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Mueller Was Right Again - This Time It's Russian Election Interference with Social Media

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The US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence just released Volume 2 of its report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election. This one looks at how the Russians used social media to influence the US presidential election. The GOP-led Senate report screams about as loudly and directly as a report can scream. Here are some quotes from the report that tell the incredible story of what happened:

  • “The Committee found, that the IRA (the Russian Internet Research Agency) sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”
  • “The Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,’ that ‘Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.’”
  • “The Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government ‘aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him’ … the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton's campaign.”
  • “The preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on socially divisive issues such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights – in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government.”
  • “The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions.”
  • “The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush.  As Clint Watts, a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee, ‘Russia's media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin.’”
  • “The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016.”
  • Evidence of the IRA's overwhelming operational emphasis on race is evident in the IRA's Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to race) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at African-Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Facebook pages (one of the IRA's top-performing pages, "Blacktivist," generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hot-button issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests), and its YouTube activity (96 percent of the IRA's YouTube content was targeted at racial issues and police brutality).”
  • “Posing as U.S. political activists, the IRA requested – and in some cases obtained – assistance from the Trump Campaign in procuring materials for rallies and in promoting and organizing the rallies.”

There’s lots more. As a technologist, this is disheartening at best; existentially threatening at worst. Or maybe I’m just naïve: this is not the first time that technology has been used inappropriately or illegally. Nor will it be the last. But in this case, the stakes were high, about as high as can be imagined. 

So how is social media technology manipulation different? Three reasons: reach, automation and impact. The Committee describes all three:

  • “Social media and its widespread adoption have changed the nature and practice of human interaction for much of the world. During the 2016 election campaign season, approximately 128 million Facebook users in the United States alone generated nearly nine billion interactions related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
  • “Political campaigns, in the ambition of harvesting this connectivity and speaking ‘directly’ with as many voters as possible, have adapted and attempted to exploit this new media environment. Total digital advertisement spending related to the 2016 election cycle on social media reached $1.4 billion – a 789 percent increase over 2012.”
  • “However, the same system of attributes that empowers these tools and their users to positively increase civic engagement and constructive dialogue lends itself to exploitation, which frequently materializes as the dissemination of intentionally false, misleading, and deliberately polarizing content.”
  • According to one November 2016 analysis, in the final three months leading up to Election Day, calculated by total number of shares, reactions, and comments, the top-performing intentionally false stories on Facebook actually outperformed the top news stories from the nineteen major news outlets.”
  • “In terms of user engagement, the top two intentionally false election stories on Facebook included articles alleging Pope Francis' endorsement of Donald Trump for President (960,000 shares, reactions, and comments), and WikiLeaks' confirmation of Hillary Clinton's sale of weapons to ISIS (789,000 shares, reactions, and comments).”
  • “A September 2017 Oxford Internet Institute study of Twitter users found that, users got more misinformation, polarizing, and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news.”
  • “In the ‘swing state’ of Michigan, professionally produced news was, by proportion, ‘consistently smaller than the amount of extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news and other forms of junk news,’ and the ratio was most disproportionate the day before the 2016 U.S election.”
  • “Intentionally false content accounted for 38 million shares on Facebook in the last 3 months leading up to the election, which translates into 760 million clicks.”
  • “Research found that, ‘falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.’”
  • “The study also determined that false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news, and that true stories take about six times as long to reach 1,500 people on Twitter as false stories do. According to the lead researcher in the study, Soroush Vosoughi, ‘It seems pretty clear that false information outperforms true information.’”
  • “The spread of intentionally false information on social media is often exacerbated by automated, or ‘bot’ accounts. The 2016 U.S. election put on full display the impact that more sophisticated automation and the proliferation of bots have had on American political discourse.”
  • The “Oxford Internet Institute study-of 17 million tweets posted during the 2016 election found that bots ‘reached positions of measurable influence,’ and ‘did infiltrate the upper cores of influence and were thus in a position to significantly influence digital communications during the 2016 U.S. election.’”

Is technology running wild? Is the dark side of social media and other technologies out of control? Reactions to Volume 2 of the Senate’s report have been muted, at best, despite the clarity of the findings – which include this warning:

  • “The attributes of social media platforms render them vulnerable for foreign influence operations intent on sowing discord throughout American society.”

Recommendations?

Disclosure would be a good start, but Senator’s Mark Warner’s bill that requires disclosures for online political ads has failed so far to garner support. The Committee offered some additional thoughts:

  • “Issues such as privacy rules, identity validation, transparency in how data is collected and used, and monitoring for inauthentic or malign content, among others, deserve continued examination.”
  • “The committee recommends that the executive branch should, in the run-up to the 2020 election, reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election.”

What are the chances?