The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target blacks and Instagram users, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The report, which also cites efforts to suppress turnout among Democratic voters, adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the past two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.
"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.
"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 added.
One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally.
The New Knowledge report released Monday is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. 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 New Knowledge study found that many of the postings focused on race, that they were primarily intended to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, and that the ultimate goal was to sow American division. That repeats several conclusions made by special counsel Robert Mueller, the intelligence community, and the Senate and House intelligence committees, though the House committee disputes that the efforts favored Trump.
Both studies are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet -- the parent company of Google -- and the other companies whose platforms were used.
But the New Knowledge report says none of the companies turned over complete data sets to Congress and that some of them "may have misrepresented or evaded" in testimony about the interference by either intentionally or unintentionally downplaying the scope of the problem.
Researchers noted what the report calls a false claim that specific population groups were not targeted by the influence operation, and another that Russians 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.
The New Knowledge report says there are still some live accounts tied to the Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg and owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin and a dozen of the company's employees were named in an indictment from Mueller in February.
Researchers discovered many examples of the Russian operators building an audience with one theme and then shifting to another, often more provocative, set of messages. For instance, an Instagram account called @army--of--jesus-- first posted in January 2015 images from The Muppet Show, then shifted to The Simpsons. By early 2016, the account's memes became Jesus-focused, frequently associating Jesus with Trump's campaign and Satan with Clinton's.
BLACKS TARGETED
The New Knowledge report gives particular attention to the Russians' focus on blacks in America.
"The most prolific [Internet Research Agency] 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 blacks, the report 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.
The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as black in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called "Don't Shoot" and "BlackToLive."
Renee DiResta, one of the report's authors and director of research at New Knowledge, said the Internet Research Agency "leveraged pre-existing, legitimate grievances wherever they could." As the election effort geared up, the Black Lives Matter movement was at the center of national attention in the United States, so the Russian operation took advantage of it, she said -- and added "Blue Lives Matter" material when a pro-police pushback emerged.
"Very real racial tensions and feelings of alienation exist in America and have for decades," DiResta said. "The [Internet Research Agency] didn't create them. It exploits them."
Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency and listed in the Senate's data, 30 targeted black 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.
During the week of the presidential election, posts on sites connected to the Internet Research Agency and targeting blacks largely ignored mentions of the election. Posts on rightist sites connected to the firm aimed to generate anger and suspicion about the election and hinted at voter fraud.
The rightist pages promoted Trump's candidacy. The leftist pages scorned Clinton while promoting Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort urged blacks and supporters of Sanders to either vote for Stein in the general election or to stay home.
Black voter turnout in a presidential election declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.
WIDE-REACHING EFFORT
One major takeaway of the study is the breadth of Russian interference that appeared on Instagram, a photo and video-sharing social media platform that is owned by Facebook.
"Instagram was a significant front in the [Internet Research Agency] 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."
The study says that as attention was focused on Facebook and Twitter in 2017, the Russians shifted much of their activity to Instagram. There were 187 million engagements with users on Instagram -- "likes" or shares of content created in Russia -- compared with 76.5 million such engagements on Facebook.
The Oxford report previewed Sunday noted that the Russians' Instagram accounts focused primarily on race, ethnicity or other forms of personal identity.
But both reports stressed that the Internet Research Agency created social media accounts under fake names on virtually every available platform.
Creating accounts designed to pass as belonging to Americans, the Internet Research Agency spread its messages not only via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but also on YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+, among other platforms. Its attack on the United States used high-tech tools created almost exclusively by American companies.
The New Knowledge report details Russian attempts to infiltrate Internet games, browser extensions and music apps. The Russians even used social media to encourage users of the game Pokemon Go -- which was at peak popularity in the months before the 2016 presidential election -- to choose usernames that were politically divisive or references to Black Lives Matter, for example.
The report discusses even more unconventional ways that the Russian accounts attempted to connect with Americans and recruit assets, such as selling merchandise with certain messages, making specific follower requests, presenting job offers and even providing help lines that could encourage people to unknowingly disclose sensitive information that could be used against them.
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.
The report suggests a grudging respect for the scale and creativity of Russian influence operations. But the Russians were not eager to take credit for their own efforts.
After the election, the report says, the Internet Research Agency put up about 70 posts on Facebook and Instagram that mocked the claims that Russia had interfered in the election.
"You've lost and don't know what to do?" said one such post. "Just blame it on Russian hackers."
Information for this article was contributed by Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times and by Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/18/2018