Russia-aligned Storm-1516 deepfake targets Texas Senate candidate James Talarico

Graphika said Oct. 21 that a newly created X account posted two videos on Oct. 20 that it assesses are very likely deepfakes, showing a man who claims to be a former student of Texas state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, accusing him of sexual assault, and that it assesses with high confidence the Russia-aligned influence operation Storm-1516 produced them. Graphika said the account very likely impersonated a real former student of Talarico’s; PolitiFact, which called the claim baseless, reported that the man told fact-checkers at Lead Stories the video is not of him, and that X had suspended the original account by Oct. 22 while other accounts kept sharing it. Clemson University researcher Darren Linvill told PolitiFact the video is Storm-1516’s work, and NewsGuard reported that an AI-detection tool gave it a 98% likelihood of being a deepfake.