Russians sought to buy racial discord on Facebook
Thousands of ads reviewed to find strategy
The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.
The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of special counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.
While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.
The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.
USA TODAY NETWORK reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this past week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post. Among the findings:
About 1,950 ads made references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions – a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device.
At least 25 percent of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation.
Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of racerelated spots rose to 400.
Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton.
Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first scientific analysis of social media influence campaigns during the election, said the ads show that the Russians are attempting to destabilize Western democracy by targeting extreme identity groups.
“Effective polarization can happen when you’re promoting the idea that, ‘I like my group, but I don’t like the other group’ and pushing distance between the two extreme sides,” Kim said. “And we know the Russians targeted extremes and then came back with different negative messages that might not be aimed at converting voters, but suppressing turnout and undermining the democratic process.”
The most prominent ad – with 1.3 million impressions and 73,000 clicks – illustrates how the influence campaign was executed.
A Facebook page called “Back the Badge” landed on Oct. 19, 2016, following a summer that saw more than 100 Black Lives Matter protests, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in August and protests over the police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Keith Lamont Scott in North Carolina.
The information analyzed by the USA TODAY NETWORK shows the Internet Research Agency paid 110,058 rubles, or $1,785, for the Facebook spot. It targeted 20- to 65-year-olds interested in law enforcement who had already liked pages such as “The Thin Blue,” “Police Wives Unite” and the “Officer Down Memorial Page.”
The very next day, the influence operation paid for an ad depicting two black brothers handcuffed in Colorado for “driving while black.” That ad targeted people interested in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X and black history. Within minutes, the Russian company targeted the same group with an ad that said “police brutality has been the most recurring issue over the last several years.”
USC professor Nick Cull, author of “The Cold War and the United States Information Agency,” says the ad campaign is reminiscent of tactics employed during the Soviet era. His book explored how the KGB tried to disrupt the LA Olympics by faking propaganda from the KKK threatening black athletes.
“Soviet news media always played up U.S. racism, exaggerating the levels of hatred even beyond the horrific levels of the reality in the 1950s,” Cull wrote in an email. “It was one reason Eisenhower decided to move on civil rights.”
Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he made the ads available to the public so that academics could study both the intention and breadth of the targeting.
“These ads broadly sought to pit one American against another by exploiting faults in our society or race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other deeply cynical thoughts,” Schiff said in an interview. “Americans should take away that the Russians perceive these divisions as vulnerabilities and to a degree can be exploited by a sophisticated campaign.”
Hundreds of ads mixed race and policing, with many mimicking Black Lives Matter activists that melded real news events with accusations of abuse by white officers.
That type of subversion only hurts legitimate efforts to calm tensions over policing and hate crimes, said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Johnson said the Russian ads likely helped to fuel “hateful, xenophobic rhetoric” throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.
“When you’re stoking fear to get a negative action directed at a targeted population based on race, and when a foreign nation uses that fear to subvert and undermine democracy, that’s become a serious problem,” Johnson said. “It’s a warning for technology companies and corporations that private citizens have entrusted with their privacy to receive factual information.”