WASHINGTON — Russia’s plot to wield social media sites to divide Americans and aid Donald Trump in the 2016 election was even more massive and sophisticate
WASHINGTON — Russia’s plot to wield social media sites to divide Americans and aid Donald Trump in the 2016 election was even more massive and sophisticated than previously understood, and efforts to disseminate disruptive messages are ongoing.
Those are the findings of two independent groups of researchers tasked by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. The reports, released Monday, concluded that posts from fake Russian accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube led to more than 300 million engagements by Americans between 2015 and 2017.
Among the groups most heavily targeted by the Russians: African-Americans. The researchers found a cross-platform effort to target black Americans, often with memes about police brutality, and later feeding them voter suppression messages. Among the narratives shared with black audiences was a meme “I WON’T VOTE, WILL YOU?” Another said “Everybody SUCKS, We’re Screwed 2016.” Others urged blacks to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.
The findings criticized social media companies for publicly minimizing the use of their platforms — and for not sharing key data, such as the many comments generated as well as the posts’ metadata, so they could better judge the impact.
“It appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress,” researchers from New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company, wrote. “It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion.”
Researchers for New Knowledge as well as a second group from the University of Oxford and Graphika, a company that analyzes social networks, pored through more than 10 million Twitter posts from thousands of Russian fake accounts, more than 116,000 posts on Instagram and 61,000 on Facebook and more than 1,000 YouTube videos.
More Attacks Likely
Many of the Russian accounts scrutinized have since been suspended, but researchers found related ones lurking on social media, often dormant but available to be activated again, and predicted more attacks will come in 2020.
