Imagine scrolling through social media and coming across a video that looks like it was produced by Mother Jones, a respected independent magazine. The headline is explosive: the Democratic National Committee paid CNN’s chief executive, Mark Thompson, a staggering $259 million to promote gender transition among children. The video shows the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Clara Jeffery, praising a supposed hack by the group Anonymous, calling it a “great gift” that exposes the moral decay of Democrats and their media allies. It even ends with the familiar Mother Jones card: “Read more at MotherJones.com.” In just a day, the video racked up more than 155,000 views on one X account and another 50,000 on a second account. It might seem like a shocking news story, maybe even a whistleblower revelation. But every single element of it was false. The video was a sophisticated fake, branded with stolen logos and built around invented reporting. It was designed to look trustworthy enough to fool people who scroll quickly, share emotionally, and move on without checking the source. And it was not an isolated prank. It was part of a Russian disinformation operation aimed at the 2026 midterm elections, an operation that wants to twist American democracy and help Republican candidates, all while making us distrust each other and the institutions we rely on.
The fake Mother Jones video was traced back to an X account called “роман,” the Russian spelling of the name Roman. The account had all the fingerprints of a bot: it was created in 2018, had no followers, had never posted before, and then suddenly produced a slick, professional-looking video that conveniently attacked Democrats. Disinformation researchers quickly identified it as part of a Russian network known as Storm-1679, or Matryoshka, named after the iconic Russian nesting dolls. The name is fitting because the operation is layered, deceptive, and designed to hide its true origin beneath a series of disguises. Over the past few weeks, this network has been injecting fake election-related content into American social media. Some of the most striking examples are deepfake videos of celebrities supposedly turning against the Democratic Party. In one, actress Sarah Jessica Parker appears to say, “When I hear about Democrats, I immediately think of corrupt Nazi whores. If you love America, never vote for Democrats.” The video was branded with a CNN logo and included the hashtag #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. Other fabricated clips have used doctored footage of actors like Christopher Lloyd, Ed Begley Jr., and Julia Roberts. There are also fake reports targeting specific candidates, such as a false claim that Texas Democratic candidate James Talarico “despises Hasidic Jews because their faith does not allow children to change their gender.” These videos are crafted to look like coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, and other major outlets. They are not just clumsy attempts at misinformation; they are deliberately polished forgeries meant to exploit the credibility of real journalists.
This is not Matryoshka’s first attack. In fact, the network played a significant role in the massive Russian influence campaign that targeted the 2024 presidential election, according to research recounted in the book How Russia Won. During that campaign, Matryoshka produced a flood of false social media posts and videos pretending to be from trusted sources like Fox News, BBC, and CNN. It spread lies that Kamala Harris had an abortion as a teenager, that she was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, that her grandfather was a communist, and that her family had financial ties to Pfizer and Big Pharma. The operation also manufactured a fake USA Today report claiming Ukrainian refugees were smuggling fentanyl into the United States. It generated content meant to stoke fears of civil war, post-election violence, and even nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia. Early in 2025, the same network tried to weaken Western support for Ukraine by publishing fake news reports depicting Kyiv as corrupt and belligerent, and claiming Europe was being dragged into World War III. Most of those posts did not gain much traction, but one false story did break through in a spectacular way. During one of Elon Musk’s tirades against the United States Agency for International Development, he shared a clip with his 216 million followers that supposedly came from E! News. The clip claimed that USAID had paid millions of dollars to celebrities to travel to Ukraine, including Angelina Jolie, Orlando Bloom, Sean Penn, and Ben Stiller. Donald Trump Jr. amplified it as well, and the video quickly drew more than eleven million views. It was a Matryoshka fake. That moment proved how easily a Russian forgery can go mainstream when powerful figures amplify it without checking.
When Mother Jones was alerted to the fake video by the anonymous research group @antibot4navalny, the magazine’s lawyers contacted X to file a complaint. X responded by removing the posts, citing a violation of the platform’s rules and trademark policy. The takedown was quick, and the current operation does not appear to have achieved enormous reach on X, Bluesky, or other social media platforms. But that is not necessarily a reason to relax. In 2024, a similar Matryoshka-generated lie managed to go viral: the false allegation that Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz had inappropriately touched a student when he was a high school teacher. That story was amplified by Jack Posobiec, a right-wing provocateur known for promoting Pizzagate, and by Candace Owens, a popular conservative influencer. It reached millions of people before it was debunked. The 2026 operation may not yet have produced a comparable viral hit, but it signals that Vladimir Putin is at it again. Russia has mounted disinformation and influence operations in every American national election since 2016, always with the same goals: to sow discord, undermine confidence in democracy, and help Donald Trump and Republican candidates. The methods evolve, the targets shift, but the pattern remains consistent. The fake Mother Jones video is just the latest iteration of a long-running strategy, and it is a reminder that the threat is not hypothetical. It is happening right now, in real time, on the platforms we use every day.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that the United States is far less prepared than it used to be. The Trump administration has dismantled the government units that once tracked and countered Russian disinformation. The FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department all had teams dedicated to identifying foreign influence operations and exposing them. Those teams have been shut down, starved, or silenced. That leaves a wide-open field for networks like Matryoshka. With fewer watchdogs inside the government, the burden falls on journalists, independent researchers, and ordinary citizens to spot the fakes. But that is not an even fight. Disinformation creators have unlimited patience, endless creativity, and the backing of a hostile foreign power. They can churn out forged videos, fake articles, and manipulated images faster than fact-checkers can debunk them. They can test messages on small audiences, see what sticks, and then push the most effective lies into the mainstream. They do not need every post to go viral; they just need enough confusion and distrust to make the information environment toxic. And with Trump leaving the door open, whether out of indifference or design, Matryoshka and other Russian operations have a clear shot at influencing the midterm elections, helping Republican candidates, and exacerbating whatever chaos and conflict may arise. This could turn out to be a far bigger and more consequential operation than a fake video starring a celebrity or a cartoonish claim about a $259 million payment.
So what should we do about it? The first step is to recognize that this is not some abstract geopolitical drama happening far away. It is happening in our feeds, in our group chats, in the articles we see shared by friends and family. The purpose of these false videos is not only to make Democrats look bad. It is to make us all feel exhausted, cynical, and unable to tell truth from lies. If we cannot agree on basic facts, democracy becomes impossible. The Russian playbook relies on our worst instincts: our eagerness to believe things that confirm what we already think, our tendency to share before we verify, our willingness to trust a familiar logo even when the content is absurd. The best defense is not government censorship or platform algorithms alone. It is media literacy, skepticism, and a commitment to independent journalism. Before sharing something shocking, pause. Ask who made it, whether the source is real, whether other outlets are reporting it, and whether the story is too perfect to be true. Support newsrooms that are not owned and controlled by oligarchs, that still believe in facts and accountability. The Matryoshka network wants us to shout at each other across the digital divide, to assume all media is corrupt, and to give up on the idea of a shared reality. The answer is to refuse that trap. We can be human enough to pause, to question, to care about what is real. That is not a naive hope; it is the only practical response to a weapon designed to destroy our ability to think together. The fake Mother Jones video was removed, but many more are on the way. The question is whether we will be ready.