Released on December 1, 2018, the SSCI report concluded that for years, Russia has leveraged social media to wage a propaganda war. Their information operations initially targeted their own citizens and immediate geographical sphere of influence. In 2014, they increased the breadth of those operations to include sowing societal and political divisions in the United States.
The scale of their operation was massive — they reached 126 million people on Facebook, posted 10.4 million tweets on Twitter, uploaded 1,000+ videos to YouTube, and reached over 20 million users on Instagram. This manipulation of U.S. political discourse continues in 2018. The Internet Research Agency disinformation campaign touched all major players in the social network ecosystem: the presence of manipulated content on Facebook, Twitter, and Google is now well-documented. In the case of Google, YouTube, G+, Gmail, and Google Voice were all leveraged to either host content or to support personas. Reddit, Tumblr, and Medium have publicly confirmed that their platforms were misused as well. Evidence in this data set confirms activity on Vine and Meetup. Games and music apps were created and pushed to teenagers to download. Even popular game Pokemon Go was incorporated into the operation. Outside of social platforms, a number of sites were created to host original written content and articles.
Social network manipulation for the purposes of disseminating propaganda and conducting influence operations is a systemic problem. In late 2017, ahead of a series of hearings, Facebook, Twitter, and Google (YouTube) gave Congress data sets of tweets, images, and other content determined to be linked to the Internet Research Agency. This analysis is an investigation of what was provided in the data set to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Foreign manipulation of American elections on social platforms will continue to be an ongoing, chronic problem. As platforms evolve and make features more impenetrable, the adversaries will adapt and manipulate the ecosystem in new ways. This is information warfare, not an issue of fake narratives or false messaging. New Knowledge is continuing to investigate Russian propaganda and other foreign influence attacks that attempt to undercut public discourse and democracy; we
monitored and reported out the evolution of tactics in 2018. We expect to see manipulation attempts in the 2020 election, including laundering narratives through Americans, and focusing on smaller/secondary platforms and peerto-peer messaging services.
We hope that additional sections of this data set (beyond the ads) will be made available to the public for further research, and that platforms will release more data that can speak to the impact and uptake among targeted communities.
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