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- If you're just scrolling, it looks pretty real to me if you're not taking a very close look. And that's why this one is so dangerous. - Robert Habeck was the Green Party leader and vice chancellor of Germany. At the end of 2024, he was in the midst of an election campaign when a video surfaced on the internet.
- He had visited this school in Germany in 2017 and there was a picture of him with some students in a local newspaper. Flash forward to 2024, and one of the young students that he was pictured with years before is claiming that he had sexually assaulted her when he visited that school. - I said, well s---, if this is gonna break through and it's reported in the media, everything is over and I can't show myself on the streets.
- The important thing about this video is that it's fake. It's one example of a slew of videos produced by a group inside Russia. We're in the golden age of disinformation. Russia has really stepped up its spread of fabricated reports. It's targeting social media platforms using influencers and AI-generated content. They sow chaos, they sow doubts, and they undermine the truth.
- When I look at her, and I'm watching this, I don't speak German so I don't know what she's saying, but I'm having this sensation of there's something wrong with her face. - If you're just scrolling, it might look normal, especially on a phone, but on a big screen, it's quite clear that her eyes aren't quite right. She's blinking sort of oddly, her eyes are changing size slightly as she's speaking and her face doesn't match what she's doing with her mouth.
- It's not like a masterclass in like filmmaking or artistry. What it is they can travel. The ultimate goal is to get ordinary people talking about it, thinking about it, considering it. - Which is why it's so dangerous to not take this stuff down. When we started digging deeper and we found more examples of similar videos, we realized this was a distinct campaign that other researchers had identified as well as government officials. - We've seen governments talk about election interference and disinformation campaigns, but what was really different about this is they came out and they attributed it not just to Russia, but to a very specific Russian group.
You almost never see that - Storm-1516 is really a new approach or methodology that Russia has adopted to spread disinformation. I spent so many hours scrolling through social media looking at these videos, and I realized that so many people believe these stories. It's a very murky operation. It's backed by the GRU, Russia's Military Intelligence Agency. We also believe that this effort is led overall from the Kremlin by a man named Sergei Kiriyenko, who is Putin's first deputy chief of the presidential administration.
Russia has been targeting the West with fake reports for years. - The disinformation is absolutely central to Soviet strategy for defeating what the KGB calls "the main enemy" that is the United States without firing the shot. - Back in the Soviet period, they invented, most famously, the conspiracy theory that HIV was cooked up in a US lab. And so what I did was snip the image and then I put her through facial recognition software. It comes up with the image of a Russian figure skater by the name of Yulia Lipnitskaya, who became well-known in Russia for winning a medal
during the Sochi 2014 games. I highly doubt it's this Russian figure skater who's acting for money, but looks like what they've done is they've taken the images of this woman, Yulia Lipnitskaya, and imposed her face on a real actor and then manipulated her face with AI animation software. It's really important for them to mix real news with fake news. You know, so many young women have come out with similar allegations against powerful men, so they're picking up on a theme that they know is very divisive.
- I could show you the magic of a Storm-1516 video and why it looks silly, but is actually genius. - My name is Darren Linvill and I am co-director of the hub and professor in the Department of Communication here at Clemson. I read Russian troll tweets until my eyes bled and we learned just an amazing amount. Storm-1516 is a narrative laundering campaign. Narrative laundering starts by creating a story. Sometimes that story is put onto a purpose-built website and then, they use all kinds of different resources to layer that narrative, layer that story into the conversation.
It may mean Russian state media layering those stories into the conversation. It definitely and most often involves real influencers and those influencers then layer in that Russian narrative until integration where it just becomes part of the conversation where real people are repeating it and talking about it. You get to the point where when you see one of these Storm-1516 narratives, you don't have to look very hard to realize, oh yeah, that's them. One technique that Storm-1516 very often uses is a whistleblower format. Maybe it's a journalist who has uncovered something that they think is gonna blow the whistle on something.
Maybe it's someone who's placed within a government who has a story to tell. Yeah, we started the trials to help children, not to injure them or murder them. Their videos look the same. They repeatedly use, for instance, members of the West African diaspora community who live in St. Petersburg as actors. - Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we arevoting in Fulton County. - We've seen them use AI in some of their videos in sort of subtle ways to mask a particular individual who's speaking to change the vocal patterns.
There's a set of narratives that Russia has pushed consistently over time, issues that have cleaver points within the discourse that the Russians want to push on maybe a wound that the Russians want to rub salt in. For instance, that Zelenskyy is corrupt, that he is using Western aid money to buy extravagant items. - President Zelenskyy uses proxies to hide ownership of two years worth $75 million. - This was a narrative that not only went viral on social media, but it was repeated by various US policy makers. - We're getting easily a half a trillion dollars in the hole for the Ukraine conflict.
Why? So that one of Zelenskyy's ministers can buy a bigger yacht? - It's these false Russian narratives repeated over and over again, and you can't get me to believe that doesn't have some effect on how a large portion of Americans view the war in Ukraine. They're trying to not tell people what to think, they're trying to influence the conversation. After Trump won the election in 2024, I think Russia really turned its focus to Europe where the real support for Ukraine remained. Certainly these issues are taken more seriously in Europe. They are much more targeted by Russian disinformation.
The thing is actually this, this event was referring to a real event, so date and time 15 years ago they are true, so I visited a school as a minister in the northern most part of Germany in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. It's not the girl who I met 15 years ago, and the girl herself was saying, or the family was saying, "this is just a lie, so we have nothing to do with it." So if you just a normal user of social media, you see it, you might tend to believe it. The video with the allegations against Habeck was shared by a German language influencer who posts a lot of Storm-1516 content.
The real core to the success of Storm-1516 has evolved into being about the influencers. There's one individual in particular, Chay Bowes. This individual is a Irish journalist, independent journalist. We've been warning you about this corruption s--- in this complete basket case country called Ukraine for years. I suppose it's all Russian disinformation too, that tens of thousands of people are literally running away from the narco-fuhrer's army.
- He's so clearly working on behalf of Russian disinformation efforts, He has regularly shared Storm-1516 content and he shared the video alleging that ballots with votes for the AFD were being shredded systematically. His post got half a million views. It was also posted by someone else and got almost 4 million views. The German authorities called this out warning the public not to believe it, saying the paper is different, the typeface is different, but you know, they have made a concerted effort here to make this look as realistic as possible. - Yeah, clearly it was resonating with lots of people and the fact that it's AFD ballots being shredded, what's, what's the narrative that plays into?
- Exactly. Well, AFD, Germany's far right party, it is pro-Russian, has called for closer ties with Moscow, called for the lifting of sanctions on Russia. In the election, the AFD got 21% of the vote, which was over double what they had gotten four years earlier. On the other hand, the Green Party's vote share fell and Robert Habeck went on to resign his parliamentary seat. Perhaps the only silver lining for Habeck is that the video targeting him didn't go viral, in part because of efforts to block the post on X in Germany.
- I had to sleepless night, but in the morning as no media was reporting about it, I was really relieved, I can say. Though this disgusting video was not a success, still the whole way of disinformation campaign is successful. Even though the story against Habeck didn't spread, you can still find the video on X outside Germany and I think that's significant. If you look at the timeline of it, Elon Musk takes over X in 2022 and Storm-1516 starts to get going in August 2023 and really just takes off. There's also the question of regulation in the US. Last year, the Justice Department shut down the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, which was coordinating a lot of the US government's efforts on this front
to expose foreign backed disinformation, and I think with the US agencies standing down on this front it's really Europe that's left monitoring it and trying to expose it and trying to regulate the social media giants. Storm-1516 has captured eyeballs like no other Russian operation before. - We've seen them ramp up the rate at which they've been targeting elections, not just in the United States, but around the world, and there's every reason to believe they'll continue to do that. I think in many ways they're just getting started.
