Russia is using American influencers to manipulate the election

The official Russian position on the US election is that it does not care who ends up in the White House, former US president Donald Trump, or Vice-President Kamala Harris.

But Russian state media tells a very different story, with compilations of Kamala Harris' worst moments shown on TV and her ready laugh lampooned.

"Kamala with the nuclear button is worse than a monkey with a grenade," said Andrei Sidorov, the dean of the global politics department at Moscow State University, on the Russian state-run Rossiya 1 channel, according to Politico.

This bias contained within Russia is one thing but Russia has also been using American right-wing social media influencers as a vehicle to actively interfere with the 2024 US presidential election, according to US officials, and Meta, for one, has taken a stand.

The social media giant which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has barred  Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other Russian state media networks, alleging they have been using undercover tactics to exert their influence on the social media company’s platforms.

The move came after Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press conference that the US administration believes Rossiya Segodnya and five of its subsidiaries, including RT, “are no longer merely firehoses of Russian Government propaganda and disinformation.”

“They are,” he said, “engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”

According to a senior intelligence official quoted by Reuters “What we see them doing is relying on witting and unwitting Americans to seed, promote and add credibility to narratives that serve these foreign actors’ interest.”

“These foreign countries typically calculate that Americans are more likely to believe other Americans’ views,” the official said, explaining what appears to have become a growing trend.

Photo: Screenshot from Benny Johnson X account

The allegations were dismissed as “nonsense” by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, speaking to the Associated Press in the wake of sanctions imposed September 13 on Russian networks including the RT parent company, TV-Novosti.

It appears that many of the American right-wing influencers being used in this way are often unaware of who is paying them to feed an increasingly unreliable and divisive discourse to their millions of followers.

According to experts, the general aim is to trigger outrage in Americans and fuel the culture wars while casting doubt on the US government’s ability to manage global security.

Early this month, the US Justice Department unveiled criminal charges against two former employees of Russian media outlet RT, who they say were covertly funding an American political media company to pay influencers to get their ideas out there.

The alleged scheme involved the Russians sending about $10 million to two media business owners who then paid American conservative influencers to create videos and social media posts.

According to Reuters, the money was funneled into a Tennessee-based firm named Tenet Media, which publicly describes itself as the home for “fearless voices.”

Six conservative influencers, including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, were allegedly used to churn out videos “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine, according to AP.

The US Justice Department does not however suggest there was any wrongdoing committed by the influencers, some of whom were misled regarding the source of their paychecks.

“We’re focusing on these tactics because the American public should know that content that they read online, especially on social media, could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans,” a senior US intelligence official said in Reuters.

“Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world,” Blinken said as he unveiled the sanctions. “Russian weaponization of disinformation to subvert and polarize free and open societies extends to every part of the world.”

“RT is aware of and prepared to assist Russia’s plans to incite protests should the [US] election not result in a Russia-preferred candidate winning the presidency,” Blinken said.

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