The FBI issued a statement Tuesday warning people of two fake videos using the agency’s name and insignia to promote election misinformation, as concerns about misinformation and foreign influence ramp up on Election Day.
Federal Bureau of Investigation seal is seen on J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington D.C. ... [+]
The FBI said it was made aware of two videos circulating on X, formerly known as Twitter, purporting to be from the agency by using its name and insignia.
One of the videos was a fake news clip falsely reporting an FBI alert urging Americans to “vote remotely” because of a supposed high terror threat at polling stations, which the agency said was “not authentic” and “does not accurately represent” the current threat level.
The other video shows a fake FBI press release stating that five prisons in key swing states Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona rigged inmate voting and colluded with a political party, which the agency said was also “not authentic” and “false.”
The accounts that posted the videos have since been suspended.
The videos were likely part of a series of fake videos created by a Russian influence operation, according to CBS News, which cites Antibot4Navalny, a group of researchers tracking online Russian disinformation. The FBI debunked two other fake videos Saturday containing false claims of arrests linked to ballot fraud and rumors about Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris. The group of researchers also attributed the earlier fabricated videos to the same Russian operation. Election officials are gearing up for a flood of misinformation on Election Day and in the days after as generative artificial intelligence and deepfake technology allow for fabricated content to become more sophisticated, and U.S. officials warn of foreign efforts to undermine the election. “Russia is the most active threat,” the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement Monday.
“We can expect a lot of fake videos, deep fakes, a lot of lies coming not before the voting, but after. It's really important we remember it's going to take a few days to count the votes. That doesn't mean it's a problem. It doesn't mean there's fraud,” Michael Waldman, president of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, who focuses on systems of democracy, told ABC News on Tuesday.
Concerns about the role of Russian influence operations mount as two polling places in a majority Black district in key swing state Georgia were shut down temporarily after they received bomb threats that were later deemed non-credible by the FBI. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the state “identified the source, and it was from Russia.” U.S. intelligence officials also deemed a video falsely claiming that it depicted a Haitian immigrant talking about voting multiple times in two Georgia counties as the work of “Russian influence actors” Friday.
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