The Kremlin is once again seeking to undermine confidence in American democracy with online influence campaigns, U.S. officials said. Since 2016, Russia has tried to influence every federal election cycle, according to previously declassified assessments.

Dustin Volz, Julian E. Barnes and Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington and San Francisco. The Russian government has been targeting Americans with covert online disinformation operations seeking to undermine public confidence in November's midterm elections, using a familiar playbook to inject chaos into the voting season, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. Classified U.S. intelligence assessments from recent months have determined that the Kremlin has again authorized a digital influence campaign to peddle content across social media in hopes of seeding or amplifying domestic divisions around the election season, the officials said. The assessments did not find evidence of attempts to take aim at voting machinery in a way that could compromise the actual voting process, the officials added.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss classified information, did not specify the efforts to influence attitudes online. But experts in Russian disinformation have spotted some social media campaigns in recent weeks that use artificial intelligence to create fake videos of Hollywood celebrities talking about key battleground Senate races. The disinformation campaign appeared to be less extensive or coordinated than at least some of Russia's prior efforts in American elections, some of the officials said. Since 2016, the Kremlin has initiated online influence operations in every American federal election cycle, according to previously declassified assessments. The officials added that U.S. spy agencies see Moscow as less interested in midterm races than in presidential contests and as distracted by its grinding war with Ukraine.