Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Russians tap immigration as a midterm wedge issue
Nonpartisan report ties shuttered online pages to troll farm
WASHINGTON — Clad in military jackets, with bandanas partially hiding their faces, Eddie Alvarez and other members of the Brown Berets clashed with other protesters July 2014 in Murrieta, Calif.
On one side, more than 200 anti-immigration activists waving American flags stopped buses carrying 140 migrant women and children to a nearby Border Patrol center in Riverside County. On the other side, Alvarez and several dozen other counterprotesters rushed out to defend the detainees.
“We knew they might not understand English, but they understood the hate,” Alvarez recalled recently.
Photos of the heated encounters — and of the Brown Berets, a Chicano militant group formed in the 1970s — circulated on the internet. But Alvarez, 21, was surprised to see his image on Aztlan Warriors, one of 32 pages or accounts that Facebook shut down last month, calling them part of a covert operation to stoke racial tensions in the United States.
“They didn’t even ask our permission or anything,” Alvarez said.
In a new report, the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan Washington think tank that partnered with Facebook, concludes that the shuttered pages and accounts were run by or linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the troll farm in St. Petersburg that U.S. officials say meddled in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
One of the recent account administrators played a role in the 2016 campaign, showing a “direct relationship between the closed accounts and the original troll operation,” the report states.
The Russian agency and 13 of its employees were indicted in February on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller for seeking to interfere “with U.S. elections and political processes.”
U.S. officials have since said that Kremlin-backed groups have continued to spread mayhem in American politics.
The nation’s volatile immigration debate has amplified online, the report warned, and foreign operatives and homegrown trolls are using it as a political wedge ahead of the November elections. It said the online disinformation campaign is likely to grow more sophisticated with bad actors tailoring their posts, videos and other content to target communities of color — and to hide who is controlling the message.
“Covert influence campaigns, some steered from abroad, are using disinformation to drive Americans further apart, and weaken the trust in the institutions on which democracy stands,” the report warns.
Audiences for the Facebook pages taken down — 290,000 people followed one of them — were highly engaged, often sharing content and participating in discussions, according to the report.
The most popular were Aztlan Warriors, Resisters and Black Elevation, which pretended to promote feminism, progressive causes and the rights of black, indigenous and Latino communities, often copying or repackaging material from other users, websites and internet platforms.
Prior Russian efforts often targeted Black Lives Matter activists opposing police brutality, seeking to sow chaos within the movement and animosity from outsiders. The recent posts used similar tactics and language to exploit tensions over illegal immigration.
The Resisters page listed 27 events from March 2017 to July 2018, including protests against President Donald Trump’s travel bans, a march against family separations on the border, and support for young immigrants without a legal path to citizenship known as Dreamers.
Other posts urged people to take over the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and shared activity related to #AbolishICE, a real grass-roots campaign that seeks to deny funding for the federal agency.
Some of the events lured real social activists to unknowingly organize logistics and drew hundreds of people to the streets, according to the digital lab report.
Grassroots and political activists said they’re meeting with Facebook to fight disinformation through speech campaigns of their own, and studying covert efforts by the FBI and CIA to infiltrate their movements decades ago.
“Let’s be clear, this is not Russian playbook, this is an American playbook,” said Malkia Cyril, founder of the Center for Media Justice in San Francisco.
But with voters citing immigration as a top concern ahead of the midterms, researchers expect more extremist online efforts.