• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 4, 2024

In an ironic twist in Russia's disinformation campaign attacking the U.S. presidential election, a network of Russian agents and bots have begun spreading outlandish disinformation in the comments sections of bona fide news organization accounts, as well as those of fact-checking sites.

The development, detected by news veracity and fact-checking platform NewsGuard, identified at least 28 accounts posting the comments on X accounts of fact-checkers including Lead Stories, FactCheck.org and Facta, as well as NewsGuard's itself.

"Since early September, NewsGuard has identified 28 accounts on X that have collectively spammed the replies on X of hundreds of U.S. news outlets with convincingly produced but fake media reports about the 2024 election and U.S. politics," NewsGuard reports in its weekly newsletter, noting, "Outlets whose reply sections on X have been targeted by the spam campaign include fact-checking organizations."

NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz tells MediaPost that it does not yet know the magnitude of the effort, but said it is continuing to track the effort and has begun tracking the comments sections on the sites of major news organizations, as well.

"Flooding the zone is a good phrase," he said, "Because they're keeping journalists and fact-checkers busy chasing claims they just made up."

In addition to draining the resources of fact-checkers and news sites, the Russian campaign ironically uses them as a vector for spreading even more disinformation.

"In the low trust world we live in, having crazy conspiracy theories in the reply area to a news outlet’s or a fact-checker’s account tends to reduce trust even though it’s not the fault of the account holder," Crovitz explains, adding, "It’s not the fault of USA Today that some Russian agent is spewing crazy conspiracy theories in response to what USA Today posted on its own account."