Foreign election influence campaigns have bark but questionable bite

At least four major foreign influence operations aimed at the U.S. election have been identified by authorities and researchers in recent months, and U.S. intelligence officials warned Friday that foreign actors are ramping up their efforts to meddle.

The Justice Department alleged the most high-profile influence operation of the 2024 cycle in an indictment Wednesday, accusing two Russian propagandists who work for the Russia-backed state media outlet RT of committing money laundering by funneling nearly $10 million to a conservative media outlet.

The Justice Department also seized 32 domains from a Russia-based group of fake news sites that researchers call "Doppelganger." Those websites often mirrored legitimate news operations in an effort to spread pro-Russia narratives. 

Less than a month earlier, Iran was accused by the former President Donald Trump campaign of hacking into the email accounts of some of its staffers and leaking emails to U.S. news outlets. China has been accused of creating fake social media accounts pretending to be Americans. Representatives for those countries have denied the accusations. 

Together, the efforts highlight the ongoing concerns about foreign efforts to alter the 2024 U.S. election, which forecasters and pundits say has the chance to be a historically close race.

But the campaigns also appear to have floundered. The Russia-backed media company had a middling YouTube presence that failed to attract significant viewership, while Iran's hack-and-leak has thus far failed to generate the kind of attention seen by previous operations. China's campaigns have similarly been found to have been narrow and lacking in reach. 

There are no indications to show any of these campaigns have had significant success in swaying voters, or even that they've directly reached many Americans, said Emerson Brooking, the director of strategy at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies online propaganda.

"I would emphasize how important it is to keep this in perspective,"  Brooking said. "That even when the numbers sound big, as a share of election-related activity and discourse in the United States, it is a drop in the ocean."

"Your uncle's bad opinions probably don't come from the Russians," he added.

That has done little to dent the momentum of these campaigns or the efforts to hunt them down. The Office of the Director National Intelligence's Foreign Malign Influence Center, the U.S. intelligence community's dedicated group for countering foreign propaganda aimed at the election, has maintained that election manipulation efforts are ongoing and that each country has clear goals: Russia aims to support Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, Iran aims to hurt Trump's candidacy, and China has decided not to use its existing propaganda apparatus to promote one U.S. presidential candidate over the other, though experts say it is perpetually interested in undermining U.S. support for democracy.

Concerns about efforts to manipulate the election have remained heightened since Russia's first major campaign was revealed in 2016. Russian election meddlers were found to have successfully spread misinformation and divisive rhetoric through social media platforms while also sparking major news cycles related to emails stolen from staffers on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. 

In the aftermath, major tech companies pledged to do more, and U.S. authorities launched task forces to help identify and stop foreign influence. Those efforts were largely heralded as a success around the 2020 election, but Republicans have since launched pressure campaigns and lawsuits aimed at reining in that work. Experts warn that 2024 could be particularly fraught. 

The influence campaigns also continue to evolve, combining some classic propaganda strategies with new technology and mediums. Russia sought to tap a group of internet-based content creators, while China has used AI to generate fake people. 

Some have been in the works for years. On Tuesday, the social media analytics firm Graphika reported it had uncovered new, previously unreported accounts tied to a sprawling, ongoing Chinese propaganda campaign nicknamed "Spamouflage." Researchers have tracked Spamouflage and Russia's Doppelganger for years, and treat them as ongoing operations. 

While American social media platforms regularly investigate and shut down their accounts — sometimes after being tipped to their existence from the U.S. government — there's no permanent way to prevent foreign propagandists from registering fake websites or accounts and trying to get Americans to interact with them.

Olga Belogolova, the director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who previously led policy for countering influence campaigns at Meta, said that despite researchers and social media companies publishing statistics showing the prevalence of some online propaganda campaigns, that doesn't prove they're effective.

"Someone posted some content, and that got someone to vote a particular way, or to not vote at all, or to believe something, right?" she said. "That is very difficult to measure."

Belogolova said that little research has been done into how effective modern influence campaigns were on voters. She pointed to a New York University study of Russian propaganda on Twitter in 2016 that found those tweets did not appear to change voters' behavior.

Authorities have warned that there could still be more twists to come that may prove more successful. Most notably, Iran is believed to still hold stolen files from the Trump campaign that it has yet to release. 

In the press call Friday, an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity along with intelligence officials, said that Iran "will likely have that kind of longer-term strategic interest" and "make tweaks to how they are conducting those operations."