UPDATED: Musk’s misinformation machine ramps up with fake video of Haitian migrant voting in Georgia

Russian interference in our elections is getting quite sophisticated. Your uncle on Facebook is going to love it.

Updated at 11:30 a.m. EST, Nov. 1, 2024: A Republican member of the Gwinnett County election board, David Hancock, says investigated the fake video depicted above — even after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the video was an act of Russian disinformation. “I believe this is some sort of fake,” Hancock wrote on an election denial Facebook group two hours after Raffensperger declared the video fake,” but I don’t understand the motive.

“The motive is to sow doubt in the election and to push the narrative that non-citizens are voting,” another forum member wrote.

The post has since been deleted, and Hancock did not respond to a request for comment.

Note: Kinda thought I’d have a few more days before we started hurtling toward critical news mass but it looks like things have kicked off a little early. The next week and probably the next three months after that are going to feel like getting hit in the face with a wet boxing glove first thing in the morning. The news is going to be non-stop and, mostly, bad if I had to guess. But I think I’m in a good place to make sense of the madness. In fact, that’s all I’ve been doing since I started Doom in February and for many years before that. So, if you appreciate this relentlessness, throw a few bucks my way either through a paid subscription for as little as $5 a month or a one-time contribution to the Doom Coffee Fund. Now, onto the news.

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I had a quick fire drill last night writing up a story for Rolling Stone about a video that’s racking up views on social media. The video shows a supposed Haitian migrant claiming he voted in two Georgia counties despite arriving in the United States just six months ago.

By the time a press release arrived from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about 8:30 PM EST the video had more than 500,000 views in various posts on Elon Musk’s X. Raffensperger said the video is obviously the work of a Russian disinformation squad and demanded Musk and other social media proprietors take the video down. As of this writing it’s unclear if that will happen. Even if it does, as we all know, the Internet is forever. Once the disinformation disease gets in the Internet bloodstream there’s no turning back. 

This is obviously important because it shows how quickly disinformation spreads when bad actors have control of Internet infrastructure like X. The other reason it’s important is because it shows how sophisticated foreign election interference — if that is, indeed, what this is — has become. 

Everyone knows Fulton County. Even casual news observers can probably note that it was the sight of problems in 2020’s election. Gwinnett, not so much. I’m guessing not many people outside of Georgia could name Gwinnett County as being in the Atlanta metro area. That Russian disinformation spooks name-checked Gwinnett along with Fulton in this video — in which a young Black male claims to have already voted in Gwinnett and plans to vote in Fulton — shows that the Russians have done their homework. 

(Side note: the young male in this video — and I say male because I have no indication he’s over 18 — is almost surely a victim in this. I can’t imagine he’d sign up to be the face of “noncitizen” voting, one of the planks of Republican plans to call the election into question, if he had much choice in the matter.)

Both counties are not only home to past battles over voting rights and charges of voter fraud, but are currently home to four election denial officials who are deeply involved in efforts here to call results of the 2024 election into question. David Hancock and Alice O’Lenick in Gwinnett and Julie Adams and Michael Heekin in Fulton have not just made public statements supporting Trump’s election lies, but have pushed policies that would enable the Trump campaign to claim fraud — and enable themselves to aid in the former president’s plans to overturn the results of the coming election. 

Read more about Georgia’s election denial officials

• Marjorie Taylor Greene is already lying about election fraud

• How Georgia election officials will sidestep court orders prohibiting extremist election rules

• A devastating blow for Georgia's election denial officials

• Laying the groundwork for another big lie in Georgia

• How did Georgia Republicans get access to sensitive election information?

So, the Russians knew to name Gwinnett and Fulton not just because it’s where problems have occurred in the past, but thanks to people like Hancock and Adams, it’s where disagreements over this year’s election will play out as well. The Russians were also savvy enough to use a supposed Haitian migrant in order to keep Trump supporters angry about that whole debacle. Finally, the video touches on fears of noncitizen voting — which is most certainly not a thing — for the perfect SEO-driving, fear-mongering trifecta.

The video is a thimble in the ocean of mis- and disinformation about this election that is already flooding the American consciousness. By the time election day actually arrives a good half of the country might just believe that the election was already stolen from Donald Trump. And the ones who aren’t already yearning for a fight over this perceived — and completely non-factual — injustice most certainly will be once they get this video and many, many others into their systems.

We live in a country that is consumed by lies being foisted upon us by the richest and most powerful people in the world. Instead of being skeptical of those lies, many Americans are gleefully feeding on them. This gluttony is almost sure to bring violence.

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