Black Insurrectionist
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wired oct 21 2024
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.
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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.
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who cd have guessed?
mma 10 24
MAGA misinformation account that spread false claims that the ABC presidential debate was rigged turns out to be a fraud
The social media account “Black Insurrectionist” was revealed to be run by a white man who has “repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders.”
Written by Gideon Taaffe
Published 10/28/24 mma
An anonymous social media account that went by the name “Black Insurrectionist” was the origin of a false story about an “ABC whistleblower” that claimed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was given sample debate questions in advance. This baseless story was amplified by MAGA influencers and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. An Associated Press investigation recently revealed the person behind the account is a white man from New York named Jason G. Palmer, who “owes more than $6.7 million in back taxes to the state of New York” and has “repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders.”
In September, the account claimed it would post an “affidavit” from an “ABC whistleblower” revealing that ABC News colluded with the Harris campaign for the September 10 presidential debate the network hosted. Black Insurrectionist wrote, “The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question[s] which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked.”
ABC categorically denied Black Insurrectionist’s claims. A network spokesperson told the Daily Beast, “Harris was not given any questions before the debate,” and, according to the outlet, “the spokesperson also said no aides were in contact with moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.” When the account did release the supposed affidavit, there were internal inconsistencies and grammatical errors.
Right-wing media personalities and politicians, including Trump, spread the story even though the account had engaged in a slew of baseless conspiracy theories and violent pro-Trump rants. Turning Point USA contributor and podcast host Benny Johnson shared the supposed affidavit citing Black Insurrectionist, which was then reposted by Trump’s younger son Eric. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo then amplified the baseless claim on her Fox Business show and highlighted right-wing billionaire Bill Ackman’s post that further spread claims of an ABC whistleblower.
In October, the account also spread vile claims baselessly accusing Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, of sexually assaulting a student. Though some conspiracy theorists with prominent platforms, including Trump ally Laura Loomer, picked up the claims, others in right-wing media cautioned against the spread of the salacious allegations.
New reporting now shows that Black Insurrectionist was misleading about more than just the alleged ABC whistleblower. The Associated Press reported: “The Black Insurrectionist account is linked directly to Jason G. Palmer, who has his own questionable backstory, starting with the fact that he isn’t Black, according to an Associated Press review of public records, open source data and interviews with a half-dozen people who interacted closely with Palmer over the past two decades. The records and personal accounts offer a portrait of an individual who has repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders, has struggled with drug addiction and whose home was raided by the FBI over a decade ago. He also owes more than $6.7 million in back taxes to the state of New York.”
Black Insurrectionist’s X account was deleted several hours after the AP first reached out to Palmer for comment.
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Right-wing media figures are spreading salacious and unsupported accusations against Tim Walz from an account known for creating viral hoaxes
Some conservative media personalities aren’t convinced, urging others to avoid the viral posts given the originator’s track record
Written by Jack Winstanley
Research contributions from Alex Kaplan
:{Published 10/17/24 mma
Right-wing and far-right media personalities have amplified an unfounded claim against Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz based on a series of posts on social media from “Black Insurrectionist,” an account that has previously pushed a conspiracy theory about the September 10 presidential debate. Some conservative media figures have warned others to “stay away” from the accusations based on the account’s track record of pushing baseless claims.
- ## On X (formerly Twitter), a series of posts accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of sexually assaulting a student
- Beginning on October 13, X user @DocNetyoutube — known as “Black Insurrectionist” — made over a dozen posts claiming to have received an anonymous email from someone saying they had been sexually assaulted by Walz. The Washington Post’s Will Sommer and Lead Stories noted that several of the emails presented as evidence contained visible cursors, typos, and formatting errors — which they said was evidence that the emails were not actually generated by an email system and even suggested that Black Insurrectionist had written it himself. Mother Jones, [10/14/24; Lead Stories, 10/14/24; Twitter/X, 10/13/24]
- Black Insurrectionist had previously promoted a false story about an ABC News “whistleblower” who claimed that the network had rigged the recent presidential debate in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. The typo-ridden supposed affidavit that Black Insurrectionist professed to have received from an ABC News employee was widely circulated by right-wing media figures as an excuse for former President Donald Trump’s poor debate performance. Snopes, [9/16/24; Media Matters, 9/16/24]
- ## Some right-wing media figures uncritically promoted the anonymous and baseless accusations
- On One America News’ Fine Point, host Chanel Rion claimed that the accusations were part of Walz’s “fascination with kids.” Guest Aldo Buttazzoni, host of Prager U’s Man on the Street, responded to the accusations by claiming that there is a “nefarious undertone” to Walz’s entire being. OAN, *Fine Point*, [10/14/24]
- On X, Trump ally Laura Loomer responded to a family picture Walz posted for his son’s birthday, stating, “Looks like he’s trying to run away from the pedo accusations. Just not doing a good job at it.” In a second post, Loomer asked whether Walz is “a pedo.” Twitter/X, [10/13/24, 10/13/24]
- Loomer also mentioned the baseless allegations about Walz on her show, saying that “there were many people accusing him” and “it needs to be investigated because a lot of people are wondering.”While she admitted that “the accusations are still unproven,” she claimed that “they have now been seen by millions of people on social media,” questioned if “he is hiding something involving minor children,” and said, “perhaps we'll see more information come out in the coming weeks before the election.” Rumble, *Loomer Unleashed*, [10/15/24]
- In a social media post, Infowars host Alex Jones likened Walz to rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, who has been accused of sex trafficking and racketeering, with Jones posting, “Tim Walz will henceforth be known as ‘Tim Diddy.’” On his Infowars show, Jones later claimed that Walz “doesn’t just have all the earmarks of it, this guy is a monster,” and said that his policy positions on education and health care go “beyond just raping them, and that’s all part of this corruption-of-the-children system that they’re pushing.” Twitter/X, [10/14/24; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 10/14/24; Associated Press, 9/21/24]
- Conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin shared a post from Black Insurrectionist to claim that Walz “allegedly raped a student” and speculated “this is the real reason he left teaching.” Crokin also claimed that Walz “has the markers of an abuser and a pedophile.” Twitter/X, [10/12/24; CNN, 12/7/22]
- Right-wing commentator Joey Mannarino called the accusations “credible.” Mannarino added, “I don’t know the details but seeing the way Walz prances across the stage lets you know he’s into men… and likely young men.” Twitter/X, [10/13/24; Raw Story, 7/22/24]
- Right-wing personality Juanita Broaddrick shared a post promoting the accusations, writing, “I guess we have our ‘October Surprise’!” Broaddrick added, “Are we going to find out if Walz is a Pedo or not?” Twitter/X, [10/14/24]
- QAnon account “Shadow of Ezra” claimed that Walz is “now facing formal accusations of premeditated s*xual assault.” The account further claimed that “Kamala Harris's campaign was reportedly informed about Walz's behavior but did nothing.” Twitter/X, [10/13/24; Media Matters, 7/17/23]
- Todd Spears, host of theIn the Hot Seat podcast, pushed the accusations against Walz on Rumble and stated that “the last thing we need is another kid-sniffer in the White House.” Rumble, *In the Hot Seat*, [10/14/24]
- ## Some right-wing media figures urged others to “stay away” from the accusations
- Right-wing commentator Bill Mitchell stated that he would not discuss the story “until the facts are confirmed by higher level sources.” In response to a comment asking what a “higher level source” was, Mitchell replied, “something beyond blogs.” Twitter/X, [10/14/24]
- Right-wing social media figure Nick Sortor stated that “these allegations hold no water unless either the ‘accuser’ goes public or someone can corroborate them.” Sortor also dismissed the accusations, adding, “Anonymous ‘me too’ claims are a leftist tactic.” Twitter/X, [10/13/24]
- QAnon figure Jordan Sather stated, “While I think it’s totally possible Tim Walz has those kinds of skeletons in his closet, I’m highly skeptical of the reporting from ‘Black Insurrectionist’ at this point,” and added, “People who specialize in forensics are analyzing B.I.'s screenshots and finding all kinds of problems with his ‘evidence.’” Sather also wrote, “Remember him claiming he had communications with an ‘ABC News whistleblower’ about rigging the debates? What happened to that story?” Telegram, [10/14/24; Media Matters, 8/20/19]
- Conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich wrote “The same account that had a ‘whistle blower’ at ABC … now has another ‘story.’ I won’t be going near that, stop asking.” Twitter/X, [10/13/24; Media Matters, 8/21/18]
- Fox News contributor Leo Terrell pleaded for Team Trump to “STAY AWAY” from the accusations. Twitter/X, [10/13/24]
- Rumble streamer David Freiheit, known online as “Viva Frei,” called the alleged supporting evidence “questionable” and “underwhelming in a very, very meaningful perspective.” He added that “it reeks of one of those either operations or potential inadvertent events where people are going to get caught repeating this, retweeting it, reaffirming it, and it's going to turn out to be bunk or even worse, a lie, and people are going to get sued for defamation.” Rumble, [10/14/24; Media Matters, 4/11/23]
- Former Fox host Megyn Kelly wrote that there are “many obvious red flags” with Black Insurrectionist's claims about Walz.She also said that she “recommend[s] everybody proceed with extreme caution” with respect to the accusations. MegynKelly.com, [10/15/24]
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