Bots inflate Russia's fake midterm videos

TLDR

• Bloomberg reviewed 130 fake videos and doctored front pages aimed at the US midterms, most flagged by Antibot4Navalny.¹
• Archived snapshots show bots inflating views: one post hit 50,839 views in 20 minutes, then under 700 in three hours.¹
• Graphika says the posts are not actually making an impact on how people vote.¹

Open-source researchers tracking Russia's Matryoshka operation say its fake celebrity and fake news-outlet videos against Democrats are being propped up by bots that inflate view counts on X, and that the clips mostly fail to reach a real audience.¹ Bloomberg reviewed 130 videos and doctored newspaper front pages published between 10 September and 9 October by a network that researchers attribute to the state-backed operation, and found false stories about 29 of the 36 Democrats running for governor and 20 of the 35 Democrats vying for Senate.¹

Why it matters: the tell-tale signs are checkable in public: dormant accounts suddenly posting, views that spike and then flatline, and almost no reposts or likes, which Bloomberg reports as a pattern researchers use to separate manufactured reach from organic growth.¹ Graphika's Jean le Roux says the operators probably still use the inflated numbers as a measure of success to report back within Russia, even though, he says, the posts are not actually making an impact on the midterms or on how people vote.¹

Driving the news:

• AI-fabricated clips of actors and musicians including Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts and Cher attacking Democrats began appearing on X in early September, some urging people to join a campaign called #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. Scores of other clips make false allegations of corruption against Democratic candidates.¹
• One clip carrying an ABC News logo alleged that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico paid OnlyFans models, which his spokesperson denies. Another, with a CBS News logo, claimed the Internal Revenue Service found that Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff owns eight undeclared properties, for which Bloomberg says there is no evidence.¹
• Antibot4Navalny, which has tracked Russian bot activity since 2018 and does not disclose its location or members, named the operation Matryoshka after the Russian nesting dolls because each day an account tries to spread the previous day's fake story and posts a new one.¹
• Bloomberg lists the common traits: fake video reports impersonating media outlets, long-dormant accounts repurposed to post one or two videos, tagging and emailing of media organisations, and several posts on one theme on the same day. Operators push five to 10 narratives every weekday, often between 9am and noon Eastern Time, and rest at weekends.¹
• Views can reach as high as 200,000 within the first hour and then plateau, whereas organic views usually follow a growth curve. A 24 September clip about Senator Amy Klobuchar got 155,300 views, two likes and no retweets by X's count, and a 22 September clip about Taylor Swift got 75,600 views within 30 minutes before tailing off.¹
• Graphika told the New York Times that new campaigns targeted Senators Cory Booker and John Hickenlooper with fabricated corruption reports, and that October posts linked to Matryoshka promoted a claim that Democrats were behind the attempted hijacking of the FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv.²
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 12 October that Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centres had cut bot activity. Graphika and Antibot4Navalny told Bloomberg they have seen no evidence of a decline in Kremlin-linked bot activity since the strikes began on 8 October, and that what fell was automated web-crawler traffic on Yandex.¹
• X said in a post on 14 October that it had suspended more than 13,000 accounts tied to suspected foreign influence operations linked to Iran, Russia and China that targeted US political conversation. Al Jazeera reports X said the networks targeted candidates and public figures across the political spectrum, ahead of the 3 November midterms.¹³

The big picture: Bloomberg says a few Matryoshka posts do break through. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which examined 135 pieces of content attributed to the operation between January and March 2025, found one fake E! News-style video about the US Agency for International Development that reached 4 million views after Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. each reposted it.¹ X did not respond to Bloomberg's emailed questions. It suspended 80 per cent of the accounts Bloomberg saw and removed 10 more after Bloomberg flagged them, but Graphika's le Roux says X is curbing the spread and reach of these campaigns while the accounts are still there.¹

The other side: Graphika's le Roux told Bloomberg the posts are not actually making an impact on the midterms or on the way people vote.¹ The New York Times separately reports that Alethea, which tracks a different Russian operation called Doppelgänger, found none of that operation's inauthentic posts had high views or interactions, although their volume suggested the messaging was likely getting in front of people.²

Single-source note: the view-count snapshots and the 130-video review rest on Bloomberg's reporting of archived snapshots that Antibot4Navalny shared exclusively with Bloomberg, which we have not seen. Bloomberg says Graphika and dTeam corroborated and supplemented the narratives. The New York Times corroborates only Graphika's attribution of the September videos to Matryoshka and the Booker, Hickenlooper and FlyDubai narratives, and its main subject is the separate Doppelgänger operation. Al Jazeera's report on X's 13,000 suspensions covers Iran, Russia and China together and does not single out Matryoshka.¹²³