In the middle of the day of voting for the American presidential election, a pro-Trump influencer admits to having been manipulated by a Russian agent with the aim of spreading false information.
AlphaFox78, an American from Massachusetts, is also and above all an influencer followed on X by more than 650,000 people. He shares pro-Donald Trump memes and videos there.
One of them, which purportedly shows a Haitian migrant claiming to have voted twice in the state of Georgia, in favor of Kamala Harris, is in fact a gross fake. To CNN, he claims to have been paid $100 to relay it by an employee of a Russian state media. On November 1, the FBI had already claimed that the sequence had been produced by Russia.
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Russian agent behind video that went viral
“I have no idea where this came from or anything, I'm just the guy who shared it,” he defends.
He adds that it was a Russian propagandist podcaster, Simeon Boikov, suspected of being a Russian agent by certain countries such as Australia, who contacted him. Before its deletion (following discussions with CNN), this video was viewed more than 2.6 million times. It notably fuels the numerous conspiracy theories, relayed by Elon Musk himself, concerning supposed electoral fraud to favor the election of Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.
A previous CNN investigation had already revealed the role played by Boikov in the disinformation campaign launched by Russia to interfere in the American presidential election.
Other fabricated deals
According to AlphaFox78's claims to CNN, this is far from the first time that he has agreed to receive a sum of money to broadcast content sent by third parties, without prior verification: “It started with memes and it seemed innocent,” he explains.
He thus claimed to have been paid ten times to publish false information explaining that Kamala Harris had warned Sean “Diddy” Combs before the FBI raid on his home while the artist is accused of being at the head of extensive sex trafficking.
If today he has “remorse”, he is not the first to be fooled by disinformation: “Real people have become important vectors of Russian disinformation. It is no longer just false accounts,” alarms Darren Linvill, expert on the subject at Clemson University, to the American news channel.
The account of the pro-Trump influencer is still online, despite his revelations. However, he is questioned under his publications on this subject. He claims that since his exchanges with CNN journalists, Simeon Boikov cut ties with him and blocked him on the Telegram application, where they exchanged.
