American Intelligence and Election Hacking

Four years after Russia-linked groups stoked divisions in the U.S. presidential election on social media platforms, a new report shows that Moscow’s campaign hasn’t let up and has become harder to detect.

The report from University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim found that Russia-linked social media accounts are posting about the same divisive issues — race relations, gun laws and immigration — as they did in 2016, when the Kremlin polluted American voters’ feeds with messages about the presidential election. Facebook has since removed the accounts.

Since then, however, the Russians have grown better at imitating U.S. campaigns and political fan pages online, said Kim, who analyzed thousands of posts. She studied more than 5 million Facebook ads during the 2016 election, identifying Russia’s fingerprints on some of the messages through an ad-tracking app. Her review is co-published by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute, where she is a scholar.

To that end, influence specialists posed as American grassroots or community activists and targeted populations with the intent to divide them or convince them not to vote, Kim wrote.

"The IRA is well-versed enough in the history and culture of our politics to exploit sharp political divisions already existing in our society," Kim wrote. "American nationalism/patriotism, immigration, gun control and LGBT issues were the top five issues frequently discussed in the IRA's campaigns."

Veterans, working-class whites in rural areas and nonwhites, "especially African Americans," also were especially targeted, according to the report. And: "One notable trend is the increase in the discussion of feminism at both ends of the spectrum."

Kim's findings about the posts' focus on nonwhites tracks with earlier findings of former special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which documented clear attempts by Russian influence-mongers specifically to divide blacks or dissuade them from voting.

In September 2019, just a few months ahead of the Democratic primaries, I noticed some posts on Instagram that appeared to use the strategies and tactics very similar to those of the IRA that I observed in my research on Russian interference in the 2016 elections on social media. A few weeks later, Facebook announced that it had taken down about 75,000 posts across 50 IRA-linked accounts from Facebook (one account) and Instagram (50 accounts).

My team at Project DATA (Digital Ad Tracking & Analysis) happened to capture some of these posts on Instagram before Facebook removed them. We identified 32 accounts that exhibited the attributes of the IRA, and 31 of them were later confirmed to be the IRA-linked accounts by Graphika, a social media analysis firm commissioned by Facebook to examine the accounts.

Some strategies and tactics for election interference were the same as before. Russia’s trolls pretended to be American people, including political groups and candidates. They tried to sow division by targeting both the left and right with posts to foment outrage, fear, and hostility. Much of their activity seemed designed to discourage certain people from voting. And they focused on swing states.