“When I’m trying to identify disinformation operations in the wild I need to understand the initial signals and ideas that Russian state media and influencers are sharing,” Walter tells WIRED. “Russian Telegram channels just blew up overnight, and started really dialing into messaging specifically about the possibility that Texas could be an independent state, the possibility that there could be a US civil war.”
Russian state media echoed these claims, and printed a flood of articles with headlines that includes phrases like “Civil War 2.0.” They additionally unfold conspiracies claiming that “US elites will keep the border wide open.”
Last week, the Russian Telegram channels and state media additionally started to spice up the ‘Take Our Border Back’ convoy led by far-right extremists, sovereign residents, QAnon adherents, and anti-vaccine conspiracists who traveled from Virginia to the border in Texas in help of Abbott. “Fears of FBI Spying on ‘Take Our Border Back’ Convoy Show US Democracy Dying,” one Sputnik headline learn final week.
The convoy’s official channels on Telegram had been additionally infiltrated by Russian accounts, although some had been eliminated or referred to as out by the US-based members of the group. “They are in every single group on any social media,” one member who calls themselves ‘Eat Putin’s Heart’ wrote on Telegram in response to a query about why Russians had been members of the group. “They want a civil war/chaos more than anything. What’s bad for America is great for Russia.”
Researchers at Antibot4Navalny, a Russian anti-disinformation analysis group that has been intently monitoring a Russian disinformation community often called Doppelganger on X, shared knowledge completely with WIRED that reveals a community of bot accounts previously linked to the Doppelganger marketing campaign has been deployed on-line up to now week to debate the Texas concern.
The marketing campaign, like earlier Doppelganger campaigns, shared hyperlinks to pretend web sites designed to look reliable however which truly comprise pretend articles made to undermine the US. One article, for instance, appeared on a pretend web site referred to as Warfare Insider, and acknowledged that Texas “has become a battleground symbolizing the clash between state and federal authorities.”
In current days, the bots have additionally been responding to posts unrelated to Texas by referencing the scenario on the border.
Some consultants have been linking this marketing campaign to earlier Russian disinformation campaigns. Already, it echoes the incident when Russian operatives had been accused of organizing an anti-immigrant rally and a counterprotest occasion to their very own rally in Texas forward of the 2016 election.
Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist and postdoctoral researcher on the University of Maryland who tracks disinformation on-line, wrote in her e-newsletter Weaponized that the time period “Free Texas” in Russian was being “used extensively [on X], and nearly exclusively, by Russian accounts associated with the notorious Internet Research Agency, which housed the 2016 election interference operation.”
The IRA was a Kremlin-linked troll farm launched in St. Petersburg that gained notoriety for its function in attempting to intrude within the 2016 US presidential election. It was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an in depth ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who additionally ran the Wagner mercenary group till he died in a mysterious helicopter crash final 12 months.
There additionally look like quite a lot of Russian accounts on X posing as pro-Texas teams, in one other echo of 2016 when an account that claimed to be run by Tennessee Republicans was outed as Russian-run.
One of the suspect accounts is the Texan Independence Supporters, which has already been referred to as out for spelling errors and consistently referencing Ukraine and Russia. On Sunday, the account claimed “we are a Texan organization, not Russian. We can definitely assure ya’ll [sic] that we’re not Russian.”
Before this, Russia had already been accused of dipping its toe within the 2024 US presidential election—together with boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s marketing campaign—however Walters says the hassle to push the Texas disaster narrative marks an escalation within the Kremlin’s efforts.
“This is the first thing that I see as a potentially significant concern to look out for, because I think it is an area [where] they could fairly easily cause more divide in the US,” he says.