Russia’s election meddling was wider than thought and targeted African Americans
The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters, and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues.
“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there.
The New Knowledge report is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. They are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter, and the other companies whose platforms were used.
The second report was written by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University along with Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media. The Washington Post first reported on the Oxford report Sunday.
The Russian influence campaign in 2016 was run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency, owned by a businessman, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Prigozhin and a dozen of the company’s employees were indicted in February as part of the investigation of Russian interference by Robert Mueller, the special counsel.
Both reports stress that the Internet Research Agency created social-media accounts under fake names on virtually every available platform. A major goal was to support Donald Trump, first against his Republican rivals in the presidential race, then in the general election, and as president since his inauguration.
Creating accounts designed to pass as belonging to Americans, the Internet Research Agency spread its messages not only via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which have drawn the most attention, but also on YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, and Google+, among other platforms.
The new reports largely confirm earlier findings: that the campaign was designed to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Trump, and exacerbate existing divisions in American society.
But the New Knowledge report gives particular attention to the Russians’ focus on African Americans.
The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African Americans. But the Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo decades-old Soviet propaganda efforts that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the U.S., as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife.
Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency in the Senate’s data, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers. Just seven pages focused on the political left, drawing 689,045 followers.
While the right-wing pages promoted Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Clinton while promoting Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter-suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African Americans, urging them to shun Clinton in the general election and either vote for Stein or stay home.
Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.
The New Knowledge report criticizes social-media companies for misleading the public. “Regrettably, it appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress,” the report says, noting what it calls one false claim that specific groups were not targeted by the influence operation and another that the campaign did not seek to discourage voting.
“It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion,” the report says.