The Washington Post has a draft of an investigation into Russian disinformation campaigns in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. The report shows how the Russian Internet Research Agency would operate.
According to the extended article, which does not include the report itself, this is the largest report on Russia’s disinformation campaign to date. The research was conducted by Oxford University and network research firm Graphika. The trend emerging is that the Russian Internet Research Agency, or IRA, is trying to steer voters away from the Democratic party or toward the Republican party, or both.
The IRA is said to have divided the American population into different groups in order to better tailor messages to them. Conservatives, for example, were targeted with coverage of gun laws, while left-wing or African-American voters sought to undermine confidence in the system to prevent them from voting. Misinformation was also spread to this group about how to vote. In addition, there were messages specifically aimed at Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gays, veterans, residents of southern states and more groups.
Facebook was most effective at reaching conservatives and African Americans. 99 percent of the engagement took place there and would have involved a total of 126 million people. With Facebook subsidiary Instagram, that would be 20 million people. The Russians started their work on Twitter, in 2009, and later turned to Facebook as well. Their activities intensified in 2014 and only got stronger from then on.
In addition to influencing voting behaviour, the Russians also managed to collect donations, organize protests and rallies, and funnel users to sites managed by the Russians. The researchers see clear peaks in activity at crucial moments in the democratic process, such as major debates and political congresses.
The data comes from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, as well as Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest and was supplied to the Senate Intelligence Committee, made up of both Democrats and Republicans. Those last three platforms, the researchers say, have unfairly received relatively little attention in this case. The data runs until mid-2017, when the companies began taking measures against the accounts. The authors describe that response as ‘late and uncoordinated’. They also regret that the companies could have shared more data with researchers. That should be better in the future.
The researchers also found negligence on the part of the Russians that could have contributed to earlier detection of their occupations. For example, they used the ruble, gave up Russian phone numbers and their IP addresses were their own, in St Petersburg, where the IRA is based.
The investigation will be released later this week, along with another investigation, according to The Washington Post.