Russia is targeting the Paris Olympics with a campaign featuring a fake Tom Cruise‘hired’ for a critical narrative of the organization of the games. The complaint comes in a report from Microsoft: A network of Russian-affiliated groups is waging “negative influence campaigns” against France, Emmanuel Macron, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Paris Games less than 80 days before the event, the American multinational reveals. Russia has been banned from the 2024 Olympics, although a small number of athletes may take part as neutral athletes.
Cruise’s fake video, which appeared last year on Telegram, titled ‘Olympics Has Fallen’ from the Gerard Butler action film ‘The Power of God’ – uses AI-generated audio of the star’s voice to recite a “strange script” that denigrates the IOC. The authors claim – falsely – that the video was produced by Netflix and is described with false five-star reviews by the New York Times and the BBC.
From the video “it is clear that the creators of the content spent a lot of time on the project, demonstrating greater skill than most of the influencer campaigners we observe,” Microsoft’s threat analysis center says in a newly published report.
The footage was made by a Kremlin-linked group called Storm-1679which has in the past tricked US actors, including Elijah Wood, into recording messages on ‘Cameo’, a website where celebrities can be paid for personalized video messages, which were then turned into anti-Ukrainian propaganda.
Storm-1679’s campaign for the Olympics includes a collection of videos in which the alarm is raised about violence during games, which will take place from 26 July to 11 August. The group published fake news – attributed to well-known broadcasters – according to which Parisians were buying home insurance in anticipation of terrorist attacks and a quarter of the tickets had been returned due to fears related to possible attacks.
Social media accounts linked to Storm-1679 have in recent months broadcast images of graffiti photographed in Paris threatening Israelis participating in the games with violence. Many of the images also referenced the attacks on the 1972 Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists, in which 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team died. “Microsoft had no independent confirmation of the physical existence of the graffiti, suggesting that the images were likely digitally generated,” the report reads.
Another Russian group, known as Storm-1099 or ‘Doppelganger’, has created fake French-language news sites exposing IOC corruption and potential violence in Paris. Fake versions of Le Parisien and Le Point present Macron as a political figure indifferent to the difficulties of French citizens.
Microsoft has said it expects Russian efforts to extend to other languages and attempt to flood social media through automated accounts, while it is also likely to increase the use of generative AI, systems that produce highly developed text, video, images and audio. plausible.
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