The Journal. - Actors Recorded Videos for ‘Vladimir.’ It Turned Into Russian Propaganda.

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Russia-aligned propagandists tricked celebrities like Elijah Wood, Pricilla Presley and Ice T into recording videos that would later be used to attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. WSJ’s Robert McMillan and the CEO of the app Cameo unpack the scheme. Further Reading: - Actors Recorded Videos for ‘Vladimir.’ It Turned Into Russian Propaganda.  - U.S. and U.K. Accuse Russia of Global Hacking Spree Targeting British Elections  Further Listening: - The Online Sleuths Fighting Russian Disinformation  - A Voting Machine Company Fights Disinformation With Lawsuits  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've ever wanted to send someone a message, but just make it a bit more Hollywood, there's an app for that. It's called Cameo. Thousands of celebrities, athletes, and influencers are on the app. And for a fee, they'll record almost any message you want. Hello, friends. Elijah here. I just wanted to say

hello and that I have joined Cameo. One of the celebrities on Cameo is Elijah Wood. He's best known for playing Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is super new for me and I'm really excited to see what your requests are

for your friends, your loved ones. It should be a lot of fun and I really look forward to it. Where does Elijah Wood rank among the celebrities on Cameo? Oh, I think he's one of the top celebrities that's on Cameo. That's our colleague Bob McMillan. He covers cybersecurity. And he says earlier this year, Wood got a request that on its face seemed pretty run-of-the-mill.

He was asked to record a video for someone named Vladimir, who apparently was having a substance abuse problem. Vladimir, hi, Elijah here. I hope this finds you happy, healthy, and well. And if you watch the video, he sounded very compassionate, very concerned. He sort of delivers these words of encouragement to someone named Vladimir, who he clearly believes to be in trouble. I just hope that, you know, you're looking at yourself, taking care of yourself, taking your health into consideration, and know that should you need help, there are people out there that want to help you.

But as it turns out, there is no Vladimir. Instead, the video Wood recorded was edited and used in a Russian disinformation campaign. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, December 14th. Coming up on the show, Cameo and the Russian propaganda machine. Russian propaganda machine. At Air Miles, we help you collect more moments.

So instead of scrolling through photos of friends on social media, you can spend more time dinnering with them. How's that spicy enchilada? Very flavorful. Yodeling with them. Ooh, must be mating season. And hiking with them. Is that a squirrel?

Bear! Run! Collect more moments with more ways to earn. Air Mile. Cameo was launched in 2017. The goal? To let celebrities on the platform connect with their fans in a new way by selling them personalized video messages. Celebrities big and small are on Cameo,

and their fees range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Like actor Jay Jackson from Parks and Rec. Welcome to Ya Heard with PIRD. And the story of this video is PIRD is now on Cameo. And artists like Ice-T. Hey, yo, check this out. This is Ice-T representing on this new situation called Cameo. Or even former Congressman George Santos. And don't get bogged down by all

the haters out there. Stay strong. Merry Christmas. And like, who are the types of celebrities that you would see on Cameo? I mean, some people might call them D-listers or has-beens. Oh, harsh. You know, that's pretty harsh. But they're, you know, not all really busy A-list celebrities are going to have the time to, you know, record a few hundred messages to their fans. I mean, you're not going to find Taylor Swift on Cameo, you know.

Some of the videos Cameo celebrities make go viral. In July, that video Elijah Wood recorded for someone named Vladimir started showing up on social media. I hope you get the help that you need. All right. Lots of love, Vladimir. Take care. But the video was highly edited, and it was uploaded to a fake social media account set up in Wood's name. We've never seen the original of that video, but what we ended up seeing was in July on Russian social media and other channels,

Elijah Wood pops up, and the video has clearly been doctored. There's a TMZ logo in the background. There are these emojis added to the video. The video is clearly choppily edited. And there's even sort of a social media link on it as well. The video is so crudely edited that, honestly, I found it a little bit incoherent. It just seemed like he was concerned about someone named Vladimir.

He mentions alcohol and drugs. And then that was about it. One of the emojis added to the video is the Ukrainian flag. And the Vladimir, who apparently needed help, seemed to be the president of Ukraine. So they present it as a message of concern about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when that's not in fact what it was supposed to be. The false claim that Zelensky is suffering from drug and alcohol problems has been promoted by Russia in the past. The goal here is to push a narrative, right? To push the narrative that Zelensky is an untrustworthy partner.

And ultimately, they are trying to strengthen the idea that Ukraine is not worth supporting, right? Like that is a strategic goal for Russia because they're engaged in a war with Ukraine. They're basically at a stalemate. And if they can erode Western support for that war, I think they believe they can win it. So if they betray the leader of Ukraine as a drunkard, that helps. — A representative for Elijah Wood

didn't respond to requests for comment. Wood isn't the only celebrity that was targeted in this Russian propaganda campaign. Videos of six other Western celebrities were misused in the same way. That's according to Microsoft, which published a report on the scam. One of the other celebrities was John C. McGinley. He's best known for his role as Dr. Cox on the sitcom Scrubs. He got a request from someone named Jane, who also wanted a video for Vladimir.

Hey, Vladimir. Hey, Vlad. Hey, Vladdy. It's Jenny C. Jane reached out to me. She told me you're having a rough patch. That over the last year, booze and dope have become your best friends. I understand. I understand. I understand. Other celebrities who were roped in include Mike Tyson and Priscilla Presley.

A representative for Priscilla Presley said that her video was not meant to be addressed to Zelensky or have anything at all to do with Russia or Ukraine or the war. Representatives for the other celebrities didn't respond to requests for comment. So who is behind these videos? Oh, that's a good question. I don't think it's clear who actually is behind them.

I mean, with Russia and with disinformation, there's a lot of very tenuous connections between individuals and the state. And it's very murky, right? And intentionally so, right? Because Russia wants to be able to say, hey, this isn't us doing it. This isn't the government doing this. This is just some patriotic citizen who got an idea. But, you know, if you read the federal indictments against Russians for being involved in this type of activity, what you can see is that they're basically companies who are paid money to engage in disinformation campaigns against the West. So that would be a good bet.

For Cameo CEO Stephen Galanis, the whole incident came as a surprise. When did you learn that some of the celebrities on Cameo had been taken advantage of in this Russian propaganda scheme? Yeah, I probably learned about it exactly when you did. I woke up to an article about it. There are a lot of safeguards to prevent this from happening. Obviously, talent safety is one of the most important parts of our platform. That said, one of the things that Cameo has done is it's opened the red velvet rope and let fans closer to the talent than ever before. And obviously, as we saw in this case, like in some really small, tiny percentage of cases, you know, sometimes you can let somebody bat through the red velvet rope. Stephen says his first thought when he heard about the scam was to wonder how it happened.

Cameo had blocked users from Russia after Western countries imposed sanctions on it for invading Ukraine. So you cannot buy Cameos in Russia today. So a few people from different IP addresses globally ended up booking Cameos that seemed pretty mundane and very much like what a standard run-of-the-mill Cameo would be. This is the type of request we see every day on the platform. It was a first name only. We had no idea who it was for and how, obviously, the people on the other side were going to try to doctor it and misuse it. But certainly the requests themselves were vanilla and the type of thing that could have gotten through

any reasonable content moderation checks. Like it wasn't going to raise any red flags the way those requests were made. Totally. I guess if you want to say the name Vladimir, which is one of the most popular names in Eastern Europe, if you're going to say broadly that raises flags, like, I think that's as unreasonable as in the West as saying, you know, a cameo request with the name John would raise flags for you. Has something like this happened before? Yeah, look, there have been other cases where talent have been tricked.

You know, they tend to be more mundane or people think that they're funny. Like, for example, Jimmy Kimmel has been, you know, having a long-standing segment on his nightly show where he booked cameos from George Santos doing the exact same thing, right? Like, pretending to be someone else and seeing if he would say it. So it's not something that happens all the time, but like, it certainly has happened before. if you would say it. So it's not something that happens all the time, but it certainly has happened before.

Whose responsibility is it to vet the requests for video messages? Well, we're a marketplace, right? So we provide the platform. The talent can accept or decline any request that comes in. So ultimately, they're the arbiter of what they do or what they don't do. Is there anything that Cameo can do, like, preemptively to root out users who might abuse the platform, particularly for disinformation?

I think our safeguards are exceptionally robust. I think at the end of the day, this was a gross misuse of our platform. It's taking advantage of a service that people really use. There are actual real people out there who their loved ones are reaching out to someone they love to tell them to go get help. And it'd be a huge shame if those people couldn't be helped because you had a couple of bad actors. But those bad actors are part of a much bigger disinformation machine. That's next. Picture the DQ Freezer, home to all the Blizzard flavors of the past. Picture it opening to bring back the salted caramel truffle Blizzard for a limited time. Picture that salted caramel truffle Blizzard in your hands.

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Must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. So, Bob, would it be fair to say that this cameo scam is part of a larger trend in disinformation? Well, I mean, it's clear evidence that disinformation is not going away, in particular Russian disinformation. And what's the end goal for these campaigns? Well, there are a couple of goals. I mean, Russia has engaged in this for a long time. And as we go into 2024, we're seeing China and Iran also up their games in disinformation. So these campaigns, when they're backed by the nation states, there's generally a strategic objective. And in 2024, you know, I think the election is ultimately going to be, you know, influencing the outcome of that election is going to be a strategic objective. I think that getting elected

representatives who do not support the war in Ukraine is going to be one of their objectives, right? They want to chip away at that support. In the past, there's been an effort to also destabilize the political consensus in the United States, to polarize things, to push the political consensus in the United States to polarize things, to push narratives from both extremes and to try and give momentum to more extreme ideologies to divide the country. Russia-aligned groups engage in this kind of political interference across the West.

Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department indicted two Russian nationals who allegedly waged a wide-ranging hacking campaign. It targeted British lawmakers and journalists. And what the Russians had been doing, according to the federal indictment, is breaking into people's email accounts, downloading sensitive documents, and then dumping them to achieve political objectives. In this case, it was a bunch of documents related to Brexit supporters that were leaked in the United Kingdom in an effort to influence an election there.

Wow. So that's another thing they do, just create chaos in elections, polarize with these disinformation messages, divide people, expose information. The Russian nationals who were indicted couldn't be reached for comment. Bob says he wasn't surprised that propagandists are engaging in disinformation, but he was surprised to learn that Cameo, of all things, was being used as part of those efforts. It just seems so audacious and it seemed almost comical, right? Like it's just, and this happens a lot with disinformation. You're like, who's going to believe that? But obviously the bar is, it seems like it can never be too low.

Why do it this way, of all the ways? Well, I was promised deep fakes. I was expecting some kind of like AI-generated disinformation campaign by now. And here we get this like clumsy, poorly edited cameo stuff. Like what's going on? I think it just speaks to the decentralized nature of these campaigns. I think basically the government isn't saying you must do this and this and this. They're enabling people to just freestyle and to go out there and try and cause havoc and try and, you know, generally throw some, just throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks. So there is a chaotic element to all of this. And it's just kind of, it's almost funny to me that instead of like doing the AI-based deep

fake of Elijah Woods, you know, saying like Vladimir Zelensky, you need help. They just paid him some money and like crudely edited it. There's one school of thinking, which is that you don't really need to try that hard with a lot of these campaigns. It's like, even if it's kind of crudely done and maybe not credible, there will be enough people who will say, yeah, that's a problem, that it will gain attention and the idea will get out there. So, you know, one might think that deep fakes would be perfect for disinformation campaigns. Maybe we're overthinking what's required here. That's all for today, Thursday, December 14th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Max Colchester and Dustin Volz. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.