CBS News
Russian disinformation groups promoting false claims about Gov. Tim Walz, experts say
Russian disinformation groups likely orchestrated baseless claims targeting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, falsely accusing the vice presidential candidate of sexually assaulting his students while he was a high school teacher, according to assessments by the U.S. intelligence community, independent researchers and a CBS News analysis.
At least four separate claims have spread since early October, racking up millions of views on social media platforms including X, owned by Elon Musk. Darren Linvill, co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, said at least two of the claims seem to be directly linked to Storm-1516, a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.
A Tuesday report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says the intelligence community found Russian disinformation groups were behind recent “manufactured and amplified inauthentic content claiming illegal activity” targeting Walz’s earlier career.
The claims
The initial claim emerged on Oct. 5 during a Rumble livestream, where an anonymous man said Walz abused him when he was a Future Leaders Exchange, or FLEX, Program student in Minnesota from 2004 to 2005. The man, whose voice appears altered, was interviewed by John Mark Dougan, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy living in Russia with alleged ties to disinformation campaigns.
This was the first sign that the claim was created by Russian disinformation groups, Linvill said.
“To have [Dougan] out there being interviewed on this story is basically a neon sign saying that maybe it’s connected to Russia. Not only do I think Russia is behind these stories, I think Russia wants us to know that they’re behind these stories,” he said.
Both the U.S. State Department and FLEX told CBS News they have no record “of any FLEX student from Kazakhstan in Mankato area schools from 2000 through 2020.” Mel Helling, the communications director for Mankato Area Public Schools, told CBS News they have no record of the allegations. NewsGuard first reported the claim.
When contacted by CBS News, Dougan claimed he has the alleged victim’s U.S. visa and the FLEX Program certificate. CBS News reviewed the documents and found several inconsistencies: The date of birth on the visa does not match the age the alleged victim stated in the livestream and the certificate has an incorrect logo on it.
The claims were picked up by other accounts that are not linked to Russian disinformation. On Oct. 12, an X account credited as Matt Wallace posted a Rumble video where he claimed without evidence that Walz may have acted inappropriately with the students during trips to China. The video was later removed and the user did not respond to a request for comment.
A third claim surfaced on Oct. 13 when an X account dubbed “Black Insurrectionist” posted grainy screenshots of supposed emails alleging Walz’s misconduct with a minor at a concert in 1995.
The supposed emails appeared manipulated. Among the clues was a comma in the date-time stamp that is not typically found in emails. “Black Insurrectionist” later deleted their account. Researchers have not linked this account to Russian disinformation.
On Oct. 16, another claim circulated when a man purporting to be Matthew Metro, a former Mankato West High School student, posted a video alleging Walz sexually assaulted him in 1997.
However, The Washington Post and AFP reported that a man named Matthew Metro did attend the school but the person in the video is not him. The Post interviewed Metro, who said he never met Walz.
Hany Farid, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in manipulated media, said he believes the video was not created using AI; rather, he believes it is a “cheap fake,” in which a man is impersonating someone else.
A disinformation pattern
The video resembles the work of Storm-1516, Linvill said. The disinformation group previously promoted a false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a hit-and-run incident, according to a report by Microsoft.
“Suggestions of sexual deviance in various forms are a favorite theme of Storm-1516,” said Linvill. “This campaign has recently turned from a focus primarily on the war in Ukraine to more frequent targeting of the Harris-Walz campaign.”
Linvill said versions of the Walz allegations appear to be a Storm-1516 “narrative laundering campaign,” a process of presenting false claims in a way that makes them appear credible. This often includes presenting the claims through a person who claims to be a victim.
CBS News reached out to X and Rumble for comment but has not heard back as of publication.
CBS News
Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in
Being overworked, underpaid, and ill-treated is not what Kenyan workers had in mind when they were lured by U.S. companies with jobs in AI.
Kenyan civil rights activist Nerima Wako-Ojiwa said the workers’ desperation, in a country with high unemployment, led to a culture of exploitation with unfair wages and no job security.
“It’s terrible to see just how many American companies are just doing wrong here,” Wako-Ojiwa said. “And it’s something that they wouldn’t do at home, so why do it here?”
Why tech giants come to Kenya
The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs, but right now it’s also creating jobs. There’s a growing global workforce of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. It’s gruntwork that needs to be done accurately and fast. To do it cheaply, the work is often farmed out to developing countries like Kenya.
Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It’s a country desperate for work. The unemployment rate is as high as 67% among young people.
“The workforce is so large and desperate that they could pay whatever and have whatever working conditions, and they will have someone who will pick up that job,” Wako-Ojiwa said.
60 Minutes
Every year, a million young people enter the job market, so the government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Intel. Officials have promoted Kenya as a “Silicon Savannah” — tech savvy and digitally connected.
Kenyan President William Ruto has offered financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws to attract the tech companies.
What “humans in the loop” do with AI
Naftali Wambalo, a father of two with a college degree in mathematics, was elated to find work in Nairobi in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. He is what’s known as a “human in the loop”: someone sorting, labeling and sifting through reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them.
Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that’ll need labeling.
Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They’re often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.
Unfair labor practices
What seemed like a ticket to the future was quickly revealed to be anything but for some humans in the loop, who say they’ve been exploited. The jobs offer no stability – some contracts only offer employment for a few days, some weekly and others monthly, Wako-Ojiwa said. She calls the workspaces AI sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines.
The workers aren’t typically hired directly by the big tech companies – instead, they are employed by mostly American outsourcing companies.
The pay for humans in the loop is $1.50-2 an hour.
“And that is gross, before tax,” Wambalo said.
Wambalo, Nathan Nkunzimana and Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan were employed by SAMA, an American outsourcing company that hired for Meta and OpenAI. SAMA, based in the California Bay Area, employed over 3,000 workers in Kenya. Documents reviewed by 60 Minutes show OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though SAMA says what it paid is a fair wage for the region.
Wambalo disagrees.
“If the big tech companies are going to keep doing this business, they have to do it the right way,” he said. “It’s not because you realize Kenya’s a third-world country, you say, ‘This job I would normally pay $30 in U.S., but because you are Kenya, $2 is enough for you.'”
60 Minutes
Nkunzimana said he took the job because he has a family to feed.
Berhane Gebrekidan lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to save anything. She said she saw people who were fired for complaining.
“We were walking on eggshells,” she said.
They say SAMA pushed workers to complete assignments faster than the companies required, an allegation SAMA denies. If a six-month contract was completed in three months, they could be out of work without any pay for those extra months. They did say Sama would reward them for fast work.
“They used to say ‘thank you.’ They give you a bottle of soda and KFC chicken. Two pieces. And that is it,” Wambalo said.
Ephantus Kanyugi, Joan Kinyua, Joy Minayo, Michael Geoffrey Asia and Duncan Koech all worked for Remotaks, a click-work platform operated by Scale AI — another American AI training company facing criticism in Kenya. Workers signed up online and selected remote work, getting paid per task. They said they sometimes went unpaid.
“When it gets to the day before payday, they close the account and say that you violated a policy,” Kanyugi said.
Employees say they have no recourse or even a way to complain.
The company told 60 Minutes that any work done “in line with our community guidelines was paid out.” In March, as workers started complaining publicly, Remotasks abruptly shut down in Kenya, locking all workers out of their accounts.
The mental toll of AI training
Workers say some of the projects for Meta and OpenAI also caused them mental harm. Wambalo was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech and excessive violence from social media. He had to sift through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end.
“I looked at people being slaughtered,” Wambalo said. “People engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide.”
Berhane Gebrekidan thought she’d been hired for a translation job, but she said what she ended up doing was reviewing content featuring dismembered bodies and drone attack victims.
60 Minutes
“I find it hard now to even have conversations with people,” she said. “It’s just that I find it easier to cry than to speak.”
Wambalo said the material he had to review online has hurt his marriage.
“After countlessly seeing those sexual activities, pornography on the job, that I was doing, I hate sex,” he said.
SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by “fully-licensed professionals.” Workers say it was woefully inadequate.
“We want psychiatrists,” Wambalo said. “We want psychologists, qualified, who know exactly what we are going through and how they can help us to cope.”
Workers fight back
Wambalo and Berhane Gebrekidan are among around 200 digital workers suing SAMA and Meta over “unreasonable working conditions” that caused them psychological problems.
“It was proven by a psychiatrist that we are thoroughly sick,” Nathan Nkunzimana said “We have gone through a psychiatric evaluation just a few months ago and it was proven that we are all sick, thoroughly sick.”
Wambalo said it’s the responsibility of the big tech companies to know how the jobs are impacting workers.
“They are the ones providing the work,” he said.
Berhane Gebrekidan feels the companies know the people they employ are struggling, but they don’t care.
“…Just because we’re Black, or just because we’re just vulnerable for now, that doesn’t give them the right to just exploit us like this,” she said.
Kenya does have labor laws, but they are outdated and don’t touch on digital labor, Wako-Ojiwa, the civil rights activist, said.
“I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it, but not just in Kenya alone,” Wako-Ojiwa said. “Because what happens is when we start to push back, in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies…they shut down and they move to a neighboring country.”
SAMA has terminated the harmful content projects Wambalo and Berhane Gebrekidan were working on. The company would not agree to an on-camera interview and neither would Scale AI, which operated the Remotasks website in Kenya.
Meta and OpenAi told 60 Minutes they’re committed to safe working conditions, including fair wages and access to mental health counseling.
CBS News
Labelers training AI say they’re overworked, underpaid and exploited by big American tech companies
The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs: machine-learning will let cars, computers and chatbots teach themselves – making us humans obsolete.
Well, that’s not very likely, and we’re gonna tell you why. There’s a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. They’re called “humans in the loop:” people sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. It’s gruntwork that needs to be done accurately, fast, and – to do it cheaply – it’s often farmed out to places like Africa –
Naftali Wambalo: The robots or the machines, you are teaching them how to think like human, to do things like human.
We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It’s a country desperate for jobs… because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college educated with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field: artificial intelligence.
Lesley Stahl: You were labeling.
Naftali Wambalo: I did labeling for videos and images.
Naftali and digital workers like him, spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them.
Naftali Wambalo: You’d label, let’s say, furniture in a house. And you say “This is a TV. This is a microwave.” So you are teaching the AI to identify these items. And then there was one for faces of people. The color of the face. “If it looks like this, this is white. If it looks like this, it’s Black. This is Asian.” You’re teaching the AI to identify them automatically.
60 Minutes
Humans tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI is getting smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that’ll need labeling.
Lesley Stahl: You find these humans in the loop not only here in Kenya but in other countries thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. In India, the Philippines, Venezuela – often countries with large low wage populations – well educated but unemployed.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Honestly, it’s like modern-day slavery. Because it’s cheap labor–
Lesley Stahl: Whoa. What do you –
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: It’s cheap labor.
Like modern day slavery, says Nerima Wako-Ojiwa, a Kenyan civil rights activist, because big American tech companies come here and advertise the jobs as a ticket to the future. But really, she says, it’s exploitation.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: What we’re seeing is an inequality.
Lesley Stahl: It sounds so good. An AI job! Is there any job security?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: The contracts that we see are very short-term. And I’ve seen people who have contracts that are monthly, some of them weekly, some of them days. Which is ridiculous.
She calls the workspaces AIi sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: I think that we’re so concerned with “creating opportunities,” but we’re not asking, “Are they good opportunities?”
Because every year a million young people enter the job market, the government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intel to come here, promoting Kenya’s reputation as the Silicon Savannah: tech savvy and digitally connected.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: The president has been really pushing for opportunities in AI –
Lesley Stahl: President?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: Ruto?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: President Ruto. Yes. The president does have to create at least one million jobs a year the minimum. So it’s a very tight position to be in.
60 Minutes
To lure the tech giants, Ruto has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws. but the workers aren’t hired directly by the big companies. They engage outsourcing firms – also mostly American – to hire for them.
Lesley Stahl: There’s a go-between.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: They hire? They pay.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Uh-huh (affirm). I mean, they hire thousands of people.
Lesley Stahl: And they are protecting the Facebooks from having their names associated with this?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Yes yes yes.
Lesley Stahl: We’re talking about the richest companies on Earth.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Yes. But then they are paying people peanuts.
Lesley Stahl: AI jobs don’t pay much?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: They don’t pay well. They do not pay Africans well enough. And the workforce is so large and desperate that they could pay whatever, and have whatever working conditions, and they will have someone who will pick up that job.
Lesley Stahl: So what’s the average pay for these jobs?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: It’s about a $1.50, $2 an hour.
Naftali Wambalo: $2 per hour, and that is gross before tax.
Naftali, Nathan, and Fasica were hired by an American outsourcing company called SAMA – that employs over 3,000 workers here and hired for Meta and OpenAI. In documents we obtained, OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got – though, SAMA says, that’s a fair wage for the region –
60 Minutes
Naftali Wambalo: If the big tech companies are going to keep doing this– this business, they have to do it the right way. So it’s not because you realize Kenya’s a third-world country, you say, “This job I would normally pay $30 in U.S., but because you are Kenya $2 is enough for you.” That idea has to end.
Lesley Stahl: OK. $2 an hour in Kenya. Is that low, medium? Is it an OK salary?
Fasica: So for me, I was living paycheck to paycheck. And I have saved nothing because it’s not enough.
Lesley Stahl: Is it an insult?
Nathan: It is, of course. It is.
Fasica: It is.
Lesley Stahl: Why did you take the job?
Nathan: I have a family to feed. And instead of staying home, let me just at least have something to do.
And not only did the jobs not pay well – they were draining. They say deadlines were unrealistic, punitive – with often just seconds to complete complicated labeling tasks.
Lesley Stahl: Did you see people who were fired just ’cause they complained?
Fasica: Yes, we were walking on eggshells.
They were all hired per project and say SAMA kept pushing them to complete the work faster than the projects required, an allegation SAMA denies.
Lesley Stahl: Let’s say the contract for a certain job was six months, OK? What if you finished in three months? Does the worker get paid for those extra three months?
Male voice: No –
Fasica: KFC.
Lesley Stahl: What?
Fasica: We used to get KFC and Coca Cola.
Naftali Wambalo: They used to say thank you. They give you a bottle of soda and KFC chicken. Two pieces. And that is it.
Worse yet, workers told us that some of the projects for Meta and OpenAI were grim and caused them harm. Naftali was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech and excessive violence, which meant sifting through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end.
Naftali Wambalo: I looked at people being slaughtered, people engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide.
Lesley Stahl: All day long?
Naftali Wambalo: Basically- yes, all day long. Eight hours a day, 40 hours a week.
The workers told us they were tricked into this work by ads like this that described these jobs as “call center agents” to “assist our clients’ community and help resolve inquiries empathetically.”
Fasica: I was told I was going to do a translation job.
Lesley Stahl: Exactly what was the job you were doing?
Fasica: I was basically reviewing content which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims. You name it. You know, whenever I talk about this, I still have flashbacks.
Lesley Stahl: Are any of you a different person than they were before you had this job?
Fasica: Yeah. I find it hard now to even have conversations with people. It’s just that I find it easier to cry than to speak.
Nathan: You continue isolating you– yourself from people. You don’t want to socialize with others. It’s you and it’s you alone.
Lesley Stahl: Are you a different person?
Naftali Wambalo: Yeah. I’m a different person. I used to enjoy my marriage, especially when it comes to bedroom fireworks. But after the job I hate sex.
Lesley Stahl: You hated sex?
Naftali Wambalo: After countlessly seeing those sexual activities pornography on the job that I was doing, I hate sex.
SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by quote “fully licensed professionals.” But the workers say it was woefully inadequate.
Naftali Wambalo: We want psychiatrists. We want psychologists, qualified, who know exactly what we are going through and how they can help us to cope.
Lesley Stahl: Trauma experts.
Naftali Wambalo: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: Do you think the big company, Facebook, ChatGPT, do you think they know how this is affecting the workers?
Naftali Wambalo: It’s their job to know. It’s their f***ing job to know, actually– because they are the ones providing the work.
60 Minutes
These three and nearly 200 other digital workers are suing SAMA and Meta over “unreasonable working conditions” that caused psychiatric problems
Nathan: It was proven by a psychiatrist that we are thoroughly sick. We have gone through a psychiatric evaluation just a few months ago and it was proven that we are all sick, thoroughly sick.
Fasica: They know that we’re damaged but they don’t care. We’re humans just because we’re black, or just because we’re just vulnerable for now, that doesn’t give them the right to just exploit us like this.
SAMA – which has terminated those projects – would not agree to an on-camera interview. Meta and OpenAI told us they’re committed to safe working conditions including fair wages and access to mental health counseling. Another American AI training company facing criticism in Kenya is Scale AI, which operates a website called Remotasks.
Lesley Stahl: Did you all work for Remotasks?
Group: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: Or work with them?
Ephantus, Joan, Joy, Michael, and Duncan signed up online, creating an account, and clicked for work remotely, getting paid per task. Problem is: sometimes the company just didn’t pay them.
Ephantus: When it gets to the day before payday, they close the account and say that “You violated a policy.”
Lesley Stahl: They say, “You violated their policy.”
Voice: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: And they don’t pay you for the work you’ve done—
Ephantus: They don’t.
Lesley Stahl: Would you say that that’s almost common, that you do work and you’re not paid for it?
Joan: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: And you have no recourse, you have no way to even complain?
Joan: There’s no way.
The company says any work that was done “in line with our community guidelines was paid out.” In March, as workers started complaining publicly, Remotasks abruptly shut down in Kenya altogether.
Lesley Stahl: There are no labor laws here?
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Our labor law is about 20 years old, it doesn’t touch on digital labor. I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it– but not just in Kenya alone. Because what happens is when we start to push back, in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies, they shut down and they move to a neighboring country.
Lesley Stahl: It’s easy to see how you’re trapped. Kenya is trapped: They need jobs so desperately that there’s a fear that if you complain, if your government complained, then these companies don’t have to come here.
Nerima Wako-Ojiwa: Yeah. And that’s what they throw at us all the time. And it’s terrible to see just how many American companies are just-just doing wrong here– just doing wrong here. And it’s something that they wouldn’t do at home, so why do it here?
Produced by Shachar Bar-On and Jinsol Jung. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by April Wilson.
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