” Kolbe said. “If it gets exposed, great. They haven’t lost agents, and they just shift to another platform. It’s really easy: just keep playing, keep shifting, and keep us playing whack-a-mole.”

U.S. officials acknowledge there is no magic bullet that can defeat disinformation campaigns emanating from Moscow or Tehran, but they believe they have arrived at a formula that will help limit its impact.

‘Project Good Old USA’

Last month, the Biden administration announced a series of actions against Russia’s disinformation campaign. The measures included an indictment against Russian agents alleged to have funneled funds to conservative influencers at a Tennessee media company while hiding the origins of the money. Officials also imposed sanctions on Russians accused of orchestrating the information warfare and announced the seizure of web domains used for fake news sites as part of Russia’s “Doppelganger” campaign.

As part of an FBI affidavit for the takedown of the web domains, U.S. authorities released a trove of Russian internal documents — lifting the lid on the Kremlin’s information warfare planning and deliberations.

In an internal memo titled “Guerrilla Media Campaign in the United States,” organizers of the propaganda project outlined how to plant false stories through manufactured social media accounts and news sites.

“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the secret memo said. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”

The instructions were part of what the Kremlin-backed team called “Project Good Old USA,” a concerted campaign to spread false information across social media to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy in the 2024 election, according to U.S. officials and court documents. 

U.S. officials believe that shedding light on Russia’s covert influence operations has complicated life for the Kremlin by exposing some of their tactics and partners and that it even embarrassed them by uncovering how they overstate their work’s impact to their Kremlin bosses.

Matthew Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a speech last month that exposing the disinformation efforts also “sends an unmistakable message to our adversaries — we’ve gained insight into your networks, we know what you’re doing, and we are determined to hold you accountable.”

Although the Russian agents charged by U.S. authorities will most likely never appear in any U.S. courtroom, the work could deter Americans from accepting lucrative offers from the Kremlin’s information operators, said Bret Schafer, of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which monitors foreign propaganda. 

The detailed exposure of the Russian operation has “got to spook them a little bit in terms of how much the intelligence community knows about what they’re doing,” Schafer said.

Fake videos and millions of views

After last month’s high-profile U.S. crackdown on the Kremlin’s fake news sites, Russia has resumed the Doppelganger operation. A dozen fake news sites that were pushed offline are now back with slightly tweaked URLs.

As with much of Russia’s disinformation production, the inauthentic news sites have not attracted many eyeballs, and audience engagement has been negligible, according to experts and an NBC News review of social media.

“In terms of audience engagement, it seems that it’s very low,” said Esteban Ponce de León, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “There is a lot of content. They have been producing a lot of news articles in the past weeks. The question is who is reading those articles.”

However, like the manufactured video last week promoting the false claim that ballots were being destroyed in a key county in the swing state of Pennsylvania, some pieces of Russian disinformation gain traction and take off. 

A video posted on X this month purported to show a former high school student accusing Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz of sexually assaulting him when Walz was a teacher at a Minnesota high school decades ago. Fact-checkers discredited the video as a baseless smear. 

The man in the video, who mispronounces the name of the high school in the clip, is not who he claims to be, according to fact-checking reports. U.S. intelligence officials later said Russian “influence actors” were behind the false story. The video played into an entrenched lie seeded over the past eight years falsely claiming Democratic politicians are pedophiles.

An Oct. 13 post on X featuring the fabricated video got 4.5 million views.

The episode illustrates how foreign and domestic disinformation often reinforce each other, with Russia and other regimes seeking to jump on divisive narratives already circulating in the country’s political bloodstream. Not since the Vietnam era of the early 1970s has the U.S. provided such a rich target for foreign influence operations, with a deeply polarized society plagued by a growing distrust of government and other institutions, experts say.

Homegrown lies

As much as Russia and other countries are carrying out large-scale efforts to tilt U.S. elections, the biggest threat to the country’s democratic health comes from falsehoods created and promoted by Americans, according to former intelligence officials and researchers who study the issue.

Trump and his online allies have broadcast falsehoods that are now accepted by a large number of his supporters. Experts say the most corrosive of those falsehoods is the baseless claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” and that this year’s election will be plagued by widespread fraud. 

According to a recent Gallup Poll, the number of Republican voters who have confidence in the accuracy of election results has steadily declined, with only 28% saying they have faith in the vote count, compared with 44% in 2020.

But U.S. law requires federal authorities to take a hands-off approach to homegrown falsehoods under America’s free speech protections. And social media companies, under intense legal and political pressure from Republican critics, have scaled back or scrapped teams in recent years that used to take down inflammatory or conspiratorial content.

The combination of homegrown falsehoods about “stolen” election conspiracies, surging foreign disinformation campaigns and a laissez-faire approach by tech firms threatens to undermine the foundations of American democracy, experts and lawmakers said.

Democracies are based on common understandings, among them that rival political factions will accept election outcomes and work to win back power at the next opportunity, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. 

If a large part of the population believes the country’s election results are illegitimate, “the basis for our assumptions about how our system works has been called into question,” she said.

“Now you’re starting to call into question the underpinnings of a structure that, up to this point, survived the Civil War and survived Vietnam,” Jamieson said.