A few days before the American presidential election, social networks are full of false information. The elections official in Georgia, a key southern state, said in a statement Thursday evening “of a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant possessing several Georgia ID cards and claiming to have voted several times”.
“This is an example of the targeted disinformation we have seen in this and other elections.”declared Brad Raffensperger believing that it was “probably from a production of Russian troll farms”.
Manufacturing “from scratch”
Suspicions confirmed by the Federal Police (FBI), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in a joint press release on Friday.
“The Intelligence Community concludes that Russian agents of influence fabricated a recent video falsely showing individuals claiming to be from Haiti and voting illegally in multiple Georgia counties”according to the text.
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“This activity by Russia is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and fuel divisions among Americans.”affirm these federal agencies.
They specify that they expect these attempts to continue until the vote and “in the following weeks and months”.
A 20 second clip
Last week, the same security services attributed to Russian agents a fake video that went viral allegedly showing the destruction of mail-in ballots for Republican candidate Donald Trump in the key northeastern state of Pennsylvania. ).
In his statement, the Georgia elections official asked “Elon Musk and the management of other social media platforms to remove” the video.
But the 20-second clip can still be viewed on
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We see a man in a vehicle saying in a monotone voice facing the camera: “ We are from Haiti. We arrived in America six months ago, and we already have American citizenship – we are voting for Kamala Harris”.
He then claims that he and his friends voted in several counties and shows a series of driver's licenses.
A battery of measures
“We checked the electoral lists. There is no match. The IDs are fake and there is no way the people in the video voted in Georgia using those IDs”explained to theAFP Mike Hassinger, spokesperson for state authorities.
In September, federal authorities announced a series of measures, including the seizure of 32 domain names used in a “campaign to influence” on the results of the election conducted under the authority of the Russian presidential administration, according to the Ministry of Justice.
