On Monday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a pair of sweeping reports illuminating how effectively Russian influence operations weaponized social media during the 2016 presidential election, targeting groups like African-Americans, evangelical Christians and pro-gun activists to sow division, confuse voters and support the candidacy of Donald J. Trump.
The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
These reports showed conclusively that Russia’s Internet Research Agency used every digital attack surface available — whether it was Facebook or Instagram, where their posts got millions of interactions, or smaller social media networks like Vine and LiveJournal, or even networked video games like Pokémon Go.
The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.
“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Tex., along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there.
The New York Times reports that one takeaway from these reports might be that the Russian influence campaign of 2016 was a freak occurrence enabled by a perfect storm of vulnerabilities: growth-obsessed social media companies, unsuspecting intelligence agencies and an election featuring two hyper-polarizing candidates, one of which had a Russian blind spot and an army of supporters willing to believe convenient lies and half-truths.
