During Tuesdays’ daily media briefing, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suggested that Russians could be using bot farms to spread debate videos that are damaging to President Joe Biden in hopes of helping the campaign of presumptive GOP candidate Donald Trump.
During the briefing, Jean-Pierre actually encouraged that speculation following a question from one reporter present.
The reporter posed the questions:
“Do you have any concerns right now that this is the leading edge of any part of a Russian effort to interfere in the election? Has the president been briefed on this? Have you seen any evidence that the Russians or other foreign powers have tried to seize on the debate performance and repeat some of the president’s most embarrassing moments?”
Jean-Pierre responded quickly that they were “very good” questions that the reporter asked. She then replied:
“I would have to talk to our team about those particular questions that you just had, there were multiple questions in your statement there. I would leave it to the Department of Justice as to what they announce. Obviously, that’s for them to speak to.”
She then added:
“[Artificial intelligence] has always been a concern. That’s why the president made some announcements recently to take executive action on how we can deal with AI. We want to see more fulsome action legislatively from Congress.”
That same day, the DOJ announced that it had shut down one particular disinformation campaign that the Kremlin had backed and that was operated by the state-owned media there.
The DOJ said this “bot farm” contained almost 1,000 accounts on the X social media platform. It used AI to spread their disinformation that was favorable to the government in Russia.
As Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, said in a statement:
“Today’s actions represent a first in disrupting a Russian-sponsored Generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm. Russia intended to use this bot farm to disseminate AI-generated foreign disinformation, scaling their work with the assistance of AI to undermine our partners in Ukraine and influence geopolitical narratives favorable to the Russian government.”
A Russian citizen who at one time led the editorial efforts of the state-controlled media outlet RT was allegedly in charge of orchestrating the bot network, the DOJ said. The agency explained:
“Since at least 2022, RT leadership sought the development of alternative means for distributing information beyond RT’s standard television news broadcasts. In response, Individual A led the development of software that was able to create and to operate a social media bot farm.”
While definitive action was taken against a Russian disinformation campaign on Tuesday, many people speculated that Jean-Pierre and the Biden administration was attempting to use that news as a way to distract from the president’s horrendous performance at the first presidential debate.
Some people questioned whether it was a smart move to essentially blame Russia for spreading news about Biden’s poor performance, instead of just blaming Biden himself.
