AOn Friday afternoon, with the presidential race just days away, federal agencies that help protect US elections warned voters about a video circulating online. It appeared to show immigrants voting illegally in Georgia, and US intelligence officials concluded it was the latest in a series of hoaxes produced by “Russian influencers.”

“This Russian activity is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of US elections and to sow divisions among Americans,” it read. affirmative from the FBI and two other federal agencies, who warned that Russia will continue to create and spread these fakes even in the weeks and months after the election.

For anyone who lived through the last two presidential elections, the statement may have sounded familiar. It has been eight years since the 2016 US election was tainted by disinformation attributed to Moscow, and the government has not found a way to deter this kind of meddling. Instead, the problem got messier.

China and Iran are now using the same tactics to try to influence American voters, while the number of such Kremlin-linked operations has multiplied in the past eight years from two to more than 70, says Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. , which often tracks and exposes foreign influence operations. “They have thousands of people working in this space now,” he says of the Russians.

A long list of government agencies work to counter these threats, from the FBI to more obscure bureaucracies like USPIS, which deals with mail-order crime. When I contacted three of them to talk about election interference, they all referred me to an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, known as CISA – the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which co-authored the statement since Friday, along with the FBI.

Tasked with protecting everything from the power grid to the banking system against malicious cyber attacks, CISA often takes the lead in protecting US elections. His brief history speaks volumes about the difficulty of his mission. Organized in response to the 2016 Russian influence operation, the agency’s first director, Christopher Krebs, was fired by then-President Trump for publicly defending the integrity of Trump’s lost 2020 election. (Krebs learned of his dismissal through a presidential tweet ).

House Republicans have since tried unsuccessfully to cut CISA’s budget. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has accused the agency of trying to censor political speech and it exists growing concern among Democrats that Trump would destroy the agency if he won the presidential race.

The controversy has put CISA in an awkward spot. In addition to its mission to secure election infrastructure, it has been forced to deal with a “swarm of disinformation” targeting the American public, says Cait Conley, a senior adviser at CISA who works on election security. The agency’s response, she says, “is to flood the area with accurate information.”

CISA director Jen Easterly went on a media tour to reassure voters that the election result can be trusted. Last year, the agency also launched a podcast called CISA Livewhose monthly episodes deliver the same message alongside discussions of Chinese cyber threats and advice on what gadgets to buy as holiday gifts. On YouTube, I rarely get more than a thousand views, much less than the 3000 or so people who work at CISA.

Now think about what they are facing. According to one analysis by the Washington Postmore than two dozen of the country’s most popular podcasts have amplified claims that the upcoming election will be rigged. The main source of that message has been Trump, who has never backed down from his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His ally in the current race is Elon Musk, owner of a social network where much of our political discourse plays out.

“We often try to blame some of this mistrust on foreign threat actors, but the reality is that the particular narrative is largely cultivated at home,” says Olga Belogolova, a disinformation expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. . “It could be amplified by foreign threat actors, Russians, Chinese, Iranians,” she says. “But these narratives are being pushed by American officials and candidates.”

Since 2016, Americans have become more receptive to them. A poll last year by Monmouth University found that two in three Republicans believe voter fraud has driven the 2020 vote. Another poll, released this month by NPR, PBS News and Marist, found that most Americans are concerned about voter fraud in the current election, including 86 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats.

After the 2016 presidential election, Belogolova worked on Facebook’s Trust and Safety team, trying to identify and disrupt Russian disinformation agents on the platform. She describes it as a game of Whack-a-mole, with new accounts popping up to replace those that have been removed. She found the work useful but also frustrating, she says, because her team removed the fakes without offering anything in their place. “You have to find ways to tell stories that are compelling to people so they have something to believe in,” she says. “I think that’s the task now.”

In an attempt to meet this challenge, CISA has sought to amplify reliable sources of information. In mid-October, he reacted to a fake video that surfaced online showing the destruction of what appeared to be mail-in ballots for Trump. It took state election officials just hours to take down the video, and the FBI blamed Russian actors for producing it. A few days later, just a week before election day, CISA launched a ‘one stop shop’ website to expose fake videos and other forms of misinformation.

Watts, the Microsoft threat analyst, says such quick reactions help slow the spread of these clips online because news outlets are quickly able to identify them as fake. But they can still garner millions of views on social media because many Americans are willing to share them. As government agencies became more effective in responding to election interference in 2016, the American public became more suspicious of the conduct of the election.

This challenge to the democratic process could prove much more difficult to manage. As Watts says, “It’s all about rebuilding trust over time.”