Disinformation, Social Media, and the 2016 Election: the Internet Research Agency Explained
This is an article about the origins and activities of the Internet Research Agency in the lead-up to, and during, the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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THE RUSSIAN INDEPENDENT PRESS REVEALS THE EXISTENCE OF THE INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY
On September 9th, 2013, a St. Petersburg-based correspondent for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Alexandra Garmazhapova, revealed the existence of a “troll factory” seeding the internet with Kremlin authorized propaganda.
Located in Olgino, a historical district in the Lakhta-Olgino Municipal Okrug north of the Gulf of Finland, the “troll factory” operated under the nondescript moniker of the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
While it would later become infamous for targeting the United States, in late 2013 the focus of the IRA’s propaganda was domestic, praising Vladimir Putin and his ally, Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin, while attacking Russia’s most prominent opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was running against Sobyanin at the time.
The IRA’s activities were discovered by Russian journalists remarkably quickly, Garmazhapova revealed that the IRA had been registered on the Russian Unified State Register of Legal Entities less than two months earlier, on July 26th, 2013.
The 24 year-old Garmazhapova and fellow journalist Andrei Shoshnikov visited the IRA’s Olgino office posing as job applicants. They had likely been alerted of its existence by an August 29th post on the Russian social media site VKontakte by an IRA employee named Natalya Lvova.
Lvova described being hired as an “internet operator” on a team whose job it was to post political messages online. Lvova revealed that each team member was responsible for writing 100 online comments a day and that they were provided with guidance on what to comment on. One day they might support Sobyanin, the next they might attack Navalny.
Garmazhapova and Shoshnikov were interviewed by a young IRA manager named Alexei Soskovets, who had extensive contacts with the pro-Kremlin youth organization NASHI. Over a year earlier, The Guardian had reported on a series of leaked emails that had revealed NASHI’s internal deliberations on how to use internet comments to boost Putin and discredit the opposition to him, Navalny in particular.
Soskovets explained to the two undercover journalists that while automated bots could be used to post the messages, they were often discovered and banned by Russian search engines, so it was decided to use real people posting, Soskovets said, “according to the vector which we indicate.”
Garmazhapova’s reporting showed that Russian domestic politics were the IRA’s primary focus, though she did reveal that even at this early stage the Russian trolls criticized the US on Russian internet forums, somewhat bizarrely, as being overcrowded with skyscrapers, and Americans as being “selfish” and “greedy.”
She also published screenshots of online troll posts dating back to May 2013, suggesting that the activities pre-dated the official registration of the IRA that July. Other screen shots showed how IRA trolls had labelled Navalny, who was in the middle of an ultimately unsuccessful mayoral campaign, as the “Hitler of our time.”
Garmazhapova and Shoshnikov also revealed that the IRA suffered from bad management and low morale. “You can go crazy,” one IRA worker told them. “They told us we have to write four LiveJournal [a Russian social network site] posts a day, write on city forums and comment in the media. Nobody upstairs reads our posts, I just copy texts from Wikipedia.”
A month after Garmazhapova’s article appeared, The Atlantic published an piece titled “Russia’s Online-Comment Propaganda Army,” that reported on the Lvova post and named the Internet Research Agency, marking the first mention of the organization by a Western publication.
While the Western press was slow to pick up on the rise of Kremlin-backed trolls, independent Russian journalists covered the phenomenon with prescience and accuracy.
On May 21st, 2014, the Russian Journalist Ilya Klishin was the first to report that the Kremlin’s trolls were targeting the West. By that time, the IRA had moved its headquarters from Olgino to a drab office located at 55 Savushkina Street, St. Petersburg.
Klishin’s reporting, which was further developed by Andrei Soldatov, revealed that a key figure behind the Kremlin’s embrace of internet trolling was the politician and strategist Vyacheslav Volodin.
Upon Putin’s return to the presidency in 2011, Volodin had been elevated to the position of deputy chief of the presidential administration and was placed in charge of dealing with the large-scale anti-Putin protests. As social media had been utilized by opposition leaders to organize the street demonstrations, Volodin decided to turn the tables and promoted the “systemic manipulation of public opinion through social media.”
According to Klishin, the effort was deemed so successful that the Kremlin decided to direct the effort abroad. Russian expats in Germany, Thailand and India began posting pro-Putin messages online.
Klishin further reported the existence of emails leaked by hackers purporting to be members of the group Anonymous that detailed the efforts of the “trolling” group targeting the United States. In all likelihood, this group refers to the IRA.
Klishin wrote that “organizers of this campaign likely studied the demographic structure of the main social networks in the U.S., the online behavior of its citizens, relevant hashtags on Twitter and groups supporting U.S. President Barack Obama.”
The Russian trolls also conducted research into “audiences, owners, official and actual editorial policies” of the news outlets The Huffington Post, The Blaze and Fox News, analyzing their attitudes towards Russia and Obama.
A few weeks before the Klishin article appeared, The Guardian published an editorial about the pro-Russian trolls polluting the comments sections beneath their articles on the crisis in Ukraine.
News of the leaked emails made it into a Western publication roughly two weeks after Klishin’s article when BuzzFeed News published the story “Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America,” on June 2nd, 2014. The article expanded the list of news sites in the Russian trolls’ cross hairs to include Politico and the far-right WorldNetDaily.
“Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community,” Svetlana Boiko, an IRA team leader wrote in a strategy document that was released in the leak. “Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters (‘brand advocates’) and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively.”
Around this time, Novaya Gazeta scored another scoop when it revealed that the man funding the Internet Research Agency was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a billionaire former-restaurateur known as “Putin’s Chef,” who enjoyed numerous state contracts through his catering and other companies with state organs linked to the Russian intelligence and defense establishment.
At this writing, Prigozhin is now infamous the world over for his ownership of the Wagner Group, a Russian private mercendary force involved in some of the fiercest fighting of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine. Wagner has been accused of carrying out numerous war crimes and atrocities.
Born in Leningrad in 1961, Prigozhin is an ex-convict with ties to the organized criminal syndicates that allied with Putin during his critical years as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.
In 1979, 18 year-old Prigozhin was convicted and given a suspended sentence for theft.
Two years later, he was convicted of “robbery in an organized group, fraud, involvement of minors in prostitution,” and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
PUTIN’S CHEF: YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN’S TIES TO VLADIMIR PUTIN AND ST. PETERSBURG-BASED ORGANIZED CRIME
Prigozhin was released after serving nine years and started a business selling hot dogs in St. Petersburg. He was invited by an old classmate at a sports boarding school, Boris Spektor, to manage a chain of convenience stores that, following the rationing of communism, were wildly popular.
Through his relationship with Spektor, Prigozhin invested in the newly legalized casino business in St. Petersburg. As deputy mayor, Putin was in charge of licencing the new gaming ventures, most of which were operated by former KGB officers with links to organized crime and used to establish “black cash” slush funds.
In 1996, Prigozhin established Concord Catering.
He scored his first major success when he opened up several restaurants, including The Customs House, as well as New Island Restaurant on the Vyatka River in St. Petersburg, which became some of the most fashionable dining destinations in town. In addition to being a favorite dining spot for International Monetary Fund officials, New Island was also patronized by St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin.
While not actually a chef himself, Prigozhin claimed that Putin respected his story of having worked his way up from being a street vendor and appreciated that he would often bring Putin’s plates of food to the table himself and occasionally even cleared them.
Prigozhin built an early relationship with Putin’s bodyguard during his time as Deputy Mayor, Viktor Zolotov. Zolotov later served as the Head of the National Guard of Russia and served as a member of the powerful Russian Security Council.
Baltik-Escort, a private security firm that Zolotov oversaw and that looked after Putin and his former boss, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, had been founded by another Putin confidant with suspected ties to organized crime, Roman Tsepov.
According to sources interviewed by Forbes Russia, Prigozhin was “well known” to Tsepov. Baltik-Escort also provided security services to the St. Petersburg-based Malyshevskaya and Tambovskaya criminal syndicates.
In 2001, Putin brought the French head of state Jacques Chirac with him to dine at Prigozhin’s New Island restaurant. A year later, New Island fed both Putin and George W. Bush on the latter’s visit to St. Petersburg. Afterward, Bush wrote a letter of thanks to Prigozhin.
In 2003, Putin celebrated his birthday at New Island. Being held in Putin’s good graces paid off handsomely for Prigozhin. While Prigozhin enjoyed success as a restaurateur, the true source of his wealth came from a series of lucrative state contracts.
Concord Catering was contracted to provide food for St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary and for Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration. Prigozhin scored a larger success when he was contracted to provide meals for St. Petersburg’s and eventually Moscow’s schools.
His greatest coup came with a massive nearly $3 billion annual contract to provide food, sanitation and laundry services for the Russian military.
The idea to outsource these services came from Anatoly Serdyakov, who Spanish prosecutors discovered was a principal coordinator between Putin’s inner circle and the Tambovskaya criminal syndicate.
After being appointed Minister of Defense by Putin in 2007, Serdyakov outsourced services that were once administered by the Russian MOD to a firm called Voentorg.
A Prigozhin friend and ally, Leonid Teyf, served the firm’s first deputy chief, promptly outsourced the multi-billion dollar contract to Concord Catering. Teyf, who maintained a mansion in Ralaigh, North Carolina, was arrested by the FBI in late-2018 for a slew of crimes including money laundering and attempting to arrange the murder of his wife’s lover.
Prigozhin returned the favor of the Kremlin’s largesse by engaging in clandestine, often violent acts on its behalf.
In one instance, he inserted a female mole from his personal intelligence network into Novaya Gazeta in order to surveille one of Russia’s few independent publications.
In the fall of 2013, he sent men to violently assault a blogger in Sochi who had published criticisms of Putin online. Individuals working for Prigozhin also organized pro-Russian demonstrations in Ukraine and were involved in the poisoning of an individual connected to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Among other tasks, Prigozhin provided the funding for the Internet Research Agency.
On March 11th, 2015, Andrei Shoshnikov published an exposé that further blew the lid off the IRA. According to a whistleblower who spoke and provided documents to Shoshnikov, the IRA put our false stories that Ukrainian oligarchs were behind the assassination to the prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
In one of the internal documents leaked to Shoshnikov, the IRA lays out its propaganda and disinformation strategy directed at the US:
“The USA has several internal problems. We single out three: The problem with the mass proliferation of weapons, and the corresponding mass shootings, crimes and incidents (…);
American policemen exceeding their authority in a way which has become commonplace. If, twenty years ago, a suspect could count on a preliminary investigation and immunity, now, on being detained, beatings and even killing have become routine business (…);
The Obamacare program, which provoked vast problems and discontent among American citizens (…);
The problem of the NSA and total surveillance of American citizens by the intelligence services.”
Little over a month after Shoshnikov published his article, another IRA whistleblower went public.
In April of 2015, the activist and investigator Lyudmila Savchuk described her experiences working at the troll factory.
“We had to write very positive comments about the government. We were given information and told how we should use it — for example, that life is more and more beautiful, and we’re living better and better. And if it’s about the U.S., we have to do everything to make the reader conclude that people there live badly, and that it’s not going well.”
Savchuk expanded upon her description of the organization in a subsequent interview with The Washington Post.
“There are departments. Mine is responsible solely for Livejournal blogs and others are for commenting on the media. There’s also a group that masquerades as journalists. They operate fake news portals that pretend to be Ukrainian news sites, with names like ‘Kharkiv News’ or the ‘Federal News Agency.’ We had video bloggers. Some made themselves look like members of the Russian opposition.”
The IRA received its most extensive treatment by the Western media in an article called “The Agency,” written by Adrian Chen for The New York Times Magazine on June 2nd, 2015. It revealed disinformation and propaganda targeting the United States. Social media accounts linked to the IRA promoted a Manhattan art exhibit called “Material Evidence” that featured photos and supposed artifacts from the crises unfolding in Ukraine and Syria that presented the conflicts along the narrative favored by the Kremlin.
On September 11th, 2014, dozens of twitter accounts linked to the IRA sent hundreds of tweets about a non-existent explosion at the Columbiana Chemicals plant located in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana using the hashtag #ColumbianaChemicals.
The IRA tweets tagged American journalists, media outlets and politicians in an attempt to provide their disinformation traction. More than simply tweeting about the false story, the IRA established a fabricated Louisiana news website covering the false story, along with a YouTube video and a Wikipedia page.
A month later, on December 13th, the IRA pushed two false stories in one day, one promoting a false story about an Ebola outbreak in Atlanta and another about the shooting of an unarmed black man in the same city.
Tthe reaction of the American intelligence community, law enforcement, and within the social media tech companies themselves was to overlook and underplay these revelations entirely.
In an interview with David Shimer, Steven Hall, the CIA’s Division Chief overseeing Russia, claimed that he felt the IRA was such a poorly kept secret that it wasn’t likely to be very influential. Hall later realized that the Russians were being vastly more aggressive in this arena than the CIA had appreciated and didn’t care if they were discovered.
In fact, being discovered may have been part of the plan all along.
What is remarkable is that in the lead up to the 2016 election, Russian journalists had uncovered ample evidence that the US was being targeted and apparently few in the United States were paying attention or alarmed if they were.
“When I began researching the story,” Adrian Chen wrote in The New Yorker two days after the first Wikileaks email dump, “I assumed that paid trolls worked by relentlessly spreading their message and thus indoctrinating Russian Internet users. But, after speaking with Russian journalists and opposition members, I quickly learned that pro-government trolling operations were not very effective at pushing a specific pro-Kremlin message.”
He continued, “[t]he real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.”
PROJECT LAKHTA: THE INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES
The Internet Research Agency, or a predecessor organization prior to its being officially registered, appears to have begun making Russian language posts on Twitter as far back as 2009, with tweets directed at a domestic audience.
By 2013, the IRA started targeting the United States with disinformation over Twitter. As its operations against the United States ramped up over the course of 2014, the IRA began utilizing other social media platforms in the following sequence: YouTube, Instagram and, lastly, Facebook.
The IRA was part of a broader effort known as Project Lakhta, the stated goal of which was “to spread distrust towards candidates for political office and the political system in general” in the United States.” Lakhta was the name of the St. Petersburg suburb where Prigozhin set up his first troll factory, and he reportedly maintains a villa in the district as well.
The Internet Research Agency is just one of multiple Russian corporate entities that tie back to Prigozhin. Given the length and depth of Putin’s relationship with Prigozhin, dating back to his earliest days as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, it is inconceivable that the Russian president isn’t aware of the overall aims and methods of the project.
The fact that Prigozhin likely possesses compromising information on Putin’s early partnerships with organized crime and yet maintains his trust and confidence indicates the close nature of their relationship.
The IRA employed hundreds of people and was headed by a management group, the General Director of which was Mikhail Bystrov, a former colonel in the Moskovsky District police department in St. Petersburg.
A young tech entrepreneur named Mikhail Burchik served as the IRA’s Executive Director, the number two position in the leadership hierarchy.
The organization is subdivided into various departments, including a graphics department, a data-analysis department, a search engine optimization department, an IT department that maintains their digital infrastructure and a finance department that budgets and allocates funding for the IRA’s various propaganda and disinformation operations.
The finance department, which was led by Elena Khusyaynova, who also manages the finances for the other legal entities involved with Project Lakhta, budgeted $12 million for its activities in 2016.
In April of 2014, the IRA established a department focused on the U.S. population, known variously as the “translator project,” or the American Department.
Less than a month earlier, Barack Obama had ordered sanctions to be applied on Russia as a response to it’s military incursion into Crimea.
The “translator project” was headed by a 27 year-old Azerbaijani entrepreneur named Dzheykun Aslanov. Nicknamed Jay Z, Aslanov reportedly liked dogs and partying. In 2009, he spent several months in the United States, visiting Boston and New York.
Aslanov oversaw many of the operations directed at the 2016 US presidential election.
While the IRA targeted the 2016 election and attempted to aid the candidacy of Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, its overall aims were more comprehensive.
“The data now available make it clear that Russian efforts are not directed against one election, one party, or even one country,” John Kelly, the CEO of Graphika and an expert on the Internet Research Agency, later testified.
“We are facing a sustained campaign of organized manipulation, a coordinated attack on the trust we place in our institutions and in our media — both social and traditional. These attacks are sophisticated and complex, and the committee’s bi-partisan work to untangle and expose them sets a great example for the country.”
According to Kelly, the IRA crafted fictitious online personas to infiltrate targeted communities. They infiltrated both right and left-wing radical communities in order to amplify the disdain and mistrust between them.
The IRA targeted the most divisive political issues in the US. In an effort to influence young minds, they utilized pop culture references and radical political discourse. They used bots and trolls for inorganic amplification. Lastly, they occasionally executed cyber attacks in conjunction with their information operations.
After the establishment of the “translator project,” members of the IRA traveled to the US on a reconnaissance and intelligence fact-finding mission.
On June 4th, 2014, IRA operatives Aleksandra Y. Krylova and Anna V. Bogacheva entered the US, claiming they were traveling for personal reasons in order to receive visas.
Krylova had joined the IRA in September of 2013 and by the time of her visit to the US she occupied the third highest position in the organization, while Bogacheva served as the director of the IRA’s data analysis group.
They were to be joined by the deputy head of the “translator project,” Robert S. Bovda, but his visa application was rejected.
Krylova and Bogacheva compiled itineraries and instructions for the trip, bringing along cameras, SIM cards and disposable cell phones. They prepared “evacuation scenarios” in the event that the purpose of their trip became known to US authorities.
Over the course of three weeks, Krylova and Bogacheva visited nine states, including Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, California, New York, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas.
Upon their return, Krylova provided her superior Mikhail Burchik with an intelligence report documenting what they had learned over their travels. Later that year, on November 26th, a third, as yet unnamed individual working for the IRA visited Atlanta, Georgia for four days.
Within just a few weeks of their return, the IRA pushed the false stories about an Atlanta-based Ebola outbreak and a police shooting of an unarmed black man.
Similar to corporate digital marketing techniques, the IRA created and managed campaigns, including the use of paid advertisements, across multiple social media platforms, using fictitious personas and imitating activist groups in order to reach both a wide audience and targeted subgroups.
The IRA also created standalone websites and used their social media personas to direct traffic to them. While the majority of the activity took place on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, the IRA was also active on Reddit, Tumblr, Medium, PayPal, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Only a minority of the content was election related. The primary focus was on divisive content related to race relations, immigration, far-right movements, gun rights, Islam and immigration, and other controversial issues roiling American society.
On January 7th, 2015, the IRA established its earliest known Instagram account. Over the course of the 2016 election and into 2017, IRA Instagram accounts received 187 million engagements, which is the sum of likes and comments received on a post divided by the number of followers. According to Facebook, which owns Instagram, roughly 20 million Instagram users were affected.
Not all of the content was politically divisive or election related. In the case of an account created on January 7th, @army_of_jesus, it started out as an Kermit the Frog and later The Simpsons meme account in an apparent attempt to build an audience before switching to explicitly political content almost exactly a year later on January 15th, 2016.
This model, of producing innocuous, community building content before switching to disinformation and propaganda, was used on numerous accounts across multiple platforms.
Three days after establishing their first Instagram account, the IRA made its first post on Facebook on January 10th, 2015. Facebook later estimated that IRA propaganda on its platform reached 126 million people. In total, the IRA made 61,500 Facebook posts across 81 pages, which resulted in 77 million engagements.
On Twitter, the IRA used 3841 accounts to produce 10.4 million tweets, 6 million of which were original, leading to 73 million engagements.
On YouTube, the IRA created 1,100 videos which they distributed over 17 account channels.
The IRA’s election-related content was pro-Trump and anti-Clinton. While a small number of posts from early 2015 supported Rand Paul, from July 2015 onward the IRA supported Trump.
On February 10th, 2016, an internal document outlining what themes were to be emphasized moving forward circulated within the IRA. It instructed the trolls to focus on “politics in the USA,” and “to use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Trump and Sanders — we support them).”
Support for Sanders was seen as a way to harm Clinton and exacerbate ideological fault lines.
In addition to supporting Sanders, the IRA used its online personas to support the candidacy of Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
The IRA’s activities surged during key moments in the election campaign. For example, IRA online activity targeting the election surged on days related to the Benghazi investigation, the Iowa Caucus, both the Republican and Democratic Conventions, during primary and then general election debates and in the days leading up to and including election day itself.
IRA propagandists also responded to real world events, when Hillary Clinton fell ill at a 2016 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York the trolls began disseminating posts raising questions about Clinton’s health.
The activity of the IRA’s left-leaning fake personas spiked on October 6th, 2017, the day before Wikileaks released the Podesta emails. This raises questions as to whether the troll factory had inside knowledge regarding the date of the leak.
IRA TARGETING OF AFRICAN AMERICANS AND BLACK LIVES MATTER
While the IRA targeted conservative and right-wing Americans, focusing on issues such as gun rights, immigration, religion, Southern culture and others, above all else they chiefly targeted African Americans.
In Soviet times, the communist school curriculum taught that exploitation of black people in the US epitomized the inherent evil of the capitalist system.
As far back as 1928, the Comintern drew up a plan and allotted $300,000 towards recruiting Southern blacks in an attempt to create a “separate negro state” in the South.
Prominent African Americans were invited to Moscow by the Kremlin.
In addition to using American racism for its own recruitment and propaganda purposes, Soviet intelligence also targeted prominent African Americans.
In 1967, the KGB authorized a plan to plant articles in the African press portraying Martin Luther King Jr. as an “Uncle Tom” secretly being paid by the US government to prevent the Civil Rights movement from harming President Lyndon Johnson.
King may be the only person in history to be simultaneously targeted by both KGB and FBI disinformation campaigns.
In the 1980’s, Soviet intelligence engaged in a global disinformation campaign spreading the falsehood that AIDS was created by the US government. Many in Africa and even the US still believe this to be true to this day.
In the 1980s, the KGB forged a National Security Council document, giving it the title “Carter’s Secret Plan to Keep Black Africans and Black Americans at Odds,” then sent it via a cutout to a small African American newspaper based out of San Francisco. A Soviet news agency redistributed the resulting article to Soviet embassies who took the story worldwide.
In the lead up to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics the KGB forged letters from the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to African nations to attempt to dissuade them from attending the games. “The Olympics — for the whites only,” the letters read.
In early 2016, researchers at the University of Washington set about studying online conversations around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, at the time unaware of the existence of Russian trolling operations.
The focus was on “framing contests,” in this context a frame is “a way of seeing and understanding the world that helps us interpret new information” and framing refers to “the process of shaping other people’s frames, guiding how other people interpret new information.”
They published a paper that analyzed #BlackLivesMatter discussions that took place on Twitter regarding shooting events in 2016. Their research revealed a framing contest between the political left, which supported Black Lives Matter, and the political right, which was critical of the movement.
The former operated within a frame that highlighted police violence against African Americans and explained the phenomenon as a product of systemic racism, while the latter highlighted violence within the African American community and cast police actions as a reasonable response to this reality.
The paper noted the near total division between the two sides and the toxic nature of the content.
After the paper was published in late 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released a list of IRA-linked Twitter accounts to the public. The researchers cross-checked the IRA accounts with the accounts they had analyzed in their data set and discovered that dozens of the troll accounts were among the most retweeted in their analysis.
They further noticed that retweets of the pro-BLM and anti-BLM troll accounts occurred within but not between the two distinct communities they had identified. While in some of the cases the IRA accounts were distorted, toxic exaggerations of Americans on both the left and right, many more still appeared to accurately mimic Americans on both sides of the political divide.
Thus, the Russian actors were not creating these divides but rather actively encouraging them.
IRA efforts to impersonate Black Lives Matter activists were made all the more cynical by the fact that internal communications within the organization regarding the strategy and tactics behind their influence operations were explicitly racist.
“Colored LGBT are less sophisticated than white; therefore complicated phrases and messages do not work,” read one internal IRA communique.
“Be careful dealing with racial content. Just like ordinary Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, Colored LGBT are very sensitive toward #whiteprivilege and they react to posts and pictures that favor white people… Unlike with conservatives, infographics works well among LGBT and their liberal allies, and it does work very well. However, the content must be simple to understand consisting of short text in large font and a colorful picture.”
One example of an IRA effort targeting African Americans was the fictitious activist group Black Matters, which emphasized distrust of the media and a desire to create “Black independent media.”
On June 8th, 2015, the IRA established a Facebook page for the group. The total online presence of the group included its own website and accounts on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and a Tumblr account called SKWAD 55 that had an associated SKWAD 55 podcast on Soundcloud.
Its online presence was modest at best, with 28,466 followers on Instagram and 1,929,855 engagements and only 5,841 followers on Twitter.
The online reach of Black Matters was expanded by being promoted and shared both by false personas within the IRA online ecosystem as well as by actual activist influencers with significant followings including Color of Change, Unapologetically Black and YourAnonNews, all of which shared Black Matters articles on their Facebook pages.
FROM ONLINE TO ON-THE-STREETS: IRA-INSPIRED PROTESTS AND COUNTER PROTESTS
In the Spring of 2015, individuals within the IRA conducted an experiment. On one of their Facebook pages targeting New York City, the trolls advertised that free hot dogs would be provided to individuals who arrived at a certain place, at a certain time.
From their office on the 2nd floor of 55 Savushkina Street, which was funded by a one time hot dog vendor, IRA employees watched via street web cameras as New Yorkers arrived and looked around quizzically for the free hot dogs on offer before leaving disappointed.
This was far more than a harmless prank. In fact, the implications were profound. Using their growing presence online, the Russians could manifest activity on American streets.
The earliest known attempt to organize a political rally took place when an IRA Instagram account @stand_for_freedom promoted a “confederate rally” on November 14th, 2015 in Houston. The account had 45,019 followers and an associated Facebook page, though it is unclear whether the rally ever actually took place.
On March 27th, 2016, the IRA’s Black Matters organized a “not my heritage” anti-confederate rally in Jackson, MI which attracted dozens of protestors to rally against Confederate heritage month.
The IRA recruited a Los Angeles-based activist named Nolan Hack, who became an “official” member of Black Matters without knowing the truth behind it, to help organize the event.
Hack was contacted by Black Matters in early 2016 and while he never actually met anybody from the organization, he did speak with them over the phone and by phone messages and text. He described the individuals posing as Black Matters activists as having “African” accents.
Black Matters, or rather the IRA, paid for Hack’s trip to Jackson, which he noted was a rare occurrence in the activist community. Hack eventually left the group in September when it failed to pay for one of his trips.
Shortly after the Jackson protest, another IRA online persona targeting African Americans reached out to activists.
The IRA creation Blacktivist had both a Twitter account and a Facebook page, which at one point had 360,000 likes, at the time nearly 60,000 more than the official Black Lives Matter Facebook page.
Following the suspicious death of a young black woman named India Cummings while in police custody in Buffalo, NY in February 2016, Blacktivist reached out to a number of local activists to attend an April 4th rally. A local civil rights activist Dierra Jenkins was contacted by Blacktavist, who she assumed was local given their focus on events that transpired in Buffalo.
Craig Carson, a Rochester, NY-based civil rights attorney and activist, who after three to four conversations over Facebook messenger was recruited to print out and distribute flyers with specific visuals on them at the protest.
On April 6th, two days after the Blacktivist promoted a protest in Buffalo, Black Matters purchased a Facebook ad calling for a “flashmob” of Americans to “take a photo with #HillaryClintonForPrison2016 or #nohillary2016.”
Thus we see how the IRA used multiple, interlocking accounts on different platforms to build an audience that it could subtly seed with anti-Clinton messages. This practice would only accelerate in the lead up to the election.
On May 18th, the activist and co-creator of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, Micah White, was contacted through his website by a man who said his name was Yan Big Davis and claimed to be working for Black Matters. Yan Big, writing in awkward English, requested an interview. While White hesitated, two weeks after the initial inquiry he agreed to be interviewed.
“The interview with Yan Big was immediately uncomfortable,” White later wrote. “The phone quality was terrible: it sounded like he was calling internationally or through a distant internet connection. He had a strange accent and an unusual way of phrasing questions. He was obviously not a typical American.”
White continued, “I rationalized that he must be an African immigrant living in America and that was why he was interested in protesting against racism and police brutality. His attempts at flattery set off more alarm bells. I finished up the interview as quickly as possible and got off the phone.”
White’s interview was posted on the Black Matters website in an attempt to foster credibility with the activist community.
Other individuals whose interviews were posted on the Black Matters site include:
Others interviewed by Black Matters were Erica Huggins, a former member of the Black Panthers; Jamal Joseph, another former Black Panther and Godfather to Tupac Shakur; as well as the mother of Ramarley Graham, a black teenager shot and killed by the NYPD in 2012.
Ramona Africa, a former member of the black anarcho-primitivist group MOVE and survivor of a violent 1985 confrontation with the Philadelphia police, was also interviewed.
Yan Big reached out to Micah White several times after their interview to ask that he help promote a protest to free the MOVE 9 (a name for members of the aforementioned MOVE group who remained in prison) and for another incarcerated African American, Jerome Skee Smith, but White never replied.
Yan Big Davis’s activities beyond interviewing black activists reveal the multifaceted tactics of the IRA. Posing as a spokesperson from Your Digital Face, a non-existent Los Angeles-based startup, Davis recruited predominantly African American business owners to pay a monthly fee in return for promoting their products on social media.
One of the victimized companies, among over a dozen that The Wall Street Journal spoke with who had communicated with Davis, was Expression Tees, a Pennsylvania t-shirt vendor noted for the progressive messaging on its apparel.
The IRA then used its own accounts to promote the products, including @Blackstagram, which had over 300,000 followers and generated 28 million engagements on Instagram.
Intelligence officials have suggested that the “Your Digital Face” operation may have been designed to map out business networks.
Other novel efforts by the IRA included attempting, with little apparent success, to target American teenage girls with a Chrome plug-in app called FaceMusic that contained malicious malware similar to that found on click-fraud scams that simulate clicks on online advertisements.
On May 21st, an IRA-organized “Stop Islamization of Texas” rally took place outside the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston. The event was organized through an IRA-created “Heart of Texas” Facebook group, which attracted 250,000 followers and made repeated calls for Texas to secede.
Later in November, the IRA reached out via Facebook to the Texan Nationalist Movement, an actual organization calling for Texan independence led by Nathan Smith, who traveled to Moscow in 2015 for a conference attended by European Neo-Nazi and fringe right wing groups. A spokesman for the group says they declined to participate.
At the same time, a separate IRA Facebook page, “United Muslims for America,” organized a counter protest at the same location. The ensuing protests drew the attention of local media and led to verbal confrontations.
The fictitious IRA creation “United Muslims for America” was based on a real California-based non profit with no links to Russia and peddled conspiracy theories that Hillary Clinton had created and funded al Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist organization and that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA agent.
Four days after the dueling protests in Houston, the IRA-promoted a counter-protest against the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church organized by the IRA-run Facebook page “LGBT United” to take place in Lawrence, Kansas.
Towards the end of the month, IRA operatives posing as activists and Facebook page administrators recruited Americans to stand before the White House holding signs.
One of the signs being held by an unwitting protestor read “Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss,” a reference to Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose 55th birthday was on June 1st, 2016.
The IRA imposters reportedly told the American holding the sign that it was for “someone who is our leader here and our boss… our founder.”
IRA-sponsored events and rallies continued into June and July. On June 1st, the IRA purchased Facebook ads for a “March for Trump,” to be held in New York City on the 25th. The march was sponsored by an IRA Facebook group called “Being Patriotic” and promoted by the Twitter account @March_for_Trump.
To promote the event, the IRA sent press releases to New York Media outlets using the email address allforusa@yahoo.com. A day later, the fictitious IRA online persona “Matt Skiber” contacted a Trump campaign volunteer who agreed to provide signs for the rally.
“Matt Skiber” then reached out to an unwitting US political activist to act as a recruiter for the March for Trump, offering to provide them with “money to print posters and get a megaphone.” The march took place on June 25th.
That same day, “LGBT United” organized a candlelight vigil following the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida which killed 49 mostly LGBT club goers. The vigil featured comments from the brother of one of the victims, attracting a dozen or more attendees and attention from local media.
On July 8th, the day after the police shooting of an unarmed black man named Philando Castile, the IRA Facebook group “Don’t Shoot Us” promoted a protest outside of the police department where the officer who shot Castile worked. The “Don’t Shoot Us” IRA effort was active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and even the augmented reality game Pokémon Go.
The “Don’t Shoot Us” YouTube page contained over 200 videos relating to police brutality which had been viewed over 368,000 times.
Overall, the IRA created 1,100 YouTube videos distributed over 17 channels and 96% of the YouTube content was related to Black Lives Matter and police brutality.
The YouTube videos linked to the dedicated website donotshoot.us, which itself linked to a Tumblr page that promoted a contest in July 2016 that had participants play the game Pokémon Go, which allows for users to travel to real locations to find and train digital Pokémon characters.
The contest was designed for users to find Pokémon in locations where black men had been killed by police, offering Amazon gift cards as prizes. It is unclear whether anybody took part in the macabre game.
The IRA organized a rally in Minneapolis in support of Philando Castile that attracted over 300 attendees on July 10th.
That same day, the IRA arranged a “Blue Lives Matter” protest in Dallas, which was a reaction to the fatal shooting of five police officers at an anti-police violence protest held in the wake of Castile’s death.
Less than a week later, the fictitious IRA group Blacktavist organized a protest in front of the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square office to protest the one year anniversary of the death of Sandra Bland, an African American woman who died while in police custody in Texas. The protestors passed around a petition to get the Chicago city council to pass a Civilian Police Accountability Council ordinance.
Throughout July, the IRA’s anti-Hillary Clinton activities picked up pace. Shortly after the Pulse Nightclub shooting, which was perpetrated by an American admirer of the Islamic State terrorist organization, the IRA group “United Muslims of America” established a July 9th event on Facebook titled “Support Hillary. Save American Muslms!”
The event page, which featured a picture of Clinton with her name written in Arabic-style font, claimed that she was “the only presidential candidate who refuses to ‘demonize’ Islam after the Orlando nightclub shooting,” and further stated that “with such a person in White House [sic] America will easily reach the bright multicultural future.”
The IRA contacted actual Americans to arrange for the production of posters for the rally, one of which depicted Clinton saying, “I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction in freedom.”
On July 23rd, the same “Being Patriotic” IRA group that organized the “March for Trump” held a “Down with Hillary” rally in front of Trump Tower in New York. To publicize the event they purchased Facebook ads and reached out to over 30 media outlets using the email address joshmilton024@gmail.com.
IRA INTERACTIONS WITH TRUMP SUPPORTERS AND TRUMP CAMPAIGN STAFF
“Hi there! I’m a member of [sic] Being Patriotic online community,” the IRA persona “Matt Skiber” wrote in an August 2nd Facebook message to the real “Florida for Trump” Facebook page.
“Listen, we’ve got an idea. Florida is still a purple state and we need to paint it red. If we lose Florida, we lose America. We can’t let it happen, right? What about organizing a YUGE pro-Trump flash mob in every Florida town? We are currently reaching out to local activists and we’ve got the folks who are okay to be in charge of organizing their events almost everywhere in FL. However, we still need your support. What do you think about that? Are you in?”
Over the course of August 2nd and 3rd, 2016, the IRA used the stolen identity of a US citizen to reach out to various Florida-based pro-Trump grassroots organizations, describing their plans to “organize a flash mob across Florida to support Mr. Trump.”
On August 4th, the IRA purchased Facebook ads promoting the “Florida for Trump” events. The next day, using the @March_for_Trump Twitter account, the IRA recruited and later paid an American actress to portray Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform at a rally in West Palm Beach.
They further paid another unwitting American, Harry Miller, as much as $1,000 to build a cage in the back of a flatbed truck for the Hillary impersonator to occupy. Miller had multiple conversations about the job with a man who he described as not speaking clear English.
On August 15th, the chairwoman of the Trump Campaign in Broward County, Florida, Dolly Trevino Rump, reached out to one of the IRA’s online personas and identified two locations for potential rallies. Rump, unaware of who she was dealing with, was a notable local Trump supporter and former Secretary of the local Broward County Republican Party.
The IRA communicated with Rump to discuss logistics and an additional Florida rally. On August 16th the IRA purchased ads on Instagram promoting the Florida rallies through their @Tea_Party_News fake account. The Team Trump Broward County Facebook page, which was operated by real Trump supporters, posted numerous times promoting the pro-Trump flash mobs.
Two weeks after their initial message to the “Florida for Trump” Facebook group, a Trump campaign employee overseeing the group responded and provided the IRA with the name and email address of Trump campaign Florida Communications Director Chad Tucker.
Posing as a “team leader” from the “Being Patriotic” group named Josh Milton, the IRA reached out to Tucker.
“[W]e are organizing a state-wide event in Florida on August, 20 to support Mr. Trump. Let us introduce ourselves first. “Being Patriotic” is a grassroots conservative online movement trying to unite people offline. . . . [W]e gained a huge lot of followers and decided to somehow help Mr. Trump get elected. You know, simple yelling on the Internet is not enough. There should be real action. We organized rallies in New York before. Now we’re focusing on purple states such as Florida.”
“Josh Milton” told Tucker that they had thirteen “confirmed locations” in Florida for the rallies and asked if the Trump campaign could provide “assistance in each location.”
After receiving her contact information from the Trump campaign employee overseeing the “Florida for Trump” Facebook page, the IRA emailed Beatriz J. Ramos, the coalitions director for the Trump campaign in Florida. When later asked by The New York Times, both Tucker and Ramos said they could not recall receiving the messages or if they responded to them.
On the day the IRA emailed Ramos, an unwitting Trump supporter contacted their @March_for_Trump Twitter account and provided contact information for an as-yet-unnamed Florida Trump Campaign official. The IRA contacted the official using the joshmilton024@gmail.com email address but there is no indication that they received a response.
The day before the “Florida for Trump” rallies took place, “Matt Skiber” reached out to an-as-yet unidentified Texas-based grassroots organization. The two parties had previously communicated with one another, with the unwitting Texas political group suggesting that they focus on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida.”
Skiber wrote to the group, “We were thinking about your recommendation to focus on purple states and this is what we’re organizing in FL.” The IRA then sent a link to a Facebook page for the Florida rallies, asking the grassroots organization to promote them among their followers, which they agreed to do.
While attendance at most of the locations was sparse, there were “Florida Goes Trump” rallies held on August 20th in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs, both located in Broward County, Florida.
Four days later, the IRA updated an internal document that listed over 100 Americans that the group had contacted through fictitious online personas. The document was used to monitor IRA recruitment efforts and outreach to these US citizens. More than this, the list summarized the political views of each of these Americans and laid out the activities they had been asked to perform by the IRA.
Over the course of September and October, the IRA creation Black Matters contacted and worked with an unwitting Raleigh, North Carolina-based African American activist named Conrad James to organize more anti-police shooting rallies.
James was told to contact a woman named Stephanie Williamson, who he would later describe as a spokeswoman for the organization. James met with Williamson, who was accompanied by an unnamed white man, and she provided him with a bankroll to cover expenses related to microphones and speakers.
It remains unclear what role Williamson played with the IRA or whether she was tricked herself.
While these IRA interactions were taking place with real people, attempting to organize rallies around actual episodes of police violence, IRA online ecosystems of false activists on platforms such as Tumblr were spreading rumors, in one instance promoting a false story about a black teenage girl being raped by NYPD officers using footage actually taken in South Africa.
In an attempt to suppress African American voter turnout, the IRA recruited two vloggers (video bloggers) who called themselves “Kalvin and Williams,” purportedly from Nigeria but who expressed opinions on American domestic politics, to post YouTube videos attacking Obama’s legacy, accusing Hillary Clinton of being a racist and defending Donald Trump, often over rap beats.
The “Williams&Kalvin” Facebook page had 48,000 fans.
Interestingly, the story being promoted in the above image by the IRA-recruited Williams&Kalvin vloggers, that Bill Clinton had an out-of-wedlock black child named Danney Williams, was also being peddled by Trump’s oldest political advisor, Roger Stone, in an operation he referred to as Project Clintonson.
Stone’s efforts was partially funded by Trump supporter and former head of the mercenary outfit Blackwater, Erik Prince.
Stone was in contat with an online avatar operated by Russian military intelligence during the 2016 election.
Following the election, Prince held a clandestine meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian official in an attempt to establish back channel communications between the incoming Trump White House and the Kremlin.
IRA ACTIVITIES AROUND THE ELECTION AND VOTER SUPPRESSION ACTIVITIES
As the election approached, the IRA placed a heavier emphasis on attempting to shape the outcome.
On September 14th, in an internal IRA review of the activities of one of their Facebook pages designed to appeal to conservatives, “Secured Borders,” the specialist who oversaw the group was criticized for “low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton” and was told “it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton” in future posts.
Later analysis showed that a significant portion of the political content produced by the IRA was anti-Clinton in thrust and that with the exception of a single event organized by the “United Muslims of America” group, which was likely intended to undermine her campaign by associating her with Islam, there was no pro-Clinton content on Facebook or Instagram.
On September 19th, Donald Trump personally responded to the IRA fake Twitter account @10_gop, a backup account for @TEN_GOP, which falsely claimed to be the “Unofficial Twitter Account of the Tennessee GOP.”
In the lead up to election day, @TEN_GOP relentlessly promoted the Wikileaks email dumps and was listed in a Fox News article as a “Trump fan.”
The account was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone, Trump political surrogate and later National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his son Michael Flynn Jr., Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway and by Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale.
In the month before the election, many IRA online personas that they had spent years building followings for began pushing messages designed to discourage Americans from voting. This effort was most aggressively directed towards African Americans.
On October 16th, the IRA Instagram account Woke Blacks posted, “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”
On November 3rd, the IRA Blacktavist account promoted a third party candidacy in an attempt to siphon votes away from Clinton, writing on Instagram “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”[1] That same day, Blacktavist wrote “NOT VOTING is a way to exercise our rights.”
African Americans were not the only subgroup targeted in voter suppression information operations by the IRA. American Muslim were also in their cross hairs.
In early November, the IRA group “United Muslims of America” posted the following message to their Facebook page: “American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today, most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”
Between November 5th and election day, November 9th, the IRA authored 32,000 posts across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The three primary groups targeted were Right-leaning, Left-leaning and black voters.
The IRA targeted right-wing voters with posts highlighting conspiracy theories, accusations of voter fraud and the need to openly revolt if Clinton won the election.
Left-leaning voters were targeted with anti-establishment messages, highlighting identity politics and promoting third party candidates. Black voters, meanwhile, were largely targeted with messages of social alienation and the ubiquity of police violence and racial injustice until, shortly before the election, the messages morphed into voter suppression narratives that attempted to dissuade African Americans from voting at all.
As the polls opened on November 8th, millions of Americans set out to cast their votes. Millions more were active on social media. 115.3 million U.S.-based Facebook users generated 716.3 million interactions related to the election and viewed election-related videos 640 million times.
Across the world, users generated over 75 million election-related tweets. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, the propagandists at the Internet Research Agency sprang into action.
Although accounting for only a minuscule fraction of the overall content being generated online and on social media regarding the election, producing a total of 4,316 unique posts on election day, the IRA relentlessly targeted the most polarized elements and issues roiling the American electorate.
Beginning at 7am, the IRA’s fabricated online avatars impersonating American voters, which they had been cultivating and building upon for years, began releasing a barrage of messages in support of Trump and attacking Clinton.
“VOTE TRUMP to save ourselves from the New World Order. Time to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” read one IRA tweet.
“Last chance to stop the Queen of Darkness. Vote Trump!” wrote another.
As the morning wore on, IRA propagandists increasingly focused on spreading disinformation related to the rigged election theme.
“Democrats BUSTED Breaking Election Law in Ohio,” read a tweet from the IRA-account World News Politics.
“Breaking,” read another IRA tweet sent at 11 A.M., “Mass Election Fraud, Voting Irregularities and Discrimination Against Trump Voters Reported #VoterFraud.”
When one Pennsylvania voter released a video purporting to show themselves using a machine that wouldn’t allow them to change their vote from Clinton to Trump, the IRA used their army of accounts to spread the video far and wide to promote the false impression that occurrences such as this were a widespread problem.
While the IRA’s conservative avatars focused on disseminating false accusations and stories of voter fraud, it’s left-leaning and African American-focused social media presence was engaged in voter suppression activities. IRA Facebook pages targeting African Americans pushed the story that the victim of police violence Eric Garner’s daughter was refusing to vote.
“Think twice before you vote,” IRA-account @Blackstagram wrote. “All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us. #Blacktavist #hot news.”
However, as election results favoring Trump rolled in, the IRA dispensed with the “rigged” election canard entirely and began posting celebratory messages online. “Trump’s lead in Florida is growing!” the prolific IRA-created account @Ten_GOP tweeted at 8:24pm.
“On November 9th, 2016, a sleepless night was ahead of us,” an IRA employee wrote in an internal communication describing election night that was later leaked to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“And when around 8 a.m. the most important result of our work arrived, we uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne… took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes… We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great.’”
THE INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY AND THE OUTCOME OF THE 2016 ELECTION
Did the efforts of the Internet Research Agency have an impact on the outcome of the 2016 election? The question is hotly debated among scholars of good faith to this very day.
Professor Thomas Rid, for example, falls firmly on the side that they did not. He points out to the facts that the overall volume of IRA activity was over reported in the press, that much of the activity was innocuous audience building and took place within echo chambers, and that only 8.4% of the overall activity was election related.
On the other hand, Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in political communications, argues that “[t]hose alleging that Kremlin-tied trolls, bots, and hackers could not have affected enough voters to swing a close election are paddling against currents of scholarship that showing that audiences are influenced by agenda setting, framing and priming.”
She goes on to argue that by making certain issues, candidate characteristics, or concepts more important to voters decision making, by influencing the media narratives in ways that benefitted Trump and hurt Clinton, and by framing issues for voters in a similar dynamic, the IRA could have influenced the outcome of the election.
While reasonable scholars disagree on this point, it may be the case that asking whether the efforts of the IRA in isolation impacted the outcome of the election is the wrong question. Perhaps it is more salient to view the IRA’s social media disinformation and propaganda campaign as part of a broader confluence of separate but interrelated events that, taken in their totality, proved decisive in Trump’s victory.
These factors include the divisive nature of the Trump campaign itself and its own voter suppression activities as well as an attention-based business model at the core of the world’s largest social media companies that encourages the spread of disinformation and divisive content.
Donald Trump’s core strategy of dividing Americans by conspiratorial appeals to his base and demonizing his opponents, as well as his broad attack on the American political class and its institutions, neatly overlapped with the IRA’s broader strategy. Witting or not, these efforts mutually reinforced each other.
It is more useful to look at their cumulative impact these parallel efforts had on the election as opposed to trying to isolate and analyze them separately. One area where the Trump Campaign and the Internet Research Agency engaged in parallel efforts to achieve a similar goal was in African American voter suppression.
This phenomenon, of course, has historically occurred in the United States as far back as Reconstruction.
In a leaked data cache used by the Trump Campaign in 2016 of over 200 million American voters, 3.5 million African Americans distributed across 16 key battleground states were placed under the label of “Deterrence,” which Trump’s chief data scientist later publicly said described people the campaign “hope don’t show up to vote.”
Finally, arguably the most important force driving division in the US body politic was the tech giants themselves, whose advertising, attention-based business model has led to an extraordinary propagation of fake news and conspiracy theories, as well as the Balkanization of the American information space.
The IRA did not hack these platforms, but rather used their essential functionality not to sell a product but to divide American society and destroy trust in institutions and attack the idea of truth itself, which is vital to any functioning democracy.
While the IRA pursued these goals consciously, it may ironically be the case that their efforts paled in comparison to the catastrophic unintended consequences of the business model driving some of America’s largest and most widely subscribed to social media platforms.