How Russian trolls are trying to go viral on X

An account secretly run by a Russian intelligence agency tried for a humorous reply: “Your boss will be angry." The awkward joke got zero likes.

Russian trolls are ramping up their efforts again on social media ahead of another U.S. presidential election, and they seem desperate for influencers to notice them. Amid elevated fears of foreign election meddling, the exchange offered an early example of a shift toward relying more on low-quality, high-volume spam tactics that experts and officials say could escalate on social-media platforms in the coming months.

Since 2022, a Russian network of fake personas on the social-media platform now called X sought to interact with billionaire and X Corp. owner Musk and conservative political and media figures including Donald Trump Jr.and Tucker Carlson, pushing divisive content and narratives that sought to weaken international support for Ukraine.

The intention was to piggyback on the visibility and wide reach of the replies section of accounts with large followings to seed messages with both influencers and their audiences, according to social-media researchers.

The fake accounts, often posing as Americans, targeted a range of prominent political and media influencers, including U.S. lawmakers, journalists and news organizations, by replying to their posts, according to a Wall Street Journal review of more than a thousand posts.

In July, the U.S. Justice Department disclosed a list of usernames for nearly 1,000 X accounts tied to a bot farm that the department said was operated by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. But the DOJ shared few details about the network’s activities beyond its general contours. By then, X had removed virtually all of the accounts.

The operation had been seeking to spread false or misleading information in and about the U.S., Europe and Israel and was focused on fanning political divisions and generating anti-Ukraine sentiment, U.S. and western officials said.

New data shared with the Journal by researchers from Clemson University offer an exclusive look at how the Russian government is positioning its online influence armies ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. The Clemson researchers were able to use the list of accounts shared by the Justice Department and cross-reference it with historic data. They collected nearly 1,300 posts from more than 200 accounts tied to the network.

Both Russia and Iran are waging operations to influence the election, U.S. officials say. Earlier this month, the Trump campaign blamed Iran for hacking some of its internal communications. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was investigating the matter. On Monday, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly linked the activity to Tehran.

While the accounts analyzed by the Clemson researchers didn’t gain much visibility before being taken down and appear to have failed to attract the attention of the high-profile users they targeted, they may signal future tactics.

Darren Linvill, a social-media researcher at Clemson, said the data showcased how Russia’s playbook has shifted over the years from “high-investment accounts" that require considerable time and energy to accrue large followings and convincing personas toward rapidly churning out low-quality accounts.

For example, the accounts replied over 50 times to various prominent accounts to claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to compel Hungary—a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more sympathetic to Russia than other European nations—to fight in the war.

“#Zelensky wants to force the #Hungarians to fight?," the accounts replied to 2022 and 2023 tweets from Trump Jr., news outlets such as CNN, Fox News and Politico, and individual American journalists and members of Congress.

The accounts replied to or retweeted Musk’s posts around a dozen times, though those posts largely weren’t about Russia but instead were jokes or about other topics, the data show. The accounts also replied to or retweeted posts about various topics by Carlson a dozen times, including retweeting a post where the former Fox News host talked about his interview earlier this year of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The data didn’t show any signs of Musk or Carlson engaging in return.

“Are you sure this is true? In general I think I’d trust a Russian bot farm before I’d trust the Wall Street Journal," Carlson said about the Journal’s review. “Less ideologically rigid."

Russia has relied on low-quality accounts to some degree since at least 2016. It appears able to create them more easily now due in part to artificial intelligence, officials and researchers said. At the same time, Russia has long sought to interact with social-media accounts with large followings, aiming to seed narratives among power users in hopes of eliciting a response that could attract viral attention.

“There’s a reason they are trying to cash these lottery tickets," Linvill said of the effort to attract the attention of popular accounts. “When they pay off, they pay off big."

Low-quality accounts are likely a response to greater scrutiny from platforms, researchers, and governments, Linvill said, because they can be created quickly, and if they are detected foreign actors can just create new ones. Other foreign actors, including some China-affiliated networks, have also used this tactic, he added.

U.S. authorities have warned that the Russian government has again committed to a broad campaign to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in favor of Republican Donald Trump, as it did during the 2020 and 2016 cycles. U.S. intelligence officials have publicly offered few specifics about Russia’s activity beyond saying that Moscow poses the most serious foreign-influence threat to the election and that it has recently sought to influence specific voting groups, including those in swing states, while promoting divisive narratives and attempting to denigrate specific politicians.

Russia has denied meddling in American elections. Iran, meanwhile, is determined to undermine Trump’s re-election bid, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. Iran also has denied such accusations.

Trump Jr. was among a number of high-profile individuals, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and others, to unwittingly retweet or otherwise engage with posts around the 2016 election season from accounts later identified to be part of the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based Russian troll farm.

Russia is expected to ramp up its efforts targeting voters as Election Day nears, as it has in previous election cycles, U.S. intelligence officials said. Russia has historically denied Western allegations that it targets other nations with covert influence operations.

Musk dismantled much of the content-moderation infrastructure at the company formerly known as Twitter after his takeover through staff cuts and rule changes that he said were needed to promote free speech. Former employees have said Musk’s changes limit the platform’s ability to detect covert influence efforts.

An X spokesman declined to comment for this article. Musk posted on X in July that the Justice Department’s support was appreciated but that X was already suspending the Russian accounts. X’s policies prohibit creating deceptive profiles to mislead others and trying to artificially influence conversations on the platform such as by using fake accounts.

Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said U.S. resilience to foreign-influence operations has deteriorated since the last election due to a variety of factors, including advances in artificial intelligence and legal challenges to government cooperation with social-media companies that have chilled efforts to police the threat.

“We’re not as prepared in 2024 as we were in 2020 under President Trump," Warner said during a recent event on foreign-influence operations held by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. “Foreign adversaries know misinformation, disinformation is cheap. And it works."

In response to a 2022 post from President Biden about taking care of members of the military, one of the fake accounts replied: “lol."

Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com