Russian Propaganda Unit Appears to Be Behind Spread of False Tim Walz Sexual Abuse Claims

A Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote wild and baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his former students, according to several specialists tracking the disinformation campaign.

Experts believe that the campaign is tied to a network called Storm-1516, which has been linked to, among other things, a previous effort that falsely claimed vice president Kamala Harris perpetrated a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011. Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West.

The propaganda unit’s work has successfully reached the highest levels of the Republican party, with vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeating at least one of their narratives. NBC reported this week that the group has pushed at least 50 false narratives in this manner since last fall, which comes amid a broader Russian government effort to disrupt next month’s election with the aim of helping former president Donald Trump return to the White House.

Numerous figures in MAGA world boosted the Tim Walz assault claims, including Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate promoter who is now a member of Trump’s campaign team, and Candace Owens, the popular right-wing podcaster. The claims went viral on X last week, when an anonymous account called Black Insurrectionist posted screenshots of emails from a purported victim. Other X users quickly debunked the claims, citing formatting errors in the images that suggested the emails were fake, but days later another conspiracist posted a video on X claiming he had spoken to one of Walz’s supposed victims on the phone—without providing any proof. The video racked up millions of hits.

Then, on Wednesday, a video claiming to show a former student of Walz describing abuse by the former football coach spread widely on X. According to a WIRED analysis using several deepfake detector tools, the video was created using AI. The video, shared by a prominent anonymous QAnon-promoting account, garnered over 4.3 million views before it was deleted.

The campaign to attack Walz predates the video; it traces back to John Dougan, a former Florida cop who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan appeared on Zak Paine’s QAnon show RedPill78 on October 5 with an anonymous man named “Rick,” who said he was a foreign exchange student at Mankato West High School in 2004 when Walz was a teacher there. “Rick” then claimed Walz assaulted him. Dougan did not respond to a request for comment.

The claims, however, didn’t go viral until last week and the release of the deepfake video.

Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED that he immediately recognized this tactic as part of Russia’s well-established disinformation playbook.

“There is little doubt this is Storm-1516,” says Linvill, whose team uncovered the network last fall.

Linvill says the account that first shared the AI-altered video bears all the hallmarks of previous Storm-1516 campaigns. “It is standard for them to create an X or YouTube account for initial placement of stories,” says Linvill.

The campaign orchestrated by Storm-1516 often begins with the posting of a fake story and video from a whistleblower or citizen journalist, the US mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe outlined in July. Disinformation is “amplified by other seemingly unaffiliated online networks,” the US mission stated. The claims then take on a life of their own, shared and reposted by unwitting social media users who likely have no idea of where the videos originated.

The fake stories can also be picked up by other media outlets that cover viral social media stories. In the case of the Walz claims, they ended up on MSN, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft.

In the past, Storm-1516 has relied on a network of fake news websites run by Dougan to push its narratives. On Saturday, a story that referenced the RedPill78 interview, the Black Insurrectionist posts, and the deepfake video was published on over 100 of Dougan’s websites simultaneously.

This was first discovered by Alex Liberty, a researcher who tracks the activity of Russia’s propaganda networks and who agrees with Linvill’s assertion that the deepfake video bears all the hallmarks of a Storm-1516 campaign.

“We believe that it might be a coordinated campaign in [an] attempt to bring numerous false accusations of the same nature against Tim Walz through different channels and in different formats in order to bring an image of legitimacy to the narrative,” Liberty tells WIRED.

McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, agrees.

“The false narrative appears to be part of a wider campaign pushed by pro-Kremlin media and QAnon influencers ahead of the November 5, 2024, US elections aimed at portraying Walz, whose political appeal is as an everyman schoolteacher and coach, as a pedophile who had inappropriate relationships with minors,” Sadeghi wrote in an analysis of the deepfake video.

From the very beginning, the allegations against Walz were easily debunked. In his interview on the RedPill78 QAnon show, Dougan’s source claimed he was in the US thanks to the State Department–funded Future Leaders Exchange program, which allows students from countries formerly under the control of the Soviet Union the chance to study in the US for a year.

However, a spokesperson for the US State Department, told NewsGuard that it has no record of any Future Leaders Exchange student from Kazakhstan in Mankato area schools from 2000 through 2020. Mankato Area Public Schools communications director Mel Helling told NewsGuard the allegations were “outlandish.”

The baseless claims were shared by some far-right accounts in the days after the episode was published, but they didn’t really take hold until a week later, when the X account known as Black Insurrectionist posted a clip from Dougan’s RedPill78 episode. The clip was viewed over 800,000 times.

Google search trends data shows a huge spike in people searching for “Tim Walz pedophile” and “Tim Walz abuse” on October 13, the day the Black Insurrectionist account began posting their claims.

The Black Insurrectionist account is anonymous and launched a year ago; its followers include Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump adviser Roger Stone. The account’s bio reads: “I am MAGA.” It rose to prominence weeks before the Walz post, when it claimed to have been in contact with a whistleblower at ABC who said Harris had been provided with the questions ahead of her September debate with former president Donald Trump. Those claims were widely debunked by multiple major fact-checking and media organizations.

Last week, the Black Insurrectionist account shared screenshots of email correspondence the account had with an alleged victim on X. Almost immediately, the evidence was questioned when X users spotted a text cursor in one of the screenshots, suggesting that Black Insurrectionist was editing the document. Others pointed out that the date and time format shown in some of the screenshots was inconsistent with how they are displayed on real emails.

Black Insurrectionist initially defended itself before going silent. The account was deleted on Thursday.

The two dozen posts from Black Insurrectionist laying out their alleged evidence have been viewed over 33 million times, according to X’s own metrics, and have been shared on numerous other platforms, including Truth Social, Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok.

Among those sharing Black Insurrectiont’s claims was Paine, who hosted Dougan on his QAnon show. “I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this story,” Paine wrote on X.

The posts have also caught the attention of the wider MAGA universe in a way that Dougan’s initial claims didn’t. Prominent right-wing figures like Owens and Posobiec both flagged the “allegations” as something worth looking into.

Owens discussed the conspiracy on her top-rated podcast, with the episode racking up over 630,000 views on YouTube since it was posted on Wednesday.

Posobiec wrote on X that there were “lots of allegations going around regarding Tim Walz sexually abusing young student(s).” While he added that he didn’t “know about any of the recent allegations being made,” he did share a link to Dougan’s claims from earlier in the month.

When Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president in July, Russian-aligned propaganda networks struggled to mount effective disinformation campaigns targeting the vice president and her team.

But as Microsoft reported in the summer, those campaigns have started to find their footing. “The shift to focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign reflects a strategic move by Russian actors aimed at exploiting any perceived vulnerabilities in the new candidates,” Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, wrote in August.