By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-10-19 15:16:16 | Updated at 2026-10-19 22:29:46
8 hours ago
Bloomberg News is warning that “Russian bot farms” are pushing out fake videos of A-List Hollywood celebrities like Taylor Swift, Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts, and Cher attacking Democrats ahead of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections.
Bloomberg claims that the videos can be attributed to a Russian state-backed operation known as Matryoshka, or Operation Overload.
Many of these videos feature the AI-created celebrities making accusations of crimes and corruption Democrat candidates have supposedly indulged and urges watchers to join a campaign entitled “#AllDemocratsAreCriminals.”
The videos have been tracked and flagged by several left-wing “anti-disinformation” groups, including Antibot4Navalny, Graphika, and dTeam, Bloomberg noted.
One video, for instance, purports to be a report by ABC News alleging that Texas Democrat James Talarico has hired OnlyFans models for his campaign. A second, carrying the CBS News logo, claims that the IRS has found that Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff has eight properties that he has never declared. There is not evidence for either claim.
The videos show hundreds of thousands of views, but the Internet tracking groups have revealed that most of the views have been manipulated by bots repeatedly hitting or reposting the videos to falsely pump up the view counts, and to fool viewers into thinking the reports are widely popular and therefore legitimate.
The Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence has also warned that foreign forces are attempting to use social media to influence the U.S. election with waves of bots and fake videos meant to pass false stories to U.S. voters. The Trump administration has also warned that Russia is a chief perpetrator of these campaigns.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attempted to take credit for a massive drop in bot traffic this month after his forces began targeting Russian data centers and infrastructure, but hard evidence of his claim seems to be lacking. Traffic for Russia’s search engine, Yandex, has dropped, but most Russian bot networks have maintained their operations researchers say.
The bot practice appears highly consistent. A fake story is posted, then tens of thousands of fake email accounts are used to repost the videos on social media, after that emails are sent out to fact-checking organizations demanding that the stories be reviewed, the latter act done in hopes of fooling news organizations to cover the story and aid in pushing out the false narrative.
Social media companies have tried fighting against these fake accounts, but it has often been a losing battle. X has fought a rear guard action to try and delete these accounts, but every one deleted prompts the creation of several more.
Jean le Roux of Graphika, the left-wing group that monitors bot activity, gave X some credit for making the effort.
“As much as X keeps taking them down, we always see a new crop,” Jean le Roux said. “X is curbing the spread and the reach of these campaigns, but they are still there.”
Still, le Roux hastened to note that few of these fake stories ever get much traction and there has been no evidence that the Russian bots have done all that much to sway any elections in Europe of the U.S.
Follow Warner Todd Huston Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston
