The American Midterm (mid-term) elections on Tuesday 8 November will once again constitute a test bed for American democracy, already heavily stressed by the presidential elections two years ago in which, especially by former President Donald Trump, yes it is tempted to undermine the confidence of American voters in the goodness of the electoral process to the last.
In this context, today the New York Times writes that Russian trolls and bots have been reactivated - albeit this time in a very different way - as happened for the 2016 presidential elections, on which, we recall, much evidence of the Russian attempt has now emerged. to spread distrust of the political system in general, damaging the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular.
For that election campaign alone, Facebook later estimated that fraudulent Russian posts reached 126 million Americans on its platforms.
Last month, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning about the disinformation threat from "the dark web, online magazines, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages and fakes. online account ".
The two state agencies have warned that these new attempts at disinformation could include claims that the data or voting results have been breached or compromised, but have not identified a particular instigator.
They are social media research companies such as Recorded Future, Graphika and Mandiant that have encountered a number of suspicious Russian campaigns on the web, especially on some new social platforms such as Gab, Parler, Getter who generally boast in the name of free speech to create unmoderated spaces.
These are much smaller disinformation campaigns than those of the 2016 elections, where fake accounts reached millions of voters of all political affiliations on Facebook and other major platforms.
But these attempts are no less pernicious, the researchers estimate, as they seek to target the most impressionable users who can help achieve Russian goals.
"The audience is much, much smaller (on these new social networks) than other traditional social media networks," said Brian Liston, senior intelligence analyst at Recorded Future who identified Nora Berka's suspicious account.
"But you can engage the public in much more targeted operations because those who are on these platforms are generally US conservatives who are perhaps more ready to accept conspiratorial narratives."
Many of the accounts identified by the researchers have already been used by a media organization called Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens, previously linked by Meta, the owner of Facebook, to Russian information campaigns run by the Internet Research Agency, the so-called "Troll Factory Russi ”which is based in St. Petersburg.
These social profiles remained inactive after they were publicly identified in the 2020 election period. And now, as if called to action by the sleeper state, they have begun to become active again starting in August and September. .
Among these, Nora Berk's profile on the social Gab was identified as one of the most typical.
Resurfacing in August after a year of silence, the profile produced a large stream of highly shared posts evidently borrowed from Russian propaganda posts, intended to denigrate, mostly obscenely, President Biden and efforts to support the Ukraine in the war against the Russian invader.
It is not easy to determine the possible impact of these disinformation efforts on Tuesday's elections.
According to Edward P. Perez, a member of the board of directors of the OSET Institute, a non-partisan organization for electoral security, today's campaigns, even if much smaller than in the past, can nevertheless achieve the desired effect because they now operate on an American company. much more divided and in which they find fertile ground.