Russian ads played up racial divisions

Facebook purchases tried to stoke tensions

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 Russia-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.

USA TODAY NETWORK reporters reviewed each of the ads, released to the public last week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not only the content of the ads but also information that revealed the audience

targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

While some 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 addressed issues fraught with racial or religious baggage like protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election. Among the findings:

❚ Of the ads, more than half made express references to race. Those nearly 2,000 ads 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% of the ads centered on crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.

❚ Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 a 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. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017.

❚ Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, and a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first analysis of social media influence campaigns for the election, said the ads show that the Russians are trying 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 Oct. 19, 2016, after a summer that saw widespread protests over racial tensions and police shootings of black men.

The information analyzed by the USA TODAY NETWORK shows the Internet Research Agency paid about

$1,785 for the Facebook spot. It target- ed 20- to 65-year-olds interested in law enforcement who had already liked pages such as “The Thin Blue Line,” “Police Wives Unite” and the “Officer Down Memorial Page.”

The next day, the 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 company targeted the same group with an ad saying that “police brutality has been the most recurring issue over the last several years.”

“We know the Russians targeted extremes and then came back with different negative messages.”

USC professor Nick Cull, author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, said the campaign is reminiscent of tactics employed in the Soviet era. His book explored how the KGB tried to disrupt the 1984 Los Angeles 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,” Cull wrote in an email.

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he made the ads available to the public so academics could study the intention and the breadth of the targeting.

“These ads broadly sought to pit one American against another by exploiting faults in our society over race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other deeply cynical thoughts,” Schiff said.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Young Mie Kim