WASHINGTON — A Russian disinformation operation has turned its attention to the US midterm elections, unleashing a series of deepfake videos that depict celebrities attacking Democrats, researchers said, with more expected to come. The videos spread late last week across social media with hashtags such as “#AllDemocratsAreCriminals” and showed Hollywood actors chastising the Democratic Party in self-recorded statements branded with CNN’s logo. Researchers said the deepfake videos appear linked to Matryoshka, or Operation Overload, a Kremlin campaign that spreads fake news videos through social media and bot activity. “This is what I believe to be the first salvo in Russia’s targeting of the November vote,” said Darren Linvill, a Clemson University expert on Russian influence campaigns. “The Russians have targeted every US election with some kind of social media campaign since 2016,” Linvill told AFP. “I was fully expecting it.” The timing of the releases is significant: the midterm elections will determine control of the US Congress, and even a small shift in public opinion could have outsize consequences. Disinformation researchers have long warned that Russia seeks to exploit existing partisan divisions, degrade trust in institutions and flood the public sphere with chaos. The celebrity videos, arriving in the weeks before voting, fit an escalating pattern of Russian activity in the final stretch of American elections. In previous cycles, Russian operatives used fake personas, bot networks and manipulated news stories to target specific voters. The deepfake videos, with their combination of stolen faces and a recognizable news logo, are a logical and dangerous evolution of those tactics.
Among the videos is a voice-cloned version of “How I Met Your Mother” star Alyson Hannigan, shown saying: “Today in America, there isn’t a single child who isn’t under threat from Democrats.” Another portrays Emma Caulfield, known for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” saying Democrats “drink our blood.” In a third, Sarah Jessica Parker appears to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Democrats “Nazis.” The clips were not genuine celebrity testimonials; they were manufactured using footage stolen from elsewhere on the internet. One fake of Julia Roberts layered fabricated audio over a 2023 Gucci campaign. Others were built on top of recordings uploaded to Cameo, a service that lets celebrities sell personalized videos to fans. The victims were quick to object. “I feel violated,” Caulfield told AFP of the video using her image. “This isn’t me, and worse, this cheap imitation is a soulless idiot.” Ed Begley Jr., of “Better Call Saul,” said he had no idea his Cameo submission had been altered to depict him bashing Democrats as “perverts.” “I want to say on record that I wholeheartedly disagree with everything that the video says,” he told AFP. “Runaway Train” star Eric Roberts said his own Cameo footage was distorted to portray him attacking Democrats over transgender issues. “Those statements are not my words and do not represent my beliefs,” Roberts said. “I am deeply troubled that my likeness was manipulated and used to deceive the public.” The videos hijack celebrities’ voices and faces without permission, transforming a commercial entertainment service into a disinformation weapon.
CNN also objected. A spokesperson told AFP that the network had no affiliation with the material. “These videos are not CNN content and have no affiliation with CNN,” the spokesperson said. The unauthorized use of a major news organization’s logo is central to the deception: viewers are meant to believe the reports are legitimate journalism. Disinformation researchers said the deepfake videos appear to be the work of Matryoshka, or Operation Overload, a Kremlin campaign known for littering social media with doctored videos that impersonate news organizations and amplify them through inorganic bot activity. The online collective Antibot4navalny first attributed the deepfakes to Matryoshka, citing familiar patterns of distribution and amplification across platforms. Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an Institute for Strategic Dialogue analyst who tracks Russian efforts to target elections across Europe, said the fabricated voiceovers and misuse of CNN’s logo are also low-effort tactics consistent with Matryoshka. “The use of Cameo videos is not new,” he said. “They have used it in the regional and local German elections, in the Hungarian elections, and in the Armenian elections.” Last month, French prosecutors said they were investigating suspected Russian deepfakes and fake video reports targeting the main centrist candidates in next year’s presidential elections. That cross-border pattern points to a sustained Russian program to use synthetic media against democratic processes, adapting the same techniques to different countries and political moments.
While the campaign’s work often has minimal impact, and X, Bluesky and TikTok have removed some of the posts, experts said the videos signal which US races and issues Russia intends to target in the elections. The balance of power in Congress is at stake, and doctored videos aimed at Democratic candidates and supporters could be used to mobilize or suppress voters. Antibot4navalny spotted other fabricated CNN video reports smearing Democratic candidates, including Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico. The operation appears to be ramping up as election day approaches. The group also alerted AFP to additional inauthentic video reports that emerged Monday, seeking to discredit MS NOW’s debunking of the celebrity deepfakes. Those posts wove disinformation journalist Brandy Zadrozny into the narrative, falsely claiming she had retracted her coverage of the burgeoning campaign. This effort to attack fact-checkers and journalists is another hallmark of Russian influence operations: when false content is exposed, the response is not to stop but to complicate the record and create the false impression that the debunking itself is unreliable. By targeting both the original candidates and the organizations trying to clean up the information environment, Matryoshka attempts to exploit the verification cycle itself, turning the media’s response into another vector of confusion. Social media platforms have had mixed success in removing the material, but the rapid generation of new videos and hashtags makes enforcement a continuous game of whack-a-mole.
Matryoshka — named for the Russian nesting dolls that reveal layer after layer — is an apt metaphor for a campaign designed to conceal its origin and multiply falsehoods. The operation has been documented across multiple elections, from Germany to Hungary to Armenia, and now the United States. Its approach is less about convincing viewers that a single celebrity made a specific statement than about flooding the public sphere with fake content that sows doubt and animosity. Even after the videos are debunked, the images and soundbites can continue to circulate in private messaging apps and fringe forums. The Russian strategy, experts say, is not necessarily to change a particular race but to degrade overall confidence in information. When voters see a fake CNN logo or a cloned celebrity voice, they may become more cynical about all news, making it harder for legitimate reporting to break through. That cynicism is a feature, not a bug, of the operation. Researchers have also noted that the deepfakes carry divisive cultural and political themes — attacks on Democrats over children, blood-drinking, “Nazis” and transgender issues — carefully chosen to align with existing online arguments. The goal is to provoke outrage and get the clips shared by real users, multiplying the reach of the original bot-driven amplification. The low-tech nature of the forgeries, using readily available AI voice cloning and repurposed videos, makes them easier to produce and harder to stop once they begin circulating.
For the celebrities involved, the experience has been distressing. Caulfield described the fake version of herself as “a soulless idiot,” and Roberts spoke of being deeply troubled that his likeness was manipulated. Yet the human toll is part of a larger political danger. With the US election approaching, Darren Linvill and other researchers expect more deepfake videos and more fabricated news reports. “This is what I believe to be the first salvo,” Linvill said, and the second, third and fourth salvos may already be in preparation. The groups monitoring these campaigns — including Antibot4navalny, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Clemson University researchers and AFP fact-checkers — are racing to expose the material, but the burden also falls on platforms to act quickly and on the public to pause before sharing outrageous videos. In an information environment where a familiar face and a trusted logo can be faked in minutes, critical thinking is a form of defense. The Russian effort, with its mix of low-tech reuse and AI-powered cloning, is a reminder that election interference no longer requires hacking voting machines; it can be as simple as stealing a celebrity’s face and wrapping it in a news brand to create chaos. The videos are not just about celebrities or even about this year’s midterm elections. They are part of a longer Russian campaign to undermine faith in democratic institutions, and they will almost certainly continue.