Russian Election Interference in 2016

According to multiple academic studies, news reports, and books, the 2016 election was influenced by Russian interference. The interference was done by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), which U.S. intelligence agencies describe as a "troll farm" with ties to Russian intelligence, in an effort to suppress the vote and polarize the electorate. Efforts primarily took place on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. The IRA ran Pro-Donald Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton social media campaigns.

Two reports, outlined below, were presented to the United States Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2018. According to the Washington Post the reports detail a "push to engage black social media users and then advise them to vote for a third-party candidate or stay home."

126 million people were reached on Facebook by "Russian agents intending to sow discord among American citizens" according to the New York Times. On Twitter, the agents posted 131,000 tweets. In part, this was an effort to suppress the vote during an election which ultimately resulted in the winner securing 3 million fewer votes than the runner-up. President Trump won the election due to the electoral college, where the outcome was "effectively decided by 107,000 people" in three states. Those three states were Pennsylvania -- where Trump won by 44,292 votes, Michigan (10,704 votes) and Wisconsin (22,748 votes).

Similar techniques to those used in the 2016 election are reportedly now being used by the same actors, according to the The Washington Post, "the Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies."

Professors and journalists have also published books on the topics, two of which, one by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and another by David Sanger have their summaries listed here.

"Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know"

University of Pennsylvania professor of communications Kathleen Hall Jamieson published "Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know" in October of 2018. The New Yorker describes Professor Jamieson as "widely respected by political experts." She has 40 years of political science experience, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center since 1993 and she co-founded FactCheck.org in 1993. When the New Yorker asked if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians "she didn’t equivocate. 'No.'”

Kirkus book review summarizes the book as follows:

If you were to war-game out that cybercrime, you’d wind up with numerous scenarios. Only one is truly negative to the Russians: “The cyberattackers are unmasked by a vigilant intelligence community, condemned by those in both major political parties…the Russian messaging…blocked or labeled a Russian propaganda,” sanctions put in place, and so on. That did not happen. Characterizing the hacking not as “interference” or “meddling” but as an act of cyberwar demanding proportional response, Jamieson surveys the damage: Millions of Americans swallowed Russian-generated lies and went at each other even as the “electoral systems of twenty-one states by one count and thirty-nine by another were hacked.” Allowing that it wasn’t Russians but American voters (and the Electoral College) who put Trump in office, the author performs an after-battle analysis of the “social disruption,” with hackers hooking former FBI Director James Comey into reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and even gaming the presidential debates. Jamieson is clear on why the Russians would have targeted Clinton; she is just as clear that the “legacy media” failed in their task and swallowed narrative lines whole—attributing misinformation to WikiLeaks, for one, and not “St. Petersburg,” bypassing any discussion of Russian involvement until well after the fact. Chalking up the knowns and unknowns, the author concludes that by commission on one hand and omission on the other, both of the leading nominees "increased our collective vulnerability to Russian machinations in very different ways”—machinations, she adds, that aren’t likely to stop.

Computational Propaganda Research Project: The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018

By Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh, and Dimitra Liotsiou of the University of Oxford, with John Kelly and Camille François, of Graphika

Executive Summary

The text below is quoted from the Computational Research Project executive summary:

"Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an extended attack on the United States by using computational propaganda to misinform and polarize US voters. This report provides the first major analysis of this attack based on data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

This analysis answers several key questions about the activities of the known IRA accounts. In this analysis, we investigate how the IRA exploited the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to impact US users. We identify which aspects of the IRA’s campaign strategy got the most traction on social media and the means of microtargeting US voters with particular messages.

We provide an overview of our findings below:

• Between 2013 and 2018, the IRA’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter campaigns reached tens of millions of users in the United States.
• Over 30 million users, between 2015 and 2017, shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts with their friends and family, liking, reacting to, and commenting on them along the way.
• Peaks in advertising and organic activity often correspond to important dates in the US political calendar, crises, and international events.
• IRA activities focused on the US began on Twitter in 2013 but quickly evolved into a multi-platform strategy involving Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube among other platforms.
• The most far-reaching IRA activity is in organic posting, not advertisements.
• Russia’s IRA activities were designed to polarize the US public and interfere in elections by:
  • campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, and more recently for Mexican American and Hispanic voters to distrust US institutions;
  • encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational;
  • and spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum.
• Surprisingly, these campaigns did not stop once Russia’s IRA was caught interfering in the 2016 election. Engagement rates increased and covered a widening range of public policy issues, national security issues, and issues pertinent to younger voters.
• The highest peak of IRA ad volume on Facebook is in April 2017 — the month of the Syrian missile strike, the use of the Mother of :*All Bombs on ISIS tunnels in eastern Afghanistan, and the release of the tax reform plan.
• IRA posts on Instagram and Facebook increased substantially after the election, with Instagram seeing the greatest increase in IRA activity.
• The IRA accounts actively engaged with disinformation and practices common to Russian “trolling”. Some posts referred to Russian troll factories that flooded online conversations with posts, others denied being Russian trolls, and some even complained about the platforms’ alleged political biases when they faced account suspension."

The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency

By: Renee DiResta, Dr. Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney and Ryan Fox of New Knowledge, with Dr. Jonathan Albright of Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University and Ben Johnson of Canfield Research, LLC

Executive Summary

The text below is quoted from the New Information "key observations" section:

The Threat Persists

• Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms.

Unpublicized Prominence of Instagram Operations

• Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that
• Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony.
• There were 187 million engagements on Instagram. Facebook estimated that this was across 20 million affected users. There were 76.5 million engagements on Facebook;
• Facebook estimated that the Facebook operation reached 126 million people. It is possible that the 20 million is not accounting for impact from regrams, which may be difficult to track because Instagram does not have a native sharing feature.
• In 2017, as media covered their Facebook and Twitter operations, the IRA shifted much of its activity to Instagram.
• Instagram engagement outperformed Facebook, which may indicate its strength as a tool in image-centric memetic (meme) warfare.
• Alternately, it is possible that the IRA’s Instagram engagement was the result of click farms; a few of the provided accounts reference what appears to be a live engagement farm.
• Our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.

Extensive Operations Targeting Black-American Communities

• The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted Black American communities and appear to have been focusedon developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets.
• The IRA created an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem.
• The IRA exploited the trust of their Page audiences to develop human assets, at least some of whom were not aware of the role they played. This tactic was substantially more pronounced on Black-targeted accounts.
• The degree of integration into authentic Black community media was not replicated in the otherwise Right-leaning or otherwise Left leaning content.

Voter Suppression Operation

• Malicious misdirection (Twitter-based text-to-vote scams, tweets designed to create confusion about voting rules),
• Turnout depression (‘stay home on Election Day, your vote doesn’t matter’),
• Candidate support redirection (‘vote for a 3rd party!’),
• Despite statements from Twitter and Facebook debating whether it was possible to gauge whether voter suppression content was present, there were three primary variants of specific voter suppression narratives spread on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Sowing Literal Division: Secession

• The IRA sowed both secessionist and insurrectionist sentiments, attempting to exacerbate discord against the government at federal, state, and local levels.
• Content focused on secessionist movements including Texas secession (#texit) and California (#calexit). These were compared to #Brexit.
• A substantial portion of political content articulated pro-Donald Trump sentiments, beginning with the early primaries.
• Pro-Trump Operations Commence During Primaries The IRA had a very clear bias for then-candidate Trump’s that spanned from early in the campaign and throughout the data set.
• ƒ Aside from an extremely small set of early posts supporting Rand Paul, this preference was consistent throughout the Right-leaning IRA-created communities.
• Some of the pages targeting traditionally Left-leaning audiences, such as United Muslims, very occasionally broached the idea that their members might consider Trump as well.

Comprehensive Anti-Hillary Clinton Operations

• A substantial portion of political content articulated anti-Hillary Clinton sentiments among both Right and Left-leaning IRA-created communities.
• There was no pro-Clinton content on Facebook or Instagram, aside from a single United Muslims Facebook Event promoting a rally encouraging Muslims to publicly demonstrate in support of Clinton’s candidacy. However, the bulk of the content on that same page was anti-Clinton, and the anti-Clinton motive behind this ostensibly pro Clinton post is transparent. There were some pro-Clinton Twitter posts (tweets and retweets), however, the developed Left-wing Twitter personas were still largely anti-Clinton and expressed pro-Bernie Sanders and pro-Jill Stein sentiments.
• Operations Targeting Prominent Figures IRA operations targeted a wide range of Republican leaders, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, John McCain, and Dr. Ben Carson.
• There were significant IRA mentions that aimed to increase or erode support for prominent political figures, including Julian Assange, Robert Mueller, and James Comey. These mentions were largely an attempt to shape audience perception during a relevant news cycle.
• Given the recent news regarding a pending indictment of Mr. Assange, it is perhaps notable that there were a number of posts expressing support for Assange and Wikileaks, including several on October 4th, 2016, the day before Roger Stone’s text message history indicated Mr. Stone believed hacked email data would be made public via Wikileaks.
• These tactics and goals overlapped with the pro-Trump portion of the operation.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age"

The New York Times reporter David Sanger's book “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age" also deals with the same topic. The publisher's summary is quoted below:

“In 2015, Russian hackers tunneled deep into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, and the subsequent leaks of the emails they stole may have changed the course of American democracy. But to see the DNC hacks as Trump-centric is to miss the bigger, more important story: Within that same year, the Russians not only had broken into networks at the White House, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but had placed implants in American electrical and nuclear plants that could give them the power to switch off vast swaths of the country. This was the culmination of a decade of escalating digital sabotage among the world’s powers, in which Americans became the collateral damage as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia battled in cyberspace to undercut one another in daily just-short-of-war conflict.”

External Articles and Resources

• Computational Propaganda Research Project: The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018
• New Knowledge: The Disinformation Report
• David Sanger: The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
• Jane Mayer: How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump