Russia’s sweeping political disinformation campaign on US social media was more far-reaching than originally thought, with troll farms working to discourage black voters and “blur the lines between reality and fiction” to help US presidential candidate Donald Trump win in 2016, according to reports released on Monday by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Moreover, the campaign did not end with Trump’s ascent to the White House. Troll farms are still working to stoke racial and political passions in the US at a time of high political discord.
The two studies are the most comprehensive picture yet of the Russian interference campaigns on US social media. They add to the portrait that investigators have been building since last year on Russia’s influence — although Trump has equivocated on whether the interference actually happened.
Facebook, Google and Twitter declined to comment on the specifics of the reports.
The reports were compiled by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge and by the Computational Propaganda Research Project, a study by researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a social media analysis firm.
The Oxford report details how Russians broke down their messages to different groups, including discouraging black voters from going to the polls and stoking anger on the right.
“These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African-American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead,” the researchers wrote.
The report from New Knowledge says there are still some live accounts tied to the original Internet Research Agency (IRA), which was named in an indictment from US Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February for an expansive social media campaign intended to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Some of the accounts have a presence on smaller platforms as the major companies have tried to clean up after the Russian activity was discovered.
The New Knowledge report says that none of the social media companies turned over complete data sets to the US Congress and some of them “may have misrepresented or evaded” in testimony about the interference by either intentionally or unintentionally downplaying the scope of the problem.
One major takeaway from both studies is the breadth of Russian interference that appeared on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and was not frequently mentioned when its parent company testified on Capitol Hill.
The study says that as attention was focused on Facebook and Twitter last year, the Russians shifted much of their activity to Instagram.
The New Knowledge study says there were 187 million engagements with users on Instagram, while there were 77 million on Facebook.
“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in congressional testimony,” the researchers wrote, adding that “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.”
The Oxford study notes that peaks in IRA advertising and organic activity — or posts, shares and comments by users — often corresponded with important dates on the US calendar, crises and international events.
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