Russian interference: Far, wide, ongoing, and successful
“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”
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The authors of the report by Oxford and Graphika, while reliant on data provided by technology companies, also highlighted the companies’ “belated and uncoordinated response” to the disinformation campaign and, once it was discovered, their failure to share more with investigators. The authors urged that in the future they provide data in “meaningful and constructive” ways.
That report says the IRA’s posts focused on the United States started on Twitter as far back as 2013, and eventually evolved into the multi-platform strategy. The researchers from Oxford said that organic postings were much more far reaching than advertisements, despite Facebook’s sole focus on ads when the company first announced it had been compromised in 2017.
The other group, led by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in disinformation, counted 263,769,228 engagements with internet Research Agency content — including likes, comments and shares — on Facebook and Instagram. They said the total number of people who viewed the Russian-backed content is likely higher than the 126 million people Facebook said were exposed.
New Knowledge faulted U.S. social media companies for failing to come to grips with the extent to which their platforms are being used for foreign propaganda, and the researchers noted that Russian efforts to manipulate American voters continue mostly unabated.
“The Instagram and Facebook engagement statistics belie the claim that this was a small operation — it was far more than only $100,000 of Facebook ads, as originally asserted by Facebook executives,” the New Knowledge white paper said. “The ad engagements were a minor factor in a much broader, organically driven influence operation.”
The Committee to Investigate Russia notes that the New Knowledge report also addresses the matter of Russia’s disproportionate attempt to disenfranchise black voters.
“The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,” the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.
The report says that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens.” In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.
… [T]actics included targeting those groups with content intended to stoke racial tensions with posts on police brutality, and dissuade them from going to the polls by casting doubt on the integrity of the electoral process. They sought to encourage voters to switch support from Mrs. Clinton to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who won more than 1% of the popular vote.
The New Knowledge study also traces a common tactic by Russian operatives: building massive followings with a Facebook or Instagram page on other topics, such as the television program “The Simpsons,” before shifting to overtly political content.
The Russians set up 30 Facebook pages targeting black Americans, the researchers found, and 10 YouTube channels that posted 571 videos related to police violence against African-Americans. YouTube, which is part of Alphabet, the holding company for Google, was not correct when it said in a statement last year that Russian content did not target a segment of U.S. society, the researchers concluded.
The Russians also set up hotlines that encourage people to discuss sexual or other personal problems the researchers found, raising the possibility they could use the information later to blackmail people. Through deceit, the Internet Research Agency recruited many Americans to take various political actions, the researchers found.
Other New Knowledge report findings include the following:
· The Internet Research Agency impersonated state and local news media on Twitter and Instagram, setting up approximately 109 Twitter accounts masquerading as news organizations, including 44 U.S.-focused Twitter handles that amassed 660,335 followers between them — with an average of 15,000 followers each …
· The agency simultaneously worked hard to undermine trust in real news media both among left and right-right-leaning audiences.
· Thousands of conspiratorial tweets were advanced or amplified by fake right-wing personas, and included pseudoscience conspiracies about vaccines, paranormal activity and aliens, and anti-Semitic complaints about the “globalist” agenda.
· The Russians sought to convey a narrative that the [Robert] Mueller investigation was corrupt, and that the emerging Russia stories were a “weird conspiracy” pushed by “liberal crybabies.”
The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies. One post on Instagram — which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal — claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups.”
Also notable is the study’s finding that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was favorably treated in posts aimed at both left-leaning and right-leaning users. The report says there were a number of posts expressing support for Assange and Wikileaks, including several in October 2016 just before WikiLeaks released hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
A lack of any substantive, hard-hitting response to Russia’s 2016 election interference has allowed it to continue.
The [New Knowledge] report says that there are still some live accounts tied to the original Internet Research Agency, which was named in an indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller in February for an expansive social media campaign intended to influence the 2016 presidential election. Some of these accounts have a presence on smaller platforms as the major companies have tried to clean up after the Russian activity was discovered.
“With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future,” the researchers wrote.
The report says that none of the companies turned over complete data sets to Congress and some of them “may have misrepresented or evaded” in testimony about the interference by either intentionally or unintentionally downplaying the scope of the problem.
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“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony,” the researchers wrote. They added that “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.”
“This newly released data demonstrates how aggressively Russia sought to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology, and how the IRA actively worked to erode trust in our democratic institutions,” said Senate Committee on Intelligence chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.
Committee vice chair Sen. Mark Warner, D.-Va., said, “These attacks against our country were much more comprehensive, calculating and widespread than previously revealed. This should stand as a wakeup call to us all that none of us are immune from this threat, and it is time to get serious in addressing this challenge.”
