Russian Operatives Plant Deepfake Targeting U.S. Midterm Elections

One day after Texans began voting in the 2026 midterm elections, a Russian AI deepfake surfaced, accusing a U.S. Senate candidate of sexually abusing a child. Private researchers named the culprit behind the false allegation within 24 hours. The U.S. government still hasn’t. On October 20, a new X account posted two videos of a young man who claimed to be a former student of James Talarico, accusing the Democratic Party hopeful of abusing him in 2012. The tactic echoes a 2024 Russian attack on vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. In a new development, AI search tools quickly picked up and repeated the claim, amplifying its reach. Operators Created, Amplified, and Laundered False Information Operators began laying groundwork for the allegation in September. They first created an X account supposedly belonging to Zyon Lewis, a graduate of Rhodes Middle School. On October 20, the operation posted a video about the alleged assault. Bots, conservative accounts, and known Russian disinformation amplifiers quickly shared the post. Graphika, a cyberthreat intelligence firm, had previously tied those amplifiers to Storm-1516, a Russian influence network. A student named Zyon Lewis did in fact attend the school, but the video was generated by AI, according to NewsGuard, an information-reliability company. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking department concluded that the X account copied the real Lewis’s Facebook page to create its profile picture and early posts. The operators built a believable persona out of a real person’s public life, then used it to deliver a fabricated accusation. The real Lewis subsequently told the fact-checking site Lead Stories that the man in the videos was not him and that Talarico had never abused him. According to NewsGuard, both the format and the amplification pattern of this operation match Storm-1516, which regularly posts deepfakes from newly created accounts to spread false claims about Western politicians. AI Amplifies the Reach of Foreign Influence Russia used the same tactic during the 2024 election. In October 2024, an actor identifying himself as a former student accused Walz of abuse. The real individual told The Washington Post he had attended the school where Walz taught but had never met Walz. This time, however, once the claim had spread on social media, AI tools picked it up. Both Google’s Gemini and Microsoft Copilot presented the claim as a real accusation, only correcting the record once fact-checking reports were available. According to NewsGuard, Google’s AI Overview stated that Lewis had accused Talarico, citing ABC News and KTAL articles that never mentioned the allegation. Cull the Amplifiers, Fix the Chatbots, Name the Culprits Preventing this type of foreign influence in U.S. elections requires social media companies to shut down known amplifiers, AI chatbots to not regurgitate false information, and the U.S. government to call out foreign adversaries. X suspended the inauthentic @Zyon_Lewis_5 burner account, but burners are meant to be disposable. The accounts that matter are the established ones that researchers have tied to multiple Storm-1516 operations. When an account shows up in foreign-influence amplification chains more than once, platforms should remove or suspend it immediately. AI companies should build products that can distinguish between unverified sources and authoritative news outlets. At a minimum, when AI responses provide citations, the cited article should contain the information the AI response claims it does. Actions by private companies and researchers are important, but the federal government’s silence is deafening. Private researchers attributed the operation to Russia within a day. Washington has remained publicly silent about this and other operations. The U.S. government dismantled much of its counter-influence infrastructure but must restore rapid public attribution of foreign influence operations. In 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency repeatedly disclosed information about Russian and Iranian operations in near real time. The White House should designate appropriate agencies to name foreign influence operations against U.S. candidates quickly and publicly, as officials did with the Walz smear in 2024. During early voting, speed matters, and the public needs accurate information as fast as possible. Jacob Breach is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he focuses on foreign influence operations. Pavneet Kaur is an intern at FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI). For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. Follow Jacob on X @JBreach. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on foreign policy and national security.