On USAID criticism, Republican views converge with Kremlin propaganda

The video falsely claiming that the United States Agency for International Development paid Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine appeared to be a clip from E!News, though it never appeared on the entertainment channel.

In fact, the video first surfaced on the social platform X in a post from an account that researchers have said spreads Russian disinformation.

Protesters in Washington rally against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk as they disrupt the federal government.Credit: AP

Within hours, it drew the attention of Elon Musk, who reposted it. So did Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son.

They amplified the false video as Musk pressed a crusade to shut down USAID, the agency that has distributed much of the government’s foreign aid since 1961. Working with US President Donald Trump’s blessing as the head of a government efficiency campaign, Musk and others in the administration have taken over the agency’s headquarters, frozen grants and notified employees that nearly all of them will be laid off.

The dismantling of the agency has been accompanied by a torrent of anger online from right-wing influencers and accounts that are promoting false claims and conspiratorial thinking.

While some politicians and voters have long questioned the value of foreign aid, those attacking the agency have often distorted facts and, wittingly or unwittingly, embraced as true anything that could help justify targeting USAID.

Elon Musk has echoed Kremlin propaganda before.Credit: AP

That includes Musk himself, who has used the platform he took over in 2022 as a megaphone for the effort to slash the federal bureaucracy. Musk has called it “a criminal organisation”, without explaining the basis for such an accusation.

“He’s exploiting ignorance about the way government works, and the lack of oversight over anything he’s doing,” said Mike Rothschild, a disinformation researcher and author of Jewish Space Lasers, a book about conspiracy theories. “All of it is incredibly dangerous, and happening right in front of us.”

The flurry of attacks also underscored once again how much Republican views have increasingly converged with propaganda emanating from the Kremlin or with narratives aligned with its international goals, especially on Musk’s platform. The false video about the celebrities appeared to be the work of an influence campaign that has produced dozens of similar fakes about Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.

“Russian anti-Ukraine propaganda has thoroughly infiltrated certain communities on X,” said Darren Linvill, a researcher there, who traced the spread of the faked clip from its origin on X through a network of accounts that has distributed Russian fakes before.

“Given how much time Musk spends on his platform,” Linvill said, “it was probably inevitable that some fabricated Russian message would resonate with him, and this one seemed almost designed to do just that.”

Neither Musk nor Trump Jr responded immediately to requests for comment.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the spread of misinformation about USAID on the platform, though it has added a note to posts sharing the video about the actors, noting that it is not real.

Much of the frenzy online this week has centred on USAID’s many grants, information about which has been publicly available for years.

One viral claim, for example, started after an account on X with more than half a million followers suggested that Politico, the Washington news website, had received more than $US8 million ($13 million) from USAID.

That wasn’t true. The website had received about $US44,000 from USAID for subscriptions to its premium environmental and energy publication over two years and more than $US8 million in subscription revenue from a variety of agencies, including the Department of Energy.

Even so, the claim shot rapidly across social media as influencers and politicians with even more followers amplified the idea.

That set off a round of other misleading claims about USAID granting money to the BBC and The New York Times. (The agency has instead granted money to an independent charity that shares a name with the BBC. The most viral claim about the Times was based on an inaccurate search of government records that included grants to unrelated but similar-sounding groups, like New York University. In a statement, the Times said the payments it had received were for subscriptions; government data shows it has also received some advertising revenue from the government. In a memo to staff, Politico’s leaders said the publication had “never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies”.)

UNHCR goodwill ambassador Ben Stiller talks to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022.Credit: AP

The facts failed to reach a significant audience online, but the misinformation was elevated by prominent podcasters, politicians and Trump allies within hours.

Accounts devoted to sharing conspiracy theories said the claims were somehow evidence that the Democrats used USAID to fund a “fake news empire”.

By Wednesday afternoon, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister and authoritarian leader, echoed the claims swirling in the US, writing on X that payments to Politico somehow financed “basically the entire left-wing media in Hungary” – a viral post that received more than 26 million views.

Soon the idea spread to the Oval Office, where Trump used his Truth Social account to criticise the government’s news subscriptions – payments that had occurred during his first presidency as well – as “payoffs” for “creating good stories about the Democrats”.

“This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history!” he wrote in all-caps as other users demanded criminal investigations.

For Russia and China, the American conservative uproar over USAID has been met with startled glee.

Both nations, echoing Orban’s complaint, have blamed the agency for supporting subversive programs in their countries.

The false video that went viral this week claiming USAID funded celebrity travel overseas fit Russia’s recurring narrative that the US furtively supports Ukraine with resources that American voters would rather spend at home.

The video appeared to be the work of an influence campaign known to researchers as Operation Overload or Matryoshka, after the Russian nesting dolls, according to Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub. That work is led by a private company with links to the Kremlin.

The footage showed photographs or clips of several well-known actors meeting with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, while a narrator with a British accent claimed the actors had received large payments from USAID for the appearance.

Jolie, the narrator says, received $US20 million; Orlando Bloom $US8 million; Sean Penn $US5 million; and so on. “This was done to increase Zelensky’s popularity among foreign audiences, particularly in the United States,” the narrator claims. “The involvement of celebrities made it easy to co-ordinate funding programs for Ukraine during the conflict.”

After the video appeared on the X account, articles about its claims appeared on the sites of at least two Russian news organisations, Tsargrad and Pravda. The video was picked up by a number of accounts that have previously shared Russian disinformation, but soon expanded beyond that to Americans cheering the Trump administration on. By Thursday, users on TikTok and Trump’s Truth Social platform had shared the video as commenters expressed outrage and called for USAID to be eliminated.

There is no evidence of the payments in any of the agency’s programs. A spokesperson for E!News also said in a statement that “the video is not authentic and did not originate from E!News”.

Stiller, said to have been paid $US4 million for a visit to Ukraine, took to social media to try to refute the claim. “These are lies coming from Russian media,” he wrote on X. “I completely self-funded my humanitarian trip to Ukraine. There was no funding from USAID and certainly no payment of any kind.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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