The Senate Intelligence Committee found that a Kremlin-backed troll operation, the Internet Research Agency, used fake American personas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms to deepen divisions, target African-Americans above all, and favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, using mostly free content rather than paid ads. Assistance from Claude AI.
Key Takeaways
- The IRA, funded and directed by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, acted with Kremlin support. Its operational planning goes back to at least 2014, when two operatives toured the United States to gather intelligence.
- IRA content favored Trump and attacked Clinton. Most of it, however, aimed at social divisions such as race, immigration, and gun rights, and it also targeted Republican primary candidates.
- No group was targeted more than African-Americans, including through Facebook ads, Instagram accounts, Twitter personas, and YouTube channels.
- Paid ads were minor. About $100,000 in ads sat alongside tens of thousands of free Facebook and Instagram posts and 10.4 million tweets.
- Facebook estimated 126 million Americans came into contact with IRA content. Instagram produced more engagement than Facebook.
- The IRA’s basic tactic was to build trust with harmless posts, then deliver “payload” messages. It also played both sides of hot-button issues, often from the same computers.
- The operation moved offline, organizing rallies, paying for self-defense classes, and staging competing protests in Houston.
- IRA activity increased after Election Day 2016, and the GRU ran its own social media operations, including the DCLeaks persona.
- Government detection was weak. The FBI leaned on contractors, and Twitter says it got no advance warning.
- The Committee’s recommendations include platform-government information sharing, greater transparency, online political ad disclosure, an interagency task force, and media literacy. Senator Wyden adds stronger privacy law and limits on ad micro-targeting.
Article Summary
On October 8, 2019, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the second of five volumes in its bipartisan Russia investigation, this one on the use of social media. The 85-page report is redacted and relies heavily on data that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other companies chose to share, plus analysis by outside experts in its Technical Advisory Group. The Committee stresses that the full scope of Russian activity remains unknown.
Its central finding is that the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg troll operation owned by oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, ran an information warfare campaign in 2016 with Kremlin support. The Committee calls Vladimir Putin’s denial of knowledge false. IRA content was overtly and almost invariably favorable to Donald Trump and hostile to Hillary Clinton, but most of it targeted divisive issues, especially race, immigration, and guns, to turn Americans against one another. The IRA also denigrated Republican primary candidates, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush.
African-Americans were the most heavily targeted group. More than 66 percent of the IRA’s Facebook ads contained a race-related term, its “Blacktivist” page drew 11.2 million engagements, and 96 percent of its YouTube content addressed race and police brutality. Researchers also found voter suppression messaging aimed at left-leaning and nonwhite audiences, such as urging them to skip the election or vote for a third-party candidate, with no comparable effort on the right.
The report challenges the focus on paid ads. The IRA spent about $100,000 on Facebook ads over two years, against operating costs near $1.25 million a month. Its roughly 3,400 ads were dwarfed by more than 61,500 Facebook posts, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 10.4 million tweets. Its method was to build believable American personas with harmless content, then slip in “payload” posts, such as an “Army of Jesus” page that suddenly attacked Clinton. Facebook estimated 126 million Americans encountered IRA content. Instagram was the most effective platform, with 187 million engagements from 133 accounts. On Twitter, the IRA used five account types, including “Left Troll” and “Right Troll,” often run from the same computers, and Twitter separately found 50,258 Russia-linked bots. The IRA also lured real people offline, staging rallies, paying for self-defense classes, and organizing dueling Houston protests for about $200.
The campaign did not end with the election. IRA activity rose afterward, with Instagram up 238 percent and Facebook up 59 percent. The Russian military intelligence service (GRU) also used fake personas, such as DCLeaks, to promote hacked material.
The Committee faults the government’s response. The FBI relied largely on contractors, and Twitter says it received no advance information from the government before the election. Looking ahead, it warns of deepfakes, harder-to-detect bots, and a shift to messaging apps.
Recommendations include stronger information sharing among platforms and with government, more transparency about bots and content origins, notifying users exposed to foreign operations, and having Congress consider requiring online political ads to disclose sponsors, as television ads must. It also urges an interagency task force, a plan to notify targeted campaigns, media literacy education, and caution from public figures about what they amplify. Senator Wyden’s additional views add that micro-targeting tools and weak privacy laws leave Americans exposed and call for stronger data protections.
Select Quotations
- “IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton’s campaign.” — Committee finding
- “kind of like arming two sides in a civil war so you can get them to fight themselves before you go and have to worry about them.” — John Kelly, Graphika, on the dueling Houston protests
- “If you’re running a propaganda outfit, most of what you publish is factual so that you’re taken seriously.” — John Kelly, Graphika
- “the extremes are screaming while the majority whispers.” — John Kelly, Graphika, on automated accounts
- “a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white.” — Former IRA employee, describing the troll factory
- “the fear of Russian influence operations can be more damaging than the operations themselves.” — Massimo Calabresi, Time, quoted by the Committee
- “The goal for Russia is to achieve a state in which the average media consumer says, ‘There are too many versions of events, and I’ll never know the truth.’” — Jakub Kalensky, former EU disinformation official
Citation
United States Congress. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media, with Additional Views. 116th Congress, 1st session, Senate Report 116-XX, 8 Oct. 2019, www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume2.pdf.