…and here it is…demoncraps have MSM's playing that same old card again.
Russia, Russia, Russia! Notice how they used the word 'reportedly'.
==Report: Russia Spreading Disinformation Ahead of Election=
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/russia-disinformation-2024-election/2024/02/26/id/1155001/
Russia has reportedly begun spreading disinformation ahead of November's election — using fake online accounts and bots to damage Ukraine-supporting President Joe Biden and Democrats.
NBC News, citing former U.S. officials and cyber experts, reported the Biden attack strategy is part of Moscow's continuing effort to undercut American military aid to Ukraine as well as support for and solidarity with NATO.
"Not that they didn't have an incentive to interfere in the last two presidential elections," Bret Schafer told NBC News. He is with the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund, which tracks disinformation efforts by Russia and other regimes.
"But I would say that the incentive to interfere is heightened right now," he said.
According to NBC News, officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a "deepfake" audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a "hack and leak."
It noted that America's deepening political polarization provides fertile ground to spread confusion, division, and chaos.
"In many ways it's a perfect storm of opportunity for them," Paul Kolbe, who worked for 25 years in the CIA's Directorate of Operations and is a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, told the outlet.
"I think, for a lot of reasons, we will see the same approach, but amplified and, I think, with some of the constraints that you might have seen taken off."
For example, Russia has amplified the political dispute between the Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over security at the Texas border over the past month — part of an attempt to promote the idea the U.S. is headed to a new "civil war," NBC News reported.
"So far, Russian operations targeting the U.S. have been opportunistic. They see whatever narrative is rising to the top, and they try to push it," Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, told the outlet.
"Disinformation isn't created in a vacuum. The more polarized a country is, the easier it is for foreign actors to infiltrate and hijack its political processes."
The larger Russian threat to the election could prove to be AI-created fake audio, the experts claimed — with the most likely disinformation scenario expected to be "hyper-personalized, localized attacks," Miles Taylor, a senior Trump administration homeland security official, told NBC News.
Other apparent Russian efforts to sow division are simpler.
Last year, celebrities who sell personalized videos on the website Cameo, including Priscilla Presley, Mike Tyson, and Elijah Wood, were tricked into inadvertently recording messages that denigrated two major enemies of the Kremlin, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Moldovan President Maia Sandu, NBC News reported.
"An equally nice outcome for them is just what we had last time, where a third of the country doesn't believe the vote," Schafer said. "Democracy is questioned; the system gets questioned. So they don't necessarily need to see their guy win to have it be a good outcome for them."
Kolbe said the Kremlin would most likely see trying to penetrate U.S. voting systems as a low-risk undertaking.
"I don't see any reason why they wouldn't," he said. "You'd be hard-pressed to find where they would see the risk part of the equation. It gets close to zero."
But officials and disinformation analysts warn Russia's ability to manipulate voters shouldn't be overstated.
"I am very skeptical, whether it's 2016 or 2024, that the United States political and media culture needs any push from Russia," Gavin Wilde, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who specializes in Russia and information warfare, told NBC News.
"The Kremlin has every interest in seeing an American public, or American leadership, that's less inclined to support Ukraine, that's less inclined to punish Russia. Those incentives are certainly there. But we're already doing a pretty good job of that at home. I don't know how much of a nudge the Kremlin thinks it needs to lend it."