Russia-paid influencers, trolls step up efforts to influence U.S. election

New propaganda networks are still being discovered, such as one identified by disinformation tracking company Alethea Group that includes 77 X accounts posting original content and more than 400 that amplify those posts. That network has claimed that Harris is showing signs of Alzheimer’s; that her family’s secret ties to “Big Pharma” give her a financial incentive to push puberty-blocking drugs; and that she is a Marxist because her grandfather taught Marxist theory, Alethea said in research shared with The Post.

Following the FBI explication in a 277-page affidavit of the contracted influence campaign, the network began asserting that experts had concluded Ukraine was behind it. On Sept. 10, for example, X user “Jhon Piell,” on now-suspended account @salman1212120, posted a video citing Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative collaborative Bellingcat, as calling the operation “a complex and dangerous project of Ukraine.”

“Less than half an hour after the video’s publication, it was retweeted at least 76 times in under 60 seconds by a network of accounts, all with Turkish names, that had been created in batches between Sept. 2 and Sept. 8, 2024,” Alethea wrote.

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