Ira Bak Internet Res Agy

capt 6 25

ira625

belated, disambiguation

no merri

see GRU, collusion twit2 twitterbot

see useful idiots

see disinfo

see collusion

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12 23 bb

russia-is-repurposing-purchased-cameo-videos-from-us-celebrities-to-make-them-seem-to-be-disparaging-ukraines-leader (https://boingboing.net/2023/12/09/russia-is-repurposing-purchased-cameo-videos-from-us-celebrities-to-make-them-seem-to-be-disparaging-ukraines-leader.html)

The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center has released a report stating that Russia has been covertly purchasing Cameo video messages from US celebrities, purportedly for fans, and then manipulating them to make it seem to be messages directed at Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Celebrities whose video messages have been used include Elijah Wood, Mike Tyson, John McGinley ("Scrubs"), and Kate Flannery ("The Office"). Link to the article in The New York Times here (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/technology/russia-disinformation-mike-tyson-priscilla-presley.html).

*The Kremlin has unleashed a new weapon in its information war with the West: the fake celebrity cameo.

*"Hi, Vladimir, Elijah here," the actor Elijah Wood said in a video packaged to seem as if Mr. Wood were addressing Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The actor, best known for playing Frodo Baggins in "Lord of the Rings," urged the president to enter treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. "I hope you can get the help you need," Mr. Wood signed off.

*The video was recorded on Cameo, the popular, though now struggling, app (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/technology/cameo-to-the-moon-and-back.html) where users can pay for personalized messages from famous people — in Mr. Wood's case, starting at $340. While a genuine video, it was repurposed as part of Russia's efforts to falsely denigrate Mr. Zelensky as a drug-addled neo-Nazi. Beginning in July, according to a report released on Thursday by Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center, the video and others like it ricocheted through Russian social media and were ultimately featured by news organizations owned or controlled by the government.

A representative for Elijah Wood confirmed that he had recorded the message on Cameo in response to a request, but it was "in no way intended to be addressed to Zelensky or have anything at all to do with Russia or Ukraine or the war."

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https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118

Treasury Sanctions Russia-Linked Election Interference Actors

September 10, 2020

Washington – Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated four Russia-linked individuals for attempting to influence the U.S. electoral process. Russia uses a variety of proxies to attempt to sow discord between political parties and drive internal divisions to influence voters as part of Moscow’s broader efforts to undermine democratic countries and institutions. In the United States, Russia has used a wide range of influence methods and actors to target our electoral process, including targeting U.S. presidential candidates.

Treasury designated Andrii Derkach (Derkach) pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13848 for his efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Derkach, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services. Derkach has directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election. Today’s designation of Derkach is focused on exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference. This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated. The Administration is working across the U.S. Government, and with state, local, and private sector partners, to make the 2020 election secure.

“Andrii Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

Derkach’s Election Influence Efforts

From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United Statesdesigned to culminate prior to election day. Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.

Between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials, and he levied unsubstantiated allegations against U.S. and international political figures. Derkach almost certainly targeted the U.S. voting populace, prominent U.S. persons, and members of the U.S. government, based on his reliance on U.S. platforms, English-language documents and videos, and pro-Russian lobbyists in the United States used to propagate his claims.

Treasury Continues to Hold Russian Actors Accountable

Today’s designation of Derkach is another example of the Treasury department promoting accountability for Kremlin-linked individuals seeking to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic processes. Treasury has previously designated the Russian troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), and its Russian financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin. Prigozhin has been designated by the United States pursuant to E.O. 13661, E.O. 13694, as amended, and most recently by E.O. 13848 for providing material support to the IRA’s influence activities against the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

Today, Treasury also designated three IRA actors pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended by E.O. 13757, and E.O. 13848 for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the IRA, an entity designated pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended, and E.O. 13848. Russian nationals Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev, and Darya Aslanova, as employees of the IRA, supported the IRA’s cryptocurrency accounts. The IRA uses cryptocurrency to fund activities in furtherance of their ongoing malign influence operations around the world.

OFAC coordinated today’s action against the IRA with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the United States Secret Service.

As a result of today’s designations, all property and interests in property of these targets that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them. Additionally, any entities 50 percent or more owned by one or more designated persons are also blocked.

View identifying information on the individuals designated today. (https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20200910)

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elected to gop in SC

russia hackers amplified or created an amp/escalator?

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-qanon-cyber-idUKL1N2HD00Z

disputed see homegrown?

QAnon received earlier boost from Russian accounts on Twitter, archives show

By Joseph Menn

Nov 2 (Reuters)- Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts.

:{:{}:

Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, reut.rs/2TFWoWc, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. bit.ly/2HTReUh

:{:{}:

A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement as it started, early in the previous month.

From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed, a Reuters analysis of the archive shows, with the term used some 17,000 times.

The archives contain more than 4,000 accounts that Twitter suspended for spreading Russian government disinformation in 2018 and 2019 but preserved for researchers.

The trove shows that some of the Russian accounts tweeted about QAnon’s most important popularizer even before the anonymous figure known as Q emerged, then rewarded her with more promotion when she put videos about Q on YouTube.

Asked about support for QAnon, the Russian embassy in Washington said Moscow does not interfere in U.S. politics.

“Malicious activity in the information space contradicts the principles of Russian foreign policy, national interests and our understanding of interstate relations,” a spokesman said.

A current Twitter executive said Russian accounts are not driving the present iteration of QAnon, which has expanded to include baseless claims about COVID-19 and other issues.

The original posts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory appeared in late October 2017, purporting to be from a Trump insider with “Q” security clearance who said Hillary Clinton faced arrest and her allies were running a massive child-sex ring.

The fantasy was confined to a small piece of the internet for a few days until conservative video blogger Tracy Diaz, known online as TracyBeanz, began to post regular videos promoting it. She soon began amassing undisclosed donors and now has more than 10 million video views on YouTube.

A few Russian accounts had been retweeting Diaz as far back as April 2017, according to the archives of suspended accounts. After her first Q video on Nov. 3, the number of Russian tweets pushing Diaz’ handle surged to 40 monthly through the following spring, the archives show.

Diaz did not respond to an email seeking comment.

It remains unclear how much the Russians influenced Diaz before she hit it big. But former Twitter security staffers said a handful of accounts that tweeted to Diaz from mid-2017 illustrated the extreme difficulty of detecting covert influence.

Now suspended for undisclosed reasons or abandoned by their operators, these accounts claimed to be American but displayed unusual interest in Russian issues. The visible tweets between them and Diaz were first flagged to Reuters by open-source researcher Chris Scott.

One account called CrusadersPost retweeted obscure Russian officials and appeared to be the first account to use the term “Q Anon” on social media, on Nov. 2, according to people with access to all public tweets.

CrusadersPost had reached out to Diaz in April to wish her a happy birthday and offer to help her with a new project.

“YOU ROCK,” she replied. The account also encouraged Diaz to publicize MegaAnon, which preceded and resembled QAnon.

Another Diaz fan ran an account called SlicksTweetz, which the banned Russian accounts mentioned 871 times. The day of her debut Q video, Diaz publicly thanked SlicksTweetz for sharing it.

:{:{}:

A week later, as she worked on new videos, she replied to him: “There are so many connections—that’s a good one I hadn’t seen yet :).” (Reporting by Joseph Menn. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Steve Orlofsky)

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pow disinfo:

mma 4 22

The far-right, conspiracy theorist website The Gateway Pundit has spent the weeks following Russia's invasion of Ukraine pumping out the Kremlin’s propaganda materials and narratives.

Founded in 2004 by (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/gateway-pundit/) Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit is a voraciously pro-Trump blog that has spread conspiracy theories about everything from (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/02/exposed-school-shooting-surviver-turned-activist-david-hoggs-father-fbi-appears-coached-anti-trump-lines-video/) the 2018 Parkland school shooting and former (https://www.mediamatters.org/gateway-pundit/20-plus-times-jim-hoft-and-gateway-pundit-were-absurdly-wrong) President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, to the Las Vegas mass shooting and the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Most recently, the blog has served as a promotional platform for Russian propaganda in the month after the country’s invasion (https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/24/europe/ukraine-russia-attack-timeline-intl/index.html) of Ukraine.

Between March 6 and March 9, Hoft published (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/breaking-video-russia-tells-us-found-biological-weapons-video/) three (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/biden-official-victoria-nuland-admits-biological-research-labs-ukraine-following-china-russia-accusations-video/) articles (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russia-publishes-documents-show-ukraine-working-biological-testing-near-russian-border/) promoting the repeatedly debunked — and Russia-created — conspiracy theory that the U.S. was funding biological weapons in Ukraine.Two of those (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russia-publishes-documents-show-ukraine-working-biological-testing-near-russian-border/) articles relied (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/breaking-video-russia-tells-us-found-biological-weapons-video/) on Russian state media. The conspiracy theory quickly spread through (https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/right-wing-personalities-promote-kremlin-conspiracy-theory-about) the right-wing media (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/kremlin-promoting-tucker-carlsons-false-fox-news-bio-labs-segment) ecosystem.

In the second half of March alone, the blog has based its coverage of the war in Ukraine on Russian propaganda at least four times:

In a March 29 article (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russia-ropes-ukraine/), Gateway Pundit questioned “Western media outlets” and their portrayal of Russia’s position in the war in Ukraine. The site also said that Russia managed to destroy a “Ukrainian neo-Nazi entity that controlled Mariupol,” a claim that originally came (https://tass.com/society/1421923?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com) from a Russian colonel-general and was reported by the Russian state media outlet TASS. Russia justified its invasion of Ukraine by promising (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/24/putin-denazify-ukraine/) to “denazify” the country and has seized on the existence of a far-right movement as proof. But the movement (https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-movement-far-right-intl-cmd/index.html), which was active in Mariupol between 2014 and 2015, separated its political and military wings in 2016. Its military wing has since been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.

In the same March 29 article (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russia-ropes-ukraine/), Gateway Pundit also attempted to throw cold water on reports that Russia was suffering “massive losses” in Ukraine. While the article didn’t mention hard numbers, on March 25 the Russian Defense Ministry told (https://www.rt.com/russia/552708-ukraine-conflict-military-casualties/) RT that the country lost 1,351 servicemen, a far cry from the western and Ukrainian estimates (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/22/how-many-russian-soldiers-died-ukraine-losses) of anywhere between 7,000 and 15,000.

On March 14, a Gateway Pundit article (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russia-ups-accusations-blames-deadly-outbreak-swine-flu-ukraine-killed-364-people-us-funded-biolabs/) embedded a video of the Russian representative to the United Nations telling the UN Security Council that a U.S. program of biological research in Ukraine resulted in the spread of dangerous pathogens. In addition to the video, the article included a transcript but, naturally, no mention that the entire narrative (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/11/how-right-embraced-russian-disinformation-about-us-bioweapons-labs-ukraine/) around nefarious (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/politics/us-bioweapons-ukraine-misinformation.html) biological research labs and weaponizing pathogens has been debunked (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/25/tweets/there-are-no-us-run-biolabs-ukraine-contrary-socia/).

On March 29, a Gateway Pundit article linked (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russian-foreign-ministry-releases-alleged-biobiden-timeline-us-bioresearch-ukraine/) to a timeline from a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson alleging to show about 30 years’ worth of “US-Ukraine bioresearch.” The existence of the research labs was (https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/sbu-no-us-biological-laboratories-in-ukraine.html) never (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/08/30/us-to-aid-ukraine-in-countering-bioweapons/72059ed1-90ca-4381-ac6f-10f4e205f09e/) a secret, but including the timeline implied a type of discovery. And the piece includes pro-Russian language that characterizes the 2014 (https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/revolution-dignity-project) “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine as an “anti-constitutional coup d’etat in Ukraine.” The article did include a warning to view the information with “extreme caution,” before reprinting the entire timeline with no additional information.

In addition to relying on Russian disinformation and state media, Gateway Pundit has published several articles that advance Russian interests, including referring (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/russia-warns-start-targeting-western-arms-convoys-entering-ukraine/) to Ukraine as a “former Soviet satellite,” claiming that the situation (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/clear-situation-ukraine-desperate-video-week-ago-getting-worse-zelensky-hanging/) in Ukraine is “desperate” and “getting worse,” saying that President Joe Biden is in a state of cognitive decline (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/kremlin-blasts-bidens-cognitive-decline-issues-statement-saying-sleepy-joes-irritability-fatigue-forgetfulness-lead-aggressive-temper-tantrums/), and claiming that Ukrainian refugees at the U.S. southern border are being (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/ukrainians-seeking-asylum-denied-entry-us-southern-border-due-covid-19-policy-video/) turned away because of COVID-19. (Russia has been running an anti-vaccine campaign (https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-03-26/russia-spread-anti-vax-lies-in-urkaine-it-may-cause-covid-crisis-for-europe) in Ukraine.)

This is not the first time the website has repeated Russian propaganda. In 2016, articles promoted (https://www.mediamatters.org/maga-trolls/pro-trump-site-gateway-pundit-ran-russian-propaganda-mentioned-mueller-indictment) misinformation about supposed voter fraud by the Democratic Party that originated from the Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency.

The Gateway Pundit has long been a far-right cesspool of conspiracy theories and hoaxes. The site has called (https://www.mediamatters.org/gateway-pundit/gateway-pundit-calls-democrats-pursuing-impeachment-be-hanged) for violence against Democrats, endorsed (https://www.mediamatters.org/gateway-pundit/gateway-pundits-white-house-correspondent-promotes-rally-white-nationalist-and) white nationalists, and celebrated (https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/trumps-impeachment-legal-team-links-discredited-gateway-pundit-which) the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6. And now it’s actively aiding an unprovoked, unwarranted, and inhumane invasion by giving a platform to Russian propaganda and spin.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/russian-media-are-promoting-trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/

alexh

Many European leaders, from U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/watch-boris-johnsons-response-when-a-labour-mp-asks-about-best-friend-trumps-embarrassing-refusal-to-accept-election-results/) to German Chancellor Angela Merkel (https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/world/meanwhile-in-america-november-10-intl/index.html) and French President Emmanuel Macron (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/525741-macron-on-biden-victory-chance-to-make-our-planet-great-again), were quick to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his victory over President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election — and it isn't hard to see that Johnson, Merkel and Macron all believe that U.S. voters made the right choice. But one leader who has yet to congratulate Biden is Russian President Vladimir Putin. And writer Cathy Young, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, stresses that Russian media pundits (https://thebulwark.com/trumps-men-in-moscow/) have been tirelessly promoting the bogus conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud.

In Russia, Young notes, media pundits have been describing the 2020 election as evidence of the failure of U.S. democracy.

"So far, Putin is the only major national leader to have held back on congratulating Joe Biden on his victory," Young explains. "Meanwhile, the Russian state-run or state-friendly media have alternated mostly between open gloating over an American election in chaos and equally open sympathy for Trump."

According to Young, "On November 4, discussions of America's election drama on Russian airwaves eclipsed a patriotic holiday at home, Russian Unity Day, and the pro-Trump cheerleading grew more heavy-handed. That evening's edition of the political talk show 'Big Game' on TV-1, Russia's main federal channel, was almost entirely dominated by pro-Trump voices."

Young observes that "Big Game" host Andranik Migranyan, a staunch Putin supporter, told Russian viewers, "The majority of American voters want law and order, and today, alas, only Trump symbolizes the idea of law and order." Migranyan, according to Young, joined Trump in saying that Democratic governors and mayors in the U.S. are allowing rioters and looters to run amok — and Migranyan also made the offensive and racist comment that Democrats "get down on their knees and kiss the feet of Blacks."

Must read by @CathyYoung63 ---> Trump’s Men in Moscow https://t.co/OvhcN4CjVG via @BulwarkOnline

— Charlie Sykes (@Charlie Sykes)1605377956.0 (tel:1605377956)

Another Russian program that has been promoting Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, according to Young, is "Evening With Vladimir Solovyov," which airs on Russia's Rossiya-1. Host Solovyov echoed the talking points of Trump supporters in the U.S., claiming that Republican observers were kept away from vote-counting facilities.

Solovyov scoffed, "Some precincts simply barred observers…. It's just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system."

One of Solovyov's guests, pundit Sergei Stankevich, told him, "Most likely, the Democrats will be able to torture the arithmetic until they get a win — that is, Biden will be declared president of the United States. But he will be a president without legitimacy, because a thick cloud of doubt will hang over his presidency for many Americans. Millions of his votes came from mail-in ballots, and no one will ever know how many of those votes were from real people."

Young observes, "The only anti-Trump voices in Putin's Russia came from the dissidents. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny, currently in Germany recovering from a poisoning widely blamed on Kremlin agents, congratulated Biden and (Vice President-elect) Kamala Harris on their victory in a 'free and fair election.'"

Young wraps up her article by noting how quick pro-Putin pundits in Russia believed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that were invented in the United States.

"For less discerning people in Russia and elsewhere," Young writes, "the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election will surely undermine not only America's moral authority, but that of her democratic institutions. And that's on the people who have spread or condoned these toxic fictions."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The bombshell report on Trump and Russia is flying under the radar ... › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-bombshell-report-on-trump-and-russia-is-flying-under-the-radar-here-are-5-reasons-it-shouldnt/)

Russia used Trump's personal lawyer to feed misinformation to the ... › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/giuliani-and-russia/)

Facebook confirms that Russia is at it again - Alternet.org › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/facebook-confirms-that-russia-is-at-it-again/)

Here's how elections are actually stolen in Russia - Alternet.org › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/how-to-rig-an-election/)

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/russian-media-are-promoting-trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/

alexh

In Russia, Young notes, media pundits have been describing the 2020 election as evidence of the failure of U.S. democracy.

Must read by @CathyYoung63 ---> Trump’s Men in Moscow https://t.co/OvhcN4CjVG via @BulwarkOnline

— Charlie Sykes (@Charlie Sykes)1605377956.0 (tel:1605377956)

Solovyov scoffed, "Some precincts simply barred observers…. It's just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system."

Young wraps up her article by noting how quick pro-Putin pundits in Russia believed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that were invented in the United States.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Russia used Trump's personal lawyer to feed misinformation to the ... › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/giuliani-and-russia/)

Facebook confirms that Russia is at it again - Alternet.org › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/facebook-confirms-that-russia-is-at-it-again/)

Here's how elections are actually stolen in Russia - Alternet.org › (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/how-to-rig-an-election/)

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/russian-state-hackers-are-accused-of-trying-to-infiltrate-bidens-campaign-firm/

a campaign advisory firm that was hired to help elect Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden (https://www.salon.com/topic/joe_biden) was targeted by suspected Russian state-backed hackers (https://www.salon.com/topic/russian-hackers), according to a recent report.

Microsoft Corp. recently alerted the Washington-based firm SKDKnickerbockerthat its staff had been targeted by individuals believed to have been affiliated with Russian hacking networks, according to Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-cyber-biden-exclusive/exclusive-russian-state-hackers-suspected-in-targeting-biden-campaign-firm-sources-idUSKBN2610I4). A person familiar with the hacking attempts told the wire agency that “they are well-defended, so there has been no breach.” Microsoft also warned (https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/14/biden-app-voter-files/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANdTOeDgOFqbES_-5RC6I96NHMUObT690ltOtZp30WEdunCgGjEAm5HkX84l5-Seqit5V0wyNdDwRZSz1ajcLNC-9eYpr7l5Yftjl4JsKb2hxTIhERJj9lriELb9NVJBWZgXS7X-67mFRL252b81PXC2KLni-pIuhBXvNzs-FY2d) that both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns are being targeted by hackers backed by China, Iran and Russia.

SKDKnickerbocker is a prominent Washington campaign firm whose partner, Anita Dunn, is a senior strategist for Biden’s campaign (https://senior%20strategist%20for%20biden%27s%20campaign/). It is responsible for efforts like “Vote Safe California,” a $35 million campaign to increase voter turnout in the upcoming presidential election.

A spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the accusations as “nonsense."

"Over the past number of years, there’s been significant evidence documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report and numerous other places, including the 17 intelligence agencies, that Russia infiltrated our elections in the 2016 race and was continuing to do that throughout not only the 2018 elections, but also into the 2020 election,” Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at the government watchdog group Common Cause, told Salon. “And so it’s no surprise at all that this new evidence was revealed recently about their involvement in trying to hack the Biden campaign.”

There is evidence that Russian state-sponsored hackers previously infiltrated prominent Democratic Party officials’ emails amid the 2016 election. While a special counsel report did not charge President Trump himself (https://www.salon.com/2019/03/22/robert-muellers-report-is-in-how-long-till-we-see-it/) with actively colluding with the Russian government, the investigation became politicized as a “witch hunt (https://www.salon.com/2019/07/22/trump-claims-he-wont-watch-mueller-testimony-because-its-a-ridiculous-witch-hunt/)” by Republican Party officials and by the president himself.

Lindsay Gorman, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, feared that this hacking attempt would become similarly politicized. “Politicization in this arena directly undermines our democracy,” Gorman told Salon.

“Given the tactics we saw in 2016, it should come as no surprise that Russia would be interested in targeting a firm tied to a political campaign,” Gorman added. “It’s important to note though that for the foreign actors we worry about in the context of cyber-espionage and organizations relevant to US policymaking, a range of motives may be at play…. For example, we don’t know yet whether these cyber attempts on campaign-related infrastructure are part of a larger election interference plot or simply a means to gather intelligence on prospective future US policy should a particular candidate be elected in November.”

While Russia’s attempts to meddle in US elections in the past four years have caused widespread political outrage and led to investigations such as Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation (https://www.salon.com/2020/03/17/justice-department-moves-to-drop-charges-against-russian-shell-companies-indicted-in-mueller-probe_partner/), the United States also has a long history of meddling in other countries’ elections. There were 62 occasions (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-us-has-a-long-history-of-election-meddling/565538/) between 1946 and 1989, the height of the Cold War, when America intervened through direct or covert methods (or both) in other countries’ elections. In 1948, for instance, America’s foreign policy apparatus intervened (https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/all-feasible-means)in Italy’s parliamentary elections to help Rome’s pro-Western government defeat the Popular Front, a leftist alliance of parties. American intelligence officials have freely admitted (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html) to influencing or even controlling media outlets, funding candidates and engaging in other electioneering activity in order to thwart politicians who were perceived as pro-Communist or simply not as friendly to perceived American interests.

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules \in 2016] or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” Steven L. Hall, a retired CIA intelligence operative, previously [told the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html) in a 2018 interview. Hall said that he “hope[d]” that the United States would “keep doing it,” by which he meant carry out out “election influence operations.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/facebook-confirms-that-russia-is-at-it-again/

it's no secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are hoping that President Donald Trump will defeat his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in November — as they rightly view Trump as much more sympathetic to Russian interests. The Trump administration has already confirmed that they are intervening once again. And according to Facebook, Russian operatives are trying to manipulate U.S. voters (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/tech/russian-troll-group-facebook-campaign/index.html) this year on the social media platform just as they did during the 2016 presidential election.

On Tuesday, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan is reporting, Facebook announced that a St. Petersburg, Russia-based troll group that interfered in the 2016 election, the Internet Research Agency, is trying to interfere in this year’s election as well. O’Sullivan notes that a “network of Facebook accounts and pages” that the social media platform removed was “set up to look and operate like a left-wing news outlet.” Facebook removed the Russian troll pages after receiving a tip from the FBI.

“This is the first publicly available evidence that people connected to the Russian troll group, which is known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), are using unwitting Americans in an attempt to meddle with the 2020 election and stir discord,” O’Sullivan reports. “The operation seems to have been shut down before it could get much traction on Facebook or the rest of the internet.”

The Internet Research Agency received close scrutiny from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/17/586698361/the-russia-investigations-mueller-indicts-the-internet-research-agency) during the Russia investigation. And that investigation was still underway when the St. Petersburg-based group tried to interfere in the 2018 midterms. But O’Sullivan notes that the trolls’ activities in 2018 were “halting and small” compared to 2016.

facebook hired Graphika, a company specializing in social media analytics, to study the matter — and Ben Nimmo, who heads investigations at Graphika, told CNN: “This looks like an early-stage attempt to target left-wing audiences on a range of issues.”

According to Nimmo, “The (U.S.) election wasn’t the only focus, but it looks like the operation wanted to divide Democratic voters the same way the IRA tried in 2016.”

Four years ago, Russian trolls who wanted to see Trump elected tried to turn Democratic voters against Hillary Clinton. Similarly, Russian trolls are now trying to dissuade Democrats from voting for Biden. One of the troll articles (https://peacedata.net/the-biden-harris-ticket-encapsulates-how-the-western-left-will-give-in-to-right-wing-populism/) that came to Facebook’s attention was from Peace Data — which claims to be a left-wing “news organization” — and was headlined “The Biden-Harris Ticket Encapsulates How the Western Left Will Give in to Right-Wing Populism.”

Nathaniel Gleicher, director of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, told CNN Business that Russian trolls are “actively, aggressively and creatively trying to target the United States in the run-up to the (2020) election.”

red flag twit bitcoin grift hack 7/20 verifid users

Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06

The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...

Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/

[long]

...#democracyrip was both the hashtag and the plan. The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to persuade American officials to allow its functionaries to act as observers in polling places. A Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities was queued. Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate. Events in 2016, of course, veered in the other direction. Yet the hashtag is worth pausing over for a moment, because, though it was never put to its intended use, it remains an apt title for a mission that is still unfolding.

Russia’s interference in the last presidential election is among the most closely studied phenomena in recent American history, having been examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors, by investigators working for congressional committees, by teams within Facebook and Twitter, by seemingly every think tank with access to a printing press. It’s possible, however, to mistake a plot point—the manipulation of the 2016 election—for the full sweep of the narrative.

Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed: Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.

[From the April 2020 issue: George Packer on how Trump is winning his war on American institutions (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/)]

In the week that followed Donald Trump’s election, Russia used its fake accounts on social media to organize a rally in New York City supporting the president-elect—and another rally in New York decrying him. Hackers continued attempting to break into state voting systems; trolls continued to launch social-media campaigns intended to spark racial conflict. Through subsidiaries, the Russian government continued to funnel cash to viral-video channels with names like In the Now and ICYMI, which build audiences with ephemera (“Man Licks Store Shelves in Online Post”), then hit unsuspecting readers with arguments about Syria and the CIA. This winter, the Russians even secured airtime for their overt propaganda outlet Sputnik (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/us/russian-propaganda-radio.html) on three radio stations in Kansas, bringing the network’s drive-time depictions of American hypocrisy to the heartland....

The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020....

---

...What the Russians can’t obtain from afar, they will attempt to pilfer with agents on the ground. The same GRU unit that hacked Podesta has allegedly sent operatives to Rio de Janeiro, Kuala Lumpur, and The Hague to practice what is known as “close-access hacking (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-charges-russian-gru-officers-international-hacking-and-related-influence-and).” Once on the ground, they use off-the-shelf electronic equipment to pry open the Wi-Fi network of whomever they’re spying on.

The Russians, in other words, take risks few other nations would dare. They are willing to go to such lengths because they’ve reaped such rich rewards from hacking. Of all the Russian tactics deployed in 2016, the hacking and leaking of documents did the most immediate and palpable damage—distracting attention from the Access Hollywood tape, and fueling theories that the Democratic Party had rigged its process to squash Bernie Sanders’s campaign.

In 2020, the damage could be greater still. Podesta told me that when he realized his email had been breached, he feared that the hackers would manufacture embarrassing or even incriminating emails and then publish them alongside the real ones. It’s impossible to know their reasoning, but Russian hackers made what would prove to be a clever decision not to alter Podesta’s email. Many media outlets accepted whatever emails WikiLeaks published without pausing to verify every detail, and they weren’t punished for their haste. The Podesta leaks thus established a precedent, an expectation that hacked material is authentic—perhaps the most authentic version of reality available, an opportunity to see past a campaign’s messaging and spin and read its innermost thoughts.

In fact, the Russians have no scruples about altering documents. In 2017, hackers with links to the GRU breached the inboxes of French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign staffers. The contents were rather banal, filled with restaurant reservations and trivial memos. Two days before these were released, other documents surfaced on internet message boards. Unlike the emails, these were pure fabrications, which purported to show that Macron had used a tax haven in the Cayman Islands. The timing of their release, however, gave them credibility. It was natural to assume that they had been harvested from the email hack, too. The Macron leaks suggested a dangerous new technique, a sinister mixing of the hacked and the fabricated intended to exploit the electorate’s hunger for raw evidence and faith in purloined documents.

Disinformation 2.0

In the spring of 2015, trolls in St. Petersburg peered at the feed of a webcam that had been furtively placed in New York City. Sitting in front of a computer screen on the second floor of a squat concrete office building, the trolls waited to see if they could influence the behavior of Americans from the comfort of Russian soil.

The men worked for a company bankrolled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a bald-headed hot-dog vendor turned restaurateur, known to the Russian press as “Putin’s chef.” In the kleptocratic system that is the Russian economy, men like Prigozhin profit from their connections to Putin and maintain their inner-circle status by performing missions on his behalf. The operation in St. Petersburg was run by the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm serving the interests of the Kremlin. (Prigozhin has denied any involvement with the IRA.)

The IRA is an heir to a proud Russian tradition. In the Soviet Union’s earliest days, the state came to believe that it could tip the world toward revolution through psychological warfare and deception, exploiting the divisions and weaknesses of bourgeois society. When it was assigned this task, the KGB referred to its program by the bureaucratic yet ominous name Active Measures. It pursued this work with artistic verve. It forged letters from the Ku Klux Klan that threatened to murder African athletes at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It fomented conspiracies about the CIA—that the agency had orchestrated the spread of the AIDS virus in a laboratory and plotted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some of these KGB schemes were harebrained. But as one defector to the West put it, more Americans believed the Soviet version of JFK’s murder than the Warren Report.

The IRA has updated the principles of Active Measures for the digital age. On social media, disinformation can flourish like never before. Whereas the KGB once needed to find journalistic vehicles to plant their stories—usually the small-audience fringes of the radical press—Facebook and Twitter hardly distinguished between mainstream outlets and clickbait upstarts. And many of the new platforms were designed to manipulate users, to keep them engaged for as long as possible. Their algorithms elevated content that fueled panic and anger.

Read: What Facebook did to American democracy (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/)

With the New York webcam, the IRA was testing a hunch: that, through the miracle of social media, it could now toy with Americans as if they were marionettes. As the political scientist Thomas Rid recounts in his powerful new history, Active Measures, a post on Facebook promised that free hot dogs would be available to anyone who arrived on a specific corner at a prescribed time. Back in St. Petersburg, IRA employees watched as New Yorkers arrived, looked at their phones in frustration, and skulked away.

The ruse was innocuous, but it proved a theory that could be put to far more nefarious ends: Social media had made it possible, at shockingly low cost, for Russians to steer the emotions and even movements of Americans. No study has quantified how many votes have been swayed by the 10 million tweets that the IRA has pumped into the digital world; no metric captures how its posts on Facebook and Instagram altered America’s emotional valence as it headed to the polls in 2016. In the end, the IRA’s menagerie of false personas and fusillades of splenetic memes were arguably more effective at garnering sensationalistic headlines than shifting public opinion. For their part, the IRA’s minions immodestly credited themselves with having tilted the trajectory of history. The U.S. government obtained an email from an IRA employee describing the scene at the St. Petersburg office on Election Night: “When around 8 a.m. the most important result of our work arrived, we uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne … took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes … We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great.’ ”

Having run a noisy operation in 2016, the IRA has since learned to modulate itself. Its previous handiwork, much of which was riddled with poor syntax and grammatical errors, hardly required a discerning eye to identify. These days, the IRA takes care to avoid such sloppiness (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/technology/russia-troll-farm-election.html). Now, when they want to, IRA trolls can make themselves inconspicuous.

The social-media companies no longer treat Russian trolls like harmless interlopers and have proved capable of aggressive policing. But thwarting the last line of attack is easier than preventing new ones.

Relying on this quieter approach, the IRA has carried the theory of its hot-dog experiment into American political life. When white supremacists applied for a permit to hold a march in 2018 to commemorate the first anniversary of their protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Facebook group organized a counterprotest in Washington, D.C. The group was called the Resisters. Its administrators, who went by the names Mary and Natasha, recruited a coterie of enthusiastic organizers to promote the rally. When Facebook took down the Resisters’ page—noting its ties to IRA accounts, and implying that Mary and Natasha were fictitious creations—American leftists were shocked to learn that they had apparently been hatching plans with foreign trolls. According to The New York Times, they were also furious with Facebook (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/facebook-fake-accounts.html): Whether or not the page was a Russian ploy, it had become a venue for real Americans to air their real grievances. In fact, it was hard to pinpoint where the Active Measures ended and the genuine action began—the sort of tradecraft that the KGB would have admired.

From the December 2019 issue: The dark psychology of social networks (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/)

Although the IRA might practice stealth when the operation demands, in other circumstances it will deploy raw bluster. Starting in 2017, it launched a sustained effort to exaggerate the specter of its interference, a tactic that social-media companies call “perception hacking.” Its trolls were instructed to post about the Mueller report and fan the flames of public anger over the blatant interference it revealed. On the day of the 2018 midterm elections, a group claiming to be the IRA published a grandiloquent manifesto on its website that declared: “Soon after November 6, you will realize that your vote means nothing. We decide who you vote for and what candidates will win or lose. Whether you vote or not, there is no difference as we control the voting and counting systems. Remember, your vote has zero value. We are choosing for you.”

The claim was absurd, but the posturing had a purpose. If enough Americans come to believe that Russia can do whatever it wants to our democratic processes without consequence, that, too, increases cynicism about American democracy, and thereby serves Russian ends. As Laura Rosenberger, a former National Security Council staffer under Obama who runs the Alliance for Securing Democracy, put it, “They would like us to see a Russian under every bed.”

Judging by this year’s presidential-primary campaign, they have been successful in this effort. When the Iowa Democratic Party struggled to implement new technology used to tally results for the state’s caucus, television panelists, Twitter pundits, and even a member of Congress speculated about the possibility of hacking, despite a lack of evidence to justify such loose talk. American incompetence had been confused for a plot against America.

An Uncoordinated Response

As the outlines of the IRA’s efforts began to emerge in the months following the 2016 election, Facebook at first refused to acknowledge the problem (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/11/mark-zuckerberg-denies-that-fake-news-on-facebook-influenced-the-elections/). The company’s defensiveness called attention to its laissez-faire attitude toward the content that it elevated in people’s News Feeds. Facebook found itself flayed by congressional committees (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/us/politics/facebook-twitter-google-hearings-congress.html), its inner workings exposed by investigative journalists (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html). Ostensibly it had been Alex Stamos’s job to prevent the last attack, and now he faced another wave of disinformation, with midterm elections fast approaching. Stamos worried that, in the absence of an orchestrated defense, his company, as well as the nation, would repeat the mistakes of 2016.

In the spring of 2018, he invited executives from the big tech companies and leaders of intelligence agencies to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. As he thought about it, Stamos was surprised that such a summit hadn’t been organized sooner. What shocked him more was a realization he had as the meeting convened: Few of these people even knew one another. “People who ran different agencies working on foreign interference met for the first time at Menlo Park, even though they were 10 Metro stops away in D.C.,” he told me. “The normal collaborative process in government didn’t exist on this issue.”

Stamos’s summit succeeded in spurring cooperation. Prior to the meeting, one tech company would identify and disable Russian accounts but fail to warn its competitors, allowing the same trolls to continue operating with impunity. Over the course of 2018, the tech industry gradually began acting in concert. The lead investigators on the threat-intelligence teams at 30 companies—including Facebook, Verizon, and Reddit—joined a common channel on Slack, the messaging platform. When one company spies a nascent operation, it can now ring a bell for the others. This winter, Facebook and Twitter jointly shut down dozens of accounts associated with a single residential address in Accra, Ghana, where the Russians had set up a troll factory and hired local 20-somethings to impersonate African Americans and stoke online anger.

From the May 2019 issue: Trump’s second term (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/trump-2020-second-term/585994/)

Yet this remains a game of cat and mouse in which the mice enjoy certain advantages. Despite the engineering prowess of the social-media companies, they haven’t yet built algorithms capable of reliably identifying coordinated campaigns run by phony Russian accounts. In most instances, their algorithms will suggest the inauthenticity of certain accounts. Those data points become a lead, which is then passed along to human investigators.

Facebook has several dozen employees on its threat-intelligence team, many of them alumni of the three-letter agencies in Washington. Still, the tech companies rely heavily on law enforcement for tips. Facebook and Twitter have frequent check-ins with the FBI. Without the bureau, Facebook might have missed an IRA video filled with lies about Russian tampering in the midterm elections. After a heads-up from the government, Facebook blocked the IRA from uploading the video before it ever appeared on its site, using the same technique that it deploys to suppress Islamic State snuff videos and child pornography. Rising from their denialist crouch, the social-media companies have proved themselves capable of aggressive policing; after treating the IRA as a harmless interloper, they came to treat it with the sort of disdain they otherwise reserve for terrorists and deviants.

Devising strategies for thwarting the last attack is far easier than preventing the next one. Even if Russian disinformation can be tamped down on social media—and the efforts here, on balance, are encouraging—there are other ways, arguably more consequential, to manipulate American politics, and scant defense against them.

On an early-March afternoon, I typed the Federal Election Commission as a destination into Uber and was disgorged at a building the agency hasn’t occupied for two years. The antiquated address placed me on course to arrive half an hour late for an appointment with Ellen Weintraub, the longest-serving and most vociferous member of the commission nominally assigned to block the flow of foreign money into political campaigns. When I called her office to inform her of my tardiness, her assistant told me not to worry: Weintraub’s schedule was wide open that afternoon. In fact, for the past six months the FEC hadn’t conducted much official business. Only three Senate-approved commissioners were installed in their jobs, even though the agency should have six and needs four for a quorum.

I asked the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee if he trusts the information he receives about Russia. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he replied.

Weintraub, a Democrat, has an impish streak. Near the beginning of the FEC’s hibernation, she called out a fellow commissioner who had blocked the publication of a memo that seemed to criticize the Trump campaign for its 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer—then posted the memo in a 57-part thread on Twitter. Weintraub has grown accustomed to her colleagues ignoring her questions about the presence of Russian and other illicit money in American campaigns. When the commission received a complaint suggesting that the FBI was investigating the National Rifle Association as a conduit for Russian money, she asked her fellow commissioners for permission to call the FBI, to, as she put it, “see if they have interesting information they want to share. But they said, ‘We’re not going to call the FBI.’ They didn’t want to do anything.”

Outside Weintraub’s office, the subject of Russia’s illicit financing of campaigns hardly provokes any attention. The Alliance for Securing Democracy was the only organization I could find that comprehensively tracks the issue. It has collected examples of Russian money flowing into campaigns around the world (https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/toolbox/authoritarian-interference-tracker/): a 9.4-million-euro loan made to the French nationalist Marine Le Pen’s party; operatives arriving in Madagascar before an election with backpacks full of cash (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/world/africa/russia-madagascar-election.html) to buy TV ads on behalf of Russia’s preferred candidate and to pay journalists to cover his rallies.

Or take a case closer to home: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—the Soviet-born Americans who worked with Rudy Giuliani in his search for politically damaging material to deploy against former Vice President Joe Biden—were charged with conspiring to funnel money from an unnamed Russian into American campaigns. Some of the cases cited by the Alliance for Securing Democracy are circumstantial, but they form a pattern. Since 2016, the group has identified at least 60 instances of Russia financing political campaigns beyond its borders. (The Kremlin denies meddling in foreign elections.)

[From the May 2018 issue: The era of fake video begins (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/realitys-end/556877/)]

When I asked Weintraub if she had a sense of how many such examples exist in American politics, she replied, “We know there’s stuff going on out there, and we’re just not doing anything.” Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which lifted restrictions on campaign finance, hardly any systemic checks preclude foreigners from subsidizing politicians using the cover of anonymous shell companies. With that decision, the high court opened the door for Russia to pursue one of its favored methods of destabilizing global democracy. By covertly financing campaigns, the Russians have helped elevate extremist politicians and nurture corrosive social movements. “Everyone knows there are loopholes in our campaign-finance system,” Weintraub said. “Why would we think that our adversaries, who have demonstrated a desire to muck around in our democracy, wouldn’t be using those loopholes, too?”

Problems of inattention, problems of coordination, and deep concerns about November—these themes came up over and over in my interviews for this story. Indeed, at times everyone seemed to be sounding the same alarm. H. R. McMaster, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, sounded it when he proposed a new task force to focus the government’s often shambolic efforts to safeguard the election. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sounded it when he realized how poorly the bureaucracy was sharing the information it was gathering about the Russian threat.

There was a moment that crystallized Schiff’s sense of this disjointedness. In the summer of 2018, he attended a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, where Tom Burt revealed that Microsoft had detected Russian phishing attacks targeting Democratic senatorial candidates. “When I went back to Washington,” Schiff told me, “I asked agency heads within the [intelligence community] whether they were aware of this. The answer was no.” That the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee had to learn this elemental fact about his own branch of government at a public gathering is troubling; that the people charged with protecting the country didn’t know it is flabbergasting.

The sprawling federal bureaucracy has never been particularly adept at the kind of coordination necessary to anticipate a wily adversary’s next move. But there is another reason for the government’s alarmingly inadequate response: a president who sees attempts to counter the Russia threat as a personal affront.

...

Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Russian-Inspired Accounts (https://www.thedailybeast.com/instagram-wont-pull-these-racist-violent-russian-inspired-accounts)

ADAM RAWNSLEY, (https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/adam-rawnsley)

CASEY MICHEL (https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/casey-michel)

=== (https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/casey-michel)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/instagram-wont-pull-these-racist-violent-russian-inspired-accounts?ref=home

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Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Violent, Russian-Inspired Accounts

HATEFEST

Neo-Confederates are posting murderous scenes and racist memes—when they’re not reusing material from Kremlin trolls. But Instagram says the accounts don’t violate its rules.

Adam Rawnsley

Casey Michel

Published Dec. 16, 2019 5:12AM ET

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

American racists are reusing some of the ugliest elements of Russia’s election interference operation.

Memes published by some of the worst Kremlin-backed trolls of the 2016 campaign are being echoed online by American neo-Confederates. The Russian accounts, overseen by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have since been taken down. But American parrot accounts running some of the same racist crap—and worse—are still live on Instagram, an investigation by The Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. At least one of these live accounts claims to belong to a Russian network persona.

The accounts—which hail the Confederate flag as “Protecting Us From Tyranny Since 1861” and claim that “The Civil War was not about slavery”—highlight the blurry and politically charged boundaries between domestic and foreign trolling. The American racists didn’t need Russia’s help to hate, of course. But the Kremlin supplied a well of ready-made memes for lazy neo-Confederates to post online.

“I think the similarities between these accounts and those of the IRA highlights how complex the IRA operations around elections have been. It is possible that memes originally created by the IRA have found new or renewed life on social media,” Kanishk Karan, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Daily Beast. “The way they camouflaged within the political conversations is also a fascinating detail: We’ve reached a point where it is harder to verify whether an online social or political movement is astroturfed or from grassroots participants.”

When Russian trolls went hunting for targets and content during the 2016 election, race was their “preferred target,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee study.

Instagram

South United, a Russian Facebook and Instagram persona that featured in the IRA’s 2016 meddling campaign, took this theme and ran with it, plastering followers with all kinds of racist, bigoted appeals to the Confederacy.

During the 2016 election, South United was one of the “10 most active IRA-administered Facebook pages,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. It was also undoubtedly Russian. The ads that South United ran were paid for in rubles using a Russian payment processor, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller cited the page as the work of the IRA in a 2018 indictment of 13 IRA employees and officials.

Some of the images published by South United included racist memes of former President Obama dressed as a Nazi with the caption “Don’t support illegals, support own people.” One meme published by the IRA’s account showed a picture of Black Lives Matter protesters next to the question “Black lives or black thugs?” These memes can still be found on active Instagram accounts that pose as state chapters of the original South United page.

The accounts also published the same racist and neo-Confederate images originally published by Russian trolls, such as one with a Confederate flag middle finger bidding viewers to "Say hi to the Yanks” and another wondering, “How many likes can this battle flag get?” The IRA’s South United watermark can still be viewed on these posts.

It’s unclear when the IRA’s South United Facebook and Instagram accounts were first created, but Twitter users were reposting material from the accounts as early as November 2015. Facebook ad data shows that the IRA’s @South_United Instagram page started running ads that same month. By contrast, the earliest post from among the dozen American-run echo-chamber mimic accounts was in May 2016.

In August of that year, the operators of some of these state chapter Instagram accounts also promoted a Russian-organized pro-Trump rally. As The Daily Beast first reported, the IRA announced a “patriotic state-wide flash mob” in support of Trump’s candidacy on a separate Facebook page it ran called “Being Patriotic” using an image of Hillary Clinton in a prison cell. Two of the state chapter Instagram accounts, @south_united_fl and @south_united_il, promoted the rally using the Hillary image taken from an IRA-run Facebook page.

The accounts still live on Instagram also share considerable overlap with the original Russian page in other ways. All of the accounts, for instance, claim to be state chapters of the original South United page, with names like “South United Iowa” and “South United Tennessee.” They all use a similar logo to the IRA Facebook account, and some posts even use memes with stilted phrases like “History is written By victor...” and “Can it be any simple?”—language reminiscent of the non-native English used in some IRA propaganda memes.

Some of the accounts on Instagram even claim to be directly related to the original Russian page. “South United Louisiana” says it’s “the South United page for the state of Louisiana,” while the “South United Georgia” page says it’s the “@south_united page made for the great people of Georgia.” (The latter was taken down at some point prior to The Daily Beast’s discovery, although the Louisiana page remains live.)

The parrot accounts used not just IRA memes but other inflammatory content from outside the South United network. The accounts reposted a variety of memes along the same lines of Southern political and cultural resentments, including pro-Confederacy, pro-gun, anti-Islam, and anti-Hillary Clinton content. In one particularly egregious example, the @south_united_florida account posted an image of four bodies with gunshot wounds to the heads and the words “King Barrak, Queen Michelle, Usurper Hillary, George Soros” above each corpse.

The Daily Beast made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the Instagram accounts still up but received no reply.

Nathan Gleicher—head of security policy at Facebook, which owns Instagram—said the accounts, for now, haven’t violated company policies aimed at helping users distinguish between “inauthentic behavior and authentic speech.” So they're staying online.

“When we take down influence operations, we take action based on the behavior we see on our platforms, not the content they post,” Gleicher told The Daily Beast. “We’ve seen these manipulation campaigns reuse content created by innocent people.Most of the content shared by coordinated manipulation campaigns isn’t provably false, and would in fact be acceptable political discourse if shared by real people. That’s why content alone is not a strong signal for identifying these operations.” To disinformation researchers at the DFRLab, the Instagram accounts that are still live show signs of being dedicated to amplifying IRA material.

DFRLab researchers found evidence that someone may have used engagement-for-hire services to interact with the American Instagram amplification accounts.A few accounts with defunct jewelry and crystal storefronts posted generic comments on the state chapter network accounts’ images.

Not that the IRA needed much help in amplifying its neo-Confederate content. The IRA’s South United Facebook page reached a height of 138,000 followers and harvested a total of 1.5 million likes and 2.3 million shares before it was shut down in 2017. Of the dozen American state chapter Instagram accounts, none have more than 1,000 followers and most have just a few dozen.

Facebook told The Daily Beast that the parrot network accounts appeared to be authentically American. "It appears that these accounts belong to real people in the United States whose content was likely mimicked by these operations we removed in the past," Gleicher told The Daily Beast.

Instagram

DFRLab researchers found some evidence that the IRA’s neo-Confederate persona may have copied organic memes created by authentic American bigots outside the state chapter network. The IRA’s South United Instagram account published a picture of a Confederate stick person attacking an LGBT pride flag stick person in late 2016—a meme copied from an unrelated American Instagram account posted in 2015.

In other words, the Russians copied the American racists. And the racists copied the Russians. It’s a circle of hate.

During 2016, the Kremlin’s sophisticated understanding of the United States led its propaganda to amplifyit. They invented memes to exploit racism, secure in the knowledge that the memes would find wide purchase in America. But while the larger social-media firms purged the accounts that promoted them, the memes have achieved exactly what the Russians wanted: persistence.

And sadly, material aimed squarely at Confederate sympathizers apparently remains a popular topic for Russian trolls: Facebook announced just two months ago that it had removed dozens of Instagram accounts that originated in Russia, some of which published pro-Confederate material targeted at American audiences.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/1/30/1830996/-Russia-purposely-didn-t-just-leak-court-documents-from-Robert-Mueller-they-altered-them

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Concord Management and Consulting, the indicted Russian “company” that provided funding for the Russian effort to weaponize social media, leaked information from non-public court documents to undercut the case being made by the special counsel’s office.To release the information, the Russian company created yet another fake company, Redstone Hacking, which claimed to have “hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case,” but in fact Concord was just releasing its own copy of court documents—but not without making a few changes.

In February 2018, the special counsel indicted 13 Russian individuals associated with Concord Management and the collection of Russian operatives masquerading as a company called the Internet Research Agency. The IRA was the core of Russia’s social media effort to support Donald Trump. It generated the fake sites for not just “groups” that supported Trump, but also the sites that weaponized American racism. Fake “Black Lives Matter” sites intended to frighten white voters in critical areas were being created by the same people making fake “Hillary hates blacks” sites that were intended to suppress African-American votes. Similarly, the Russian agency played nonexistent extremes on both sides of immigration, of gun safety, and of every issue that could be used to lever open a gap among American voters. The militant messages at “Blacktivist” came from the Russians. So did the xenophobic rants at “Secured Borders.”

The workers at the IRA created dozens of Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, webpages, and a network of connections among them. Then they created thousands of bots, each of which had its own set of accounts and provided apparent heft and popularity to the core accounts. They even sent actual Russian agents to actual American cities to stage actual protests.On Twitter alone, the IRA created 3,800 known accounts and sent 176,000 tweets that were seen by millions of Americans. Some of those tweets were retweeted by such conservative Trump supporters as Ann Coulter. Some of them were retweeted by members of Trump’s campaign, like Michael Flynn.The YouTube videos the IRA created also got broad notice on the right. So did their GIF memes. And when they had trouble getting an idea to break through organically, the Russians did it the old-fashioned way: They bought ads. All of it as part of the effort to help Donald Trump. At least 90 people worked full-time at this effort—and that doesn’t include the “over 100 Americans” that they either recruited or attempted to recruit.

On Wednesday, the special counsel’s office made a new court filing opposing the publication of some documents related to the Concord case. And, as CNN reports, the filing reveals that Concord Management has already been busy conducting its own document release—against court orders. And the Russians have been making changes to the documents they release. The new filing states that "Certain non-sensitive discovery materials in the defense's possession appear to have been altered and disseminated as part of a disinformation campaign aimed (apparently) at discrediting ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the U.S. political system.”

CNN and BBC reporter Josh Russell was one of several people who received information from a new Twitter account under the name of Redstone Hacking.

Screen%20Shot%202019-01-30%20at%202.42.12%20PM.png

Tweet from ‘Redstone Hacking’ claiming to have hacked into Mueller documents

Redstone claimed to have “special access” to court documents obtained by hacking into a Russian server with information on the case against Concord and the Internet Research Agency. But it now appears that Redstone was Concord “hacking” its own documents to leak out selections.

Exactly what Concord Management/Internet Research Agency/Redstone Hacking altered in the documents they released isn’t clear, because for the most part the documents they produced were still not available to the public.

wiki priozhin

Internet Research Agency

Main article: Internet Research Agency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency)

Prigozhin has been connected to and is alleged to have financed and directed\17] a network of companies including a company called the Internet Research Agency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency) Ltd., (Russian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language): ООО «Агентство интернет-исследований»)[18] [Concord Management and Consulting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_Management_and_Consulting) Company and one other related company.[1] The three companies are accused of Internet trolling and attempting to influence the 2016 US presidential elections and other activity to influence political events outside Russia.

Russian journalist Andrey Soshnikov reported that Alexey Soskovets, who had participated in Russian youth political community, was directly connected to the offices of Internet Research in Olgino. His company, North-Western Service Agency, won 17 or 18 (according to different sources) contracts for organizing celebrations, forums and sport competitions for authorities of Saint Petersburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg). The agency was the only participant in half of those bids. In the summer of 2013 the agency won a tender for providing freight services for participants of Seliger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seliger_%28forum%29) camp.[19]

Despite links to Alexei Soskovets, Nadejda Orlova, deputy head of the Committee for Youth Policy in Saint Petersburg, disputed connection between her institution and the trolling offices.[citation ^needed]

Spin offs

Campaigns against opposition in 2013 involved Dmitry Bykov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Bykov) and the then head of RIA Novosti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIA_Novosti), Svetlana Mironyuk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Mironyuk), while a homepage claiming to fight fake news (Gazeta O Gazetah) was used to spread fake news.[20]

US Treasury Department sanctions

Main article: International sanctions during the Ukrainian crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis)

On 20 December 2016, the US Treasury Department (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Treasury_Department) designated Prigozhin pursuant to E.O.13661 for sanctions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_sanctioned_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis) for providing support to senior officials of the Russian Federation.[21][22][23]

In June 2017 US sanctions were imposed on one of Prigozhin's companies, Concord Management and Consulting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_Management_and_Consulting), in connection with the war in Eastern Ukraine.[15][24][25]

On 28 January 2018, the US Treasury Department also designated Evro Polis Ltd for sanctions. Evro Polis is a Russian company that has contracted with the Government of Syria to protect Syrian oil fields in exchange for a 25 percent share in oil and gas production from the fields. The company was designated for being owned or controlled by Yevgeniy Prigozhin. The sanctions require that any property or interests in property of the designated persons in the possession or control of U.S. persons or within the United States must be blocked. Additionally, transactions by U.S. persons involving these persons (including companies) are generally prohibited.[26][27]

US criminal charges

Main article: Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_%282017%E2%80%932019%29)

see

Internet Research Agency Indictment (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency_Indictment)

On 16 February 2018, Prigozhin, the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_Management_and_Consulting), another related company, and other connected Russian individuals were indicted by a U.S. grand jury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury). He was charged with funding and organizing operations for the purpose of interference with the U.S. political and electoral processes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections), including the 2016 presidential election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election), and other crimes including identity theft.[28]

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/

no lnx

POLITICS

POLITICS FEATURES

NOVEMBER 25, 2019 9:02AM ET

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It

Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.

By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN

Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.

Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.

On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.

The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.

We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.

These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends.Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”

The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.

While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.

...

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Facebook: Russian trolls are back. And they're here to meddle with 2020

By Donie O'Sullivan, CNN Business

Updated 5:24 AM ET, Tue October 22, 2019

New York (CNN Business)People linked to the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed troll group indicted by the United States for its alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election, are laying the groundwork to do the same in 2020, new information released by Facebook on Monday suggests.

Profiles originating in Russia had since the beginning of this year been building a network of accounts on Instagram designed to look like groups in swing states, the company said. Instagram is owned by Facebook (FB).

Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn't bother voting for her.

The accounts Facebook revealed Monday, 50 of which were on Instagram and one of which was on Facebook, were designed to look like they were advocating on a broad range of issues across American life.

A fake Bernie Sanders' supporters page posted an image attacking the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden

Accounts with usernames like @black.queen.chloe and @michigan_black_community looked like they were run by black activists. There were also pro and anti-Trump accounts, and accounts posing as feminists, LGBTQ rights advocates, and environmentalists. Other account names included @stop.trump2020, @bernie.2020_, @iowa.patriot, and @feminist_agenda_, according to Graphika.

Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S.Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.

"It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides," Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business.

In a statement responding to the news, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said, "We applaud Facebook for disclosing the existence of these fake accounts and shutting them down. ... [But] Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform. If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump's ads that attempt to gaslight the American people."

Nimmo also observed attacks on other candidates, including Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but said those attacks seemed more the result of "character building" in which the accounts were sharing content to bolster their respective personas -- for instance, liberal-looking accounts attacked Trump, while conservative-looking accounts posted negative content about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

"Among the accounts focused on black activism, there was strong support for Bernie Sanders along with a moderate amount of content opposing Kamala Harris," Graphika said in its analysis. "Education reform and student debt relief were two of the most commonly mentioned reasons for supporting Sanders, while Harris's record as a California DA was mentioned as a reason to oppose her candidacy. Mixed in with these was a small amount of content attacking Joe Biden, primarily due to gaffes related to his previous handling of racial issues."

Nimmo said the accounts sent just under 75,000 posts, the majority of which were not directly related to the 2020 election, but to broader political and social issues in the US.

Facebook said Monday those behind the operation had taken steps to conceal their identities and locations. The company did not publicly say how it had determined the accounts were linked to the Internet Research Agency but said it had shared details with law enforcement.

The campaign mostly recycled existing memes and posts from real American news organizations and political groups.

"This wasn't Russians targeting Americans with Russian content, this was Russians targeting Americans with American content," Nimmo said.

The decision to recycle existing content, rather than create new material, might have been part of the campaign's strategy to conceal its Russian links, Nimmo said. However, errors in some of the accounts' posts suggested the accounts weren't run by native English speakers.

"What the future for their children will be?" the caption read on one post apparently criticizing Americans who don't remember the Confederacy fondly. Another account posted "What a bullsh."

From Russia with Love? Mystery Facebook account sent New York activist a bunch of roses]

Nathaniel Gleicher, who leads Facebook's team investigating foreign influence operations, said the company had caught the operation in its early stages and that the Russian group had been focusing on audience building. Gleicher said the accounts were "trying to make themselves look like ordinary citizens" in a way that could later have lent credibility to their posts.

Facebook has taken extensive steps to crack down on foreign disinformation on its platforms since the 2016 election, including hiring former intelligence officials to root out campaigns like those run from Russia. Gleicher said that the steps Facebook had taken appeared to make it difficult for the Russian accounts "to build the following among authentic communities."

"People in Russia are still trying this," Nimmo told CNN Business on Monday. But, he said, they are finding it a lot harder because the social media companies "are hunting them."

"In 2016, you could have set up an account posing as a Tennessee Republican and have it registered to a Russian phone number," he noted.

Facebook also announced Monday that it had removed several networks of Iranian accounts, some of which targeted Americans. One of the accounts directed audiences to content about Black Lives Matter -- a tactic that was very popular among the Russian trolls in 2016. The network had a relatively small following of more than 7,000 accounts.

While most of the focus on online foreign interference in the US has been devoted to Russia, over the past 12 months, Facebook has detected multiple Iranian campaigns targeting the United States.

CNN's Sarah Mucha contributed reporting.

https://www.axios.com/lawmakers-release-all-of-russian-facebook-election-ads-f0fc9e30-d44a-4da5-8aed-e42a4e47451b.html

Congress releases every Russian Facebook ad that ran during election

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racist memes 2016 IRA

https://www.thedailybeast.com/30-batsht-crazy-mostly-racist-facebook-memes-the-russians-used-to-corrupt-your-mind

https://qz.com/1249579/r-funny-reddits-most-popular-meme-forum-was-a-hangout-spot-for-russian-propaganda-trolls/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/russian-propaganda-campaign-helped-trumps-poll-numbers-in-2016-research-analysis/

When former special counsel Robert Mueller spoke publicly on May 29, he made it abundantly clear that Russian government officials made a concerted effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. President Donald Trump and many of his supporters, however, have maintained that Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts had no impact on the election. But a new analysis by University of Tennessee researchers in Knoxville finds that Russian activities did influence public opinion in the U.S. in 2016.

The study addresses social media and the activities of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company and troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia.And according to the study, every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to that company predicted a 1% increase (https://theconversation.com/russian-twitter-propaganda-predicted-2016-us-election-polls-119444) in favor of Trump in opinion polls.

Damian Ruck, lead researcher for the study, wrote, “Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls.”

Ruck found that “exposure to Russian propaganda may have helped change American minds in favor of Republican candidate Trump.” According to Ruck, “It turns out that the activity of Russian Twitter trolls was a better predictor of Donald Trump’s polling numbers than his own Twitter activity.”

Nonetheless, Ruck asserted that it’s unclear whether or not Russian activity ultimately affected the outcome of the 2016 election. Asked about that possibility, Ruck told NBC News, “The answer is that we still don’t know (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/new-study-shows-russian-propaganda-may-really-have-helped-trump-n1025306), but we can’t rule it out.”

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oct 2016 nbc

Russian trolls who interfered in 2016 U.S. election also made ad money, report says

POLITICS

JUN 5 2019, 6:00 AM ET

Russian trolls who interfered in 2016 U.S. election also made ad money, report says

by KEN DILANIAN

WASHINGTON — The effort by a Russian internet deception factory to manipulate American public opinion during the 2016 election was better planned and executed — and also more lucrative — than previously understood, according to a new analysis of nearly 10 million tweets by a leading cybersecurity firm.

The operation by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency amounted to "a vast, coordinated campaign that was incredibly successful at pushing out and amplifying its messages," according to Symantec, which conducted an in-depth analysts of nearly 4,000 Twitter accounts involved in what U.S. intelligence agencies assess was a Russian-government–sponsored propaganda operation designed in part to help Donald Trump get elected president.

Some of the accounts were set up months in advance. And some of the trolls used their fake accounts to make money on the side, the researchers found.

"While this propaganda campaign has often been referred to as the work of trolls, the release of the dataset makes it obvious that it was far more than that," Symantec researcher Gillian Cleary wrote in a blog post, calling it "a vast disinformation network."

"The sheer scale and impact of this propaganda campaign is obviously of deep concern to voters in all countries, who may fear a repeat of what happened in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016."

Russian trolls used fake 2016 accounts to collect ad revenue Play

Russian trolls used fake 2016 accounts to collect ad revenue 3:05

The IRA's disinformation campaign was described in the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller, and in his indictment of multiple Russian nationals. U.S intelligence agencies assessed that the social media manipulation was part of a Russian intelligence operation designed to undermine American democracy by exacerbating divisions, hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton and help Trump. Experts say the U.S. government and American social media companies have yet to develop a strategy to prevent such manipulation from happening again. Just last week, a different cybersecurity firm exposed an Iranian effort to manipulate U.S. social media with fake accounts.

The IRA's basic strategy, Symantec found, was to use a small core of Twitter accounts to push out new content. And they harnessed a wider pool of automated accounts to amplify those messages.

The operation was carefully planned, with accounts often registered months before they were used — well in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Symantec found. The average time between account creation and first tweet was 177 days.

Image: A building that houses the Internet Research Agency, also known as the "troll factory," in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2018.

A building that houses the Internet Research Agency, also known as the "troll factory," in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2018. Dmitri Lovetsky / AP file

The core group of main accounts consisted mainly of "fake news" sources masquerading as regional news outlets or political organizations. Most of them had at least 10,000 followers but followed substantially fewer accounts. They were mainly used to publish new tweets.

They posed as local news outlets, such as "New Orleans Online," "El Paso Top News," and "San Jose Daily." The majority of these accounts were created between May and August of 2014, but lay dormant until January 2015, when most of them started tweeting. This suggests a significant element of advance planning, Symantec said.

A much larger pool of auxiliary accounts was used to amplify messages pushed out by the main accounts, many impersonating individuals.

Auxiliary accounts had less than 10,000 followers, but often followed more accounts than that. Their main purpose was to retweet messages from other accounts, although they were also used to publish original tweets, researchers found.

Senate report: Russia used to social media to help Trump campaign Play

Senate report: Russia used to social media to help Trump campaign 2:18

Symantec identified 123 main accounts and 3,713 auxiliary accounts within the dataset provided by Twitter.

The propaganda was "evenly split" in its efforts to aim at the extremes of both sides of the liberal/conservative political divide, the researchers found.

Among the majority of accounts that were automated, many would frequently show signs of human intervention, such as posting original content or slightly changing the wording of reposted content, presumably in an attempt to make them appear more authentic and reduce the risk of their deletion by Twitter, researchers found.

Some of the fake news accounts were set up to monitor the activity of certain blogs and push new posts to Twitter.

As NBC News has previously reported, a number of prominent Americans retweeted some of the fake Russian troll accounts, including President Donald Trump, The Washington Post, singer Nicki Minaj, comedian Sarah Silverman and Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter.

Some of the accounts were using a technique that pushed an ad to whoever clicked on the link, generating money for the account.

A handful of of the IRA's Twitter accounts managed to be extraordinarily influential, the researchers found.

The most retweeted account within the dataset was @TEN_GOP, created in November 2015, which masqueraded as a group of Republicans in Tennessee. It appears to have been operated by a person, not a computer.

Image: A man holds a smart phone with the icons for the social networking apps Facebook, Instagram and Twitter seen on the screen

A man holds a smart phone with the icons for the social networking apps Facebook, Instagram and Twitter seen on the screen. Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP - Getty Images file

In less than two years TEN_GOP gained 150,000 followers. Its 10,794 tweets garnered more than 6 million retweets, only a small fraction of which came from other Russian troll accounts.

TEN_GOP's tweets mixed pro-Russia messages with right-wing political memes, racism and conspiracy theories.

"It was a highly professional campaign," Symantec said. "Aside from the sheer volume of tweets generated over a period of years, its orchestrators developed a streamlined operation that automated the publication of new content and leveraged a network of auxiliary accounts to amplify its impact."

Editor's note: The Symantec report initially said that one of the Russian troll accounts could have been paid up to $1 million through the use of link shorteners, a technique that pushes ads to those who click on tweets. Craig Silverman, Buzzfeed's media editor and an expert in social media advertising, said in a tweet that the $1 million number was inflated, and that Symantec had used an incorrect formula to calculate it. In response, Symantec removed the $1 million figure "while we investigate some additional data," a spokeswoman told NBC News. "This does not change any of the other findings in our research." NBC News has removed references to $1 million from the story above.

...

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/21/648803459/russias-2016-twitter-campaign-was-strongly-pro-gun-with-echoes-of-the-nra

many lnx, also graphs

Russia's influence campaign on Twitter pushed pro-gun and pro-National Rifle Association messages during the 2016 election and beyond — a rare example of consistency in a scheme that mostly sought to play up extremes on the left and right.

On every issue, from race to health care, women's rights to police brutality, gay marriage to global warming, accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/17/586698361/the-russia-investigations-mueller-indicts-the-internet-research-agency)sought to amplify controversy by playing up conflict.

Except when it came to guns and the NRA.

That's according to a new analysis of millions of now-deleted Twitter posts connected to the group, done by NPR in collaboration with an outside data firm.

Last year, Twitter notified the House intelligence committee about thousands of accounts (https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/default.aspx) it linked to the Internet Research Agency; the social media company has deleted millions of tweets associated with those accounts....

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AN 419

When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont conceded the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and encouraged his supporters to vote for her in the general election, many of them agreed that Clinton—shortcomings and all—would be much better for his liberal/progressive movement than GOP nominee Donald J. Trump. Sanders aggressively voiced his support for the centrist Clinton during his speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, stressing that a Trump presidency would be terrible for the United States (an assertion that proved to be frighteningly accurate). The “Bernie or Bust” crowd, however, adamantly maintained its opposition to Clinton: some voted for Green Party nominee Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson (a former Republican governor of New Mexico), some didn’t vote at all, some even voted for Trump. And the Washington Post, in an article published on Friday, is reporting that some of Sanders’ more anti-Clinton supporters may have been manipulated by the Kremlin (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html?utm_term=.049b848c2962) three years ago.

Russian interference in the 2016 election and President Vladimir Putin’s preference for Trump over Clinton was probed extensively by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose Russia investigation concluded in March. But one thing that hasn’t been reported nearly as much is efforts by the Kremlin to manipulate and deceive Sanders’ supporters. And in the Washington Post, Michael Kranish reports that three years ago, there was a concerted effort by Russians to convince Sanders supporters that they would be better off under Trump.[wacko at mta MOVIE]

Kranish reports that in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News told Sanders supporters, “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016.” And analysis by Clemson University, according to Kranish, found that Red Louisiana News was among thousands of pro-Trump online accounts that were actually based in Russia—not the United States—and stressed to Sanders supporters that they had more in common with Trump than with Clinton. Kranish also reports that Mueller, during his Russia investigation, alleged that a St. Petersburg, Russia-based group called the Internet Research Agency instructed its employees to write social media posts that were anti-Clinton but favorable to Sanders and Trump.

In a 2018 interview, Kranish notes, Sanders told Vermont Public Radio that in 2016, one of his campaign workers suspected that Russians were behind those posts (https://www.vpr.org/post/sen-bernie-sanders-russia-we-knew-what-we-knew-when-we-knew-it#stream/0) and warned the Clinton campaign, “I think these guys are Russians.” Kranish adds, however, that the campaign worker didn’t share those concerns with Sanders himself.

Sanders also told Vermont Public Radio that in 2016, Russian government operatives “were playing a really disgusting role” in the election and set out to “sow division in this country.” The senator commented, “What they were saying is—in so many words—is Bernie Sanders is not going to win. So if you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, let me tell you: Hillary Clinton is a criminal, a murderer, a terrible person…. crazy, all of these disgusting things.”

Clemson University’s research, Kranish adds, found that “some 9000” tweets coming from Russia used the name “Bernie” and were retweeted 61,804 times and “liked” 59,281 times.

One of the Russian social media accounts mentioned in Kranish’s article called itself#BlackMenForBernie, had 72,121 followers and tried to convince African-American Sanders supporters that they shouldn’t support Clinton. One of its tweets read, “#BlackMenForBernie Leader Switches to Trump! I will Never Vote for Hillary, Welcome aboard the Trump Train.”

Kranish concludes his report by quoting Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill, who warns that if people in the Russia government were able to manipulate the 2016 presidential election, they inevitably “will strike again.” And therefore, Merrill asserts, “Democratic candidates” must “work together and support each other to defend against these threats.”

---

ref no lnx

Inside the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters — and help elect Trump

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spar in February 2016 during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by MSNBC at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H. (David Goldman/AP)

By Michael Kranish April 12 at 6:00 AM

After Bernie Sanders lost his primary campaign for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News reached out to his supporters to help sway the general election. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” the account tweeted.

The tweet was not actually from Louisiana, according to an analysis by Clemson University researchers. Instead, it was one of thousands of accounts identified as based in Russia, part of a cloaked effort to persuade supporters of the Vermont senator to elect Trump. “Bernie Sanders says his message resonates with Republicans,” said another Russian tweet.

While much attention has focused on the question of whether the Trump campaign encouraged or conspired with Russia, the effort to target Sanders supporters has been a lesser-noted part of the story. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, in a case filed last year against 13 Russians accused of interfering in the U.S. presidential campaign, said workers at a St. Petersburg facility called the Internet Research Agency were instructed to write social media posts in opposition to Clinton but “to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”

That strategy could receive new attention with the release of Mueller’s report, expected within days.

:{:{}:

Sanders told Vermont Public Radio last year that one of his campaign workers figured out what was going on, alerted the Clinton campaign and told them, “I think these guys are Russians.” But Sanders said he never knew, and he later backed off his suggestion that his staff did. A spokesman referred questions to 2016 campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who said in an interview that Sanders “misspoke a little bit and conflated a few of the facts. .?.?. He did not know, I did not know, none of us knew” that Russia was behind the efforts.

Only recently, with the latest analysis of Twitter data, has the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign been documented on that social media platform.

:{:{}:

A pair of Clemson University researchers, at the request of The Washington Post, examined English-language tweets identified as coming from Russia, many of which were designed to influence the election. It is impossible to say how many were targeted at Sanders supporters because many don’t include his name. Some 9,000 of the Russian tweets used the word “Bernie,” which were “liked” 59,281 times and retweeted 61,804 times.

:{:{}:

But that was only one element of the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters, the researchers said. Many thousands of other tweets, with no direct reference to Sanders, were also designed to appeal to his backers, urging them to do anything but vote for Clinton in the general election.

“I think there is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton,” said one of the Clemson researchers, Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications. The tweets examined in the new analysis “give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought.”

[Trump disavows past enthusiasm for WikiLeaks after Assange’s arrest]

The Russian social-media strategy underscores a challenge that Sanders faces as he once again seeks the Democratic presidential nomination, this time in a crowded field. Many Sanders supporters believe he was treated unfairly by the Democratic Party and Clinton, a point the Russians sought to capitalize on as they worked to undermine Clinton in the November election.

Although Sanders later denounced the Kremlin’s efforts and campaigned for Clinton, some Democrats believe he could have done more to smooth over tensions and encourage his supporters to support his onetime opponent. A former senior Clinton campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing Sanders ahead of the 2020 primaries, said that there remains bitterness over the way Sanders repeatedly said the system was tilted against him.

Sanders said in May 2016 that party rules enabling Clinton to collect “superdelegates” did not meet the definition of “rigged,” but he called it a “dumb process which certainly has disadvantaged our campaign.”

The effort to promote Sanders as a way to influence the U.S. election began shortly after he declared his candidacy in spring 2015, according to Mueller’s indictment of the Russians. Russia’s aim was to defeat or weaken Clinton, who had angered Russian President Vladimir Putin when she had been secretary of state.

One reason that Sanders was on Russia’s radar has been little noted: he, like Trump, opposed trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Russian PresidentVladimir Putin had been critical of the TPP, saying it was secretive and “hardly facilitates sustainable development of Asia Pacific.”

:{:{}:

During the primaries, Sanders gave at least three interviews to a Russia-controlled television network, RT, in which his trade stance was highlighted. The network in February 2016 criticized MSNBC for breaking away from Sanders after he said he was “helping to lead the opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” The network posted a story headlined, “Bernie Sanders 'censored' by MSNBC while criticizing trade deal.”

Around the same time that Sanders was featured on RT, Russian employees at the Internet Research Agency were given a document explaining how to influence the U.S. election. The workers were told to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them),” according to Mueller’s indictment of the Russians.

The Twitter database shows the impact. The tweets sent from Russia, cloaked to look as though they came from Americans, included: “Bernie Sanders looks to black voters to boost his underdog campaign”; “Hillary Clinton’s summer of drama creates openings for Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden”; and “I’m for Bernie all the way!”

Then, in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee that suggested the party machinery was tilted against Sanders. The DNC computers were later revealed to have been hacked by Russia. The hack prompted Trump to stoke the divide among Democrats. “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted July 23, 2016. “.?.?. On-line from Wikileakes [sic], really vicious. RIGGED!”

Russian trolls significantly increased their effort to persuade Sanders supporters to oppose Clinton in the general election. One of their methods was to try to convince African Americans that they couldn’t trust her.

“#BlackMenForBernie Leader Switches to Trump! I will Never Vote for Hillary,Welcome aboard the Trump Train,” said a tweet from an account that was said to come from Texas and was identified as “Southern. Conservative Pro God. Anti Racism.” The account, actually operated by a Russian, had 72,121 followers. The message was liked 260 times and retweeted 295 times, according to the Clemson database.

Linvill, the Clemson researcher, said Sanders was seen as “just a tool” to the Russians. “He is a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party,” resulting in lower turnout for Clinton, he said. The tweets suggested either voting for Trump or a third-party candidate such as Green Party nominee Jill Stein, or writing in Sanders’s name.

While it is impossible to show a direct correlation between a Russian-based tweet and someone’s vote in the United States, a post-election survey conducted for Ohio State University documented how false stories spread on social media may have caused a decline in turnout for Clinton. Only 77 percent of those surveyed who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 supported Clinton in 2016; 10 percent backed Trump, 4 percent voted for third-party candidates, and 8 percent did not vote, according to the YouGov survey.

[Bernie Sanders unveils new Medicare-for-all legislation]

In an effort to demonstrate how inaccurate information makes its way into the mainstream, the survey asked respondents about three demonstrably false articles that had been widely distributed. A quarter of respondents believed the false story that Clinton was in “very poor health,” 10 percent believed that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope, and 35 percent (including 20 percent of Obama supporters) believed that Clinton had approved weapons sales to “Islamic jihadists, including ISIS.”

:{:{}:

The Ohio State team concluded in a soon-to-be published final version of its report that “belief in these fake news stories is very strongly linked to defection from the Democratic ticket by 2012 Obama voters.” Obama voters who recognized all three stories as false voted for Clinton at a rate of 89 percent, while 61 percent who believed one of the stories was false voted for her, and 17 percent of those who believed two of the false stories supported Clinton.

:{:{}:

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, said Twitter had studied what happened during the presidential election and will apply those lessons as the 2020 campaign unfolds.

“Protecting the integrity of public conversation around elections is core to Twitter's mission,” Roth said in a statement to The Post. “Since 2016, we've launched new policies, significantly scaled our enforcement against malicious automation, built strong partnerships within the industry and with government entities, and opened the largest public archive of potential information operations online, including thousands of Russian-linked accounts we have removed.”

Sanders told Vermont Public Radio last year that the Russians “were playing a really disgusting role because they don’t believe in anything. And all they want to do is sow division in this country, bring people against each other. So what they were saying is — in so many words — is Bernie Sanders is not going to win, so if you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, let me tell you, Hillary Clinton is a criminal, a murderer, a terrible person .?.?. crazy, all of these disgusting things.”

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said “the Russians will strike again.” As a result, he said, it is imperative for “everyone else, especially Democratic candidates, to work together and support each other to defend against these threats.”

Craig Timberg contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04

...url?

---

video essays on the New

York Times on Russian

disinformation:

Operation Infektion.

(thanks Maggie!)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html

OPERATION INFEKTION: A THREE-PART VIDEO SERIES ON RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION

RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION: FROM COLD WAR TO KANYE

CreditCredit

By Adam B. Ellick and Adam Westbrook

398

WATCH: This is a three-part film series. Scroll down and click to play any episode.

Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.

EPISODE 1

MEET THE KGB SPIES WHO INVENTED FAKE NEWS

We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-internet era. Meet the KGB operatives who invented it and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.

Video

EPISODE 2

THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS OF FAKE NEWS

The Pizzagate playbook: same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories.

Video

EPISODE 3

THE WORLDWIDE WAR ON TRUTH

Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.

---

AP:

... Senate panel has been investigating Russian interference on social media and beyond for almost two years. Intelligence committee Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement that the data shows how aggressively Russia tried to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology and erode trust in institutions.

“Most troublingly, it shows that these activities have not stopped,” said Burr, a North Carolina Republican.

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 in 2017, the Russians shifted much of their activity to Instagram.

The New Knowledge study says that 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. They added that “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.”

The Russian activity went far beyond the three tech companies that provided information, reaching many smaller sites as well. The New Knowledge report details sophisticated attempts to infiltrate internet games, browser extensions and music apps. The Russians even used social media to encourage users of the game Pokemon Go — which was at peak popularity in the months before the 2016 presidential election — to use politically divisive usernames, for example.

The report discusses even more unconventional ways that the Russian accounts attempted to connect with Americans and recruit assets, such as merchandise with certain messages, specific follower requests, job offers and even help lines that could encourage people to unknowingly disclose sensitive information to Russia that could later be used against them.

The Russians’ attempts to influence Americans on social media first became widely public in the fall of 2017. Several months later, Mueller’s indictment laid out a vast, organized Russian effort to sway political opinion. While the social media companies had already detailed some of the efforts, the indictment tied actual people to the operation and named 13 Russians responsible.

Also notable is the study’s finding that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was favorably treated in posts aimed at both left-leaning and right-leaning users. The New Knowledge report says there were a number of posts expressing support for Assange and Wikileaks, including several in October 2016 just before WikiLeaks released hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The Oxford study notes that peaks in Internet Research Agency advertising and organic activity — or posts, shares and comments by users — often corresponded with important dates on the U.S. calendar, crises and international events.

The researchers from Oxford said thatorganic postings were much more far reaching than advertisements,despite Facebook’s sole focus on ads when the company first announced it had been compromised in 2017.

Other findings in the studies:

— During the week of the presidential election, posts directed to right-leaning users aimed to generate anger and suspicion and hinted at voter fraud, while posts targeted to African-Americans largely ignored mentions of the election until the last minute.

— Establishment figures of both parties, especially Clinton, were universally panned. Even a tag targeted to feminists criticized Clinton and promoted her primary opponent, independent Bernie Sanders;

— Several posts promoted the Russian agenda in Syria and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

— IRA’s posts focused on the United States started on Twitter as far back as 2013, and eventually evolved into the multi-platform strategy.

— Russian activity on Twitter was less organized around themes like race or partisanship but more driven by local and current events and made use of occasional pop culture references.

— Facebook posts linked to the IRA “reveal a nuanced and deep knowledge of American culture, media, and influencers in each community the IRA targeted.” Certain memes appeared on pages targeted to younger people but not older people. “The IRA was fluent in American trolling culture,” the researchers say.

https://www.alternet.org/ny-times-bombshell-russian-trolls-extensively-targeted-black-americans-and-tried-suppress-democratic

bombshell New York Timesreport (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/russia-2016-influence-campaign.html) reveals the Russian troll operation on social media platforms was far more extensive than first understood. One major aspect of a report prepared for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee finds Russia "extensively" and "specifically" targeted Black Americans.

Russia's Internet Research Agency (I.R.A.), owned by a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, used not only Facebook and Twitter, but also YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, Google+, and especially Instagram.

"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 posts on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its Facebook operations, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee," the Times reports.

Two reports have been prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

One of the reports, by a company called New Knowledge, reveals the "most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets."

In that same report, "researchers discovered many examples of the Russian operators building an audience with one theme and then shifting to another, often more provocative, set of messages. For instance, an Instagram account called @army_of_jesus_ first posted in January 2015 images from The Muppet Show, then shifted to The Simpsons and by early 2016 became Jesus-focused.Multiple memes associated Jesus with Mr. Trump’s campaign and Satan with Mrs. Clinton’s."

Russian trolls worked both to support Donald Trump and to attack Hillary Clinton.

"While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate," the Times states. "The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home."

Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-voter-turnout-fell-in-2016-even-as-a-record-number-of-americans-cast-ballots/) in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.

The paper describes it as "the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day."

Read the entire Times report here (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/russia-2016-influence-campaign.html).

ref

no lnx

Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media

Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, and the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, center, at a dinner in 2011. Mr. Prigozhin was indicted by American prosecutors for his involvement in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.CreditCreditPool photo by Misha Japaridze

By Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel

Dec. 17, 2018

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.

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, Texas, 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 Knowledge report, which was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled release on Monday, is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. They are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and the other companies whose platforms were used.

[Read the New Knowledge report here.]

The second report was written by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University along with Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media. The Washington Post first reported on the Oxford report on Sunday.

[Read the Oxford report here.]

The Russian influence campaign in 2016 was run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency, owned by a businessman, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who is a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Prigozhin and a dozen of the company’s employees were indicted last February as part of the investigation of Russian interference by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.

Both reports stress that the Internet Research Agency created social media accounts under fake names on virtually every available platform. A major goal was to support Donald Trump, first against his Republican rivals in the presidential race, then in the general election, and as president since his inauguration.

Creating accounts designed to pass as belonging to Americans, the Internet Research Agency spread its messages not only via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which have drawn the most attention, but also on YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+, among other platforms. Its attack on the United States used almost exclusively high-tech tools created by American companies.

Image

A four-story building houses the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia.CreditNaira Davlashyan/Associated Press]

The New Knowledge researchers discovered many examples of the Russian operators building an audience with one theme and then shifting to another, often more provocative, set of messages. For instance, an Instagram account called @army_of_jesus_ first posted in January 2015 images from The Muppet Show, then shifted to The Simpsons and by early 2016 became Jesus-focused. Multiple memes associated Jesus with Mr. Trump’s campaign and Satan with Mrs. Clinton’s.

The Russian campaign was the subject of Senate hearings last year and has been widely scrutinized by academic experts. The new reports largely confirm earlier findings: that the campaign was designed to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Mr. Trump and exacerbate existing divisions in American society.

But the New Knowledge report gives particular attention to the Russians’ focus on African-Americans, which is evident to anyone who examines collections of their memes and messages.

“The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,” the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.

The report says that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens.” In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.”

The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African Americans. But the Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife.

Renee DiResta, one of the report’s authors and director of research at New Knowledge, said the Internet Research Agency “leveraged pre-existing, legitimate grievances wherever they could.” As the election effort geared up, the Black Lives Matter movement was at the center of national attention in the United States, so the Russian operation took advantage of it, she said — and added “Blue Lives Matter” material when a pro-police pushback emerged.

“Very real racial tensions and feelings of alienation exist in America, and have for decades,” Ms. DiResta said. “The I.R.A. didn’t create them. It exploits them.”

Everyone Who’s Been Charged in Investigations Related to the 2016 Election

Thirty-seven people have been charged in investigations related to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.]

Aug. 21, 2018]

Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency in the Senate’s data, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers. Just seven pages focused on the political left, drawing 689,045 followers.

While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.

Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.

The New Knowledge report argues that the Internet Research Agency’s presence on Instagram has been underestimated and may have been as effective or more effective than its Facebook effort. The report says there were 187 million engagements on Instagram — users “liking” or sharing the content created in Russia — compared 76.5 million engagements on Facebook.

In 2017, as the American news media focused on the Russian operations on Facebook and Twitter, the Russian effort shifted strongly to Instagram, the report says.

The New Knowledge report criticizes social media companies for misleading the public.

“Regrettably, it appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress,” the report says, noting what it calls one false claim that specific population groups were not targeted by the influence operation and another that the campaign did not seek to discourage voting.

“It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion,” the report says.

The report suggests a grudging respect for the scale and creativity of Russian influence operations. But the Russians were not eager to take credit for their own efforts.

After the election, the report says, the Internet Research Agency put up some 70 posts on Facebook and Instagram that mocked the claims that Russia had interfered in the election.

“You’ve lost and don’t know what to do?” said one such post. “Just blame it on Russian hackers.”

Related Coverage

Russian Trolls Were Sloppy, but Indictment Still ‘Points at the Kremlin’

Feb. 17, 2018

Image

13 Russians Indicted as Mueller Reveals Effort to Aid Trump Campaign

Feb. 16, 2018

Image

The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election

Sept. 7, 2017

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html

The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

By Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti

Sept. 20, 2018

On an October afternoon before the 2016 election, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

Police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

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But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved. In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.

As Mr. Trump emerged in spring 2016 as the improbable favorite for the Republican nomination, the Russian operation accelerated on three fronts — the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents; massive fraud on Facebook and Twitter; and outreach to Trump campaign associates.

Consider 10 days in March. On March 15 of that year, Mr. Trump won five primaries, closing in on his party’s nomination, and crowed that he had become “the biggest political story anywhere in the world.” That same day in Moscow, a veteran hacker named Ivan Yermakov, a Russian military intelligence officer working for a secret outfit called Unit 26165, began probing the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. In St. Petersburg, shift workers posted on Facebook and Twitter at a feverish pace, posing as Americans and following instructions to attack Mrs. Clinton.

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On March 21 in Washington, Mr. Trump announced his foreign policy team, a group of fringe figures whose advocacy of warmer relations with Russia ran counter to Republican orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Unit 26165 was poring over the bounty from a separate attack it had just carried out: 50,000 emails stolen from the Clinton campaign’s chairman.

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On March 24, one of the members of the Trump foreign policy team, George Papadopoulos, sat in the cafe of an upscale London hotel with a Russian woman who introduced herself as Mr. Putin’s niece and offered to help set up a meeting between the Russian president and Mr. Trump. The woman and the adviser exchanged frequent messages in the weeks that followed. Today, Mr. Padadopoulos is unsure that those messages came from the person he met in the cafe.

The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter; of American citizens’ feelings about immigration and race;of American journalists eager for scoops, however modest; of the naïve, or perhaps not so naïve, ambitions of Mr. Trump’s advisers. The Russian trolls, hackers and agents totaled barely 100, and their task was to steer millions of American voters. They knew it would take a village to sabotage an election.

Russians or suspected Russian agents — including oligarchs, diplomats, former military officers and shadowy intermediaries — had dozens of contacts during the campaign with Mr. Trump’s associates. They reached out through email, Facebook and Twitter. They sought introductions through trusted business connections of Mr. Trump’s, obscure academic institutions, veterans groups and the National Rifle Association.

They met Trump campaign aides in Moscow, London, New York and Louisville, Ky. One claimed the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton; another Russian, the Trump campaign was told, would deliver it. In May and June alone, the Trump campaign fielded at least four invitations to meet with Russian intermediaries or officials.

In nearly every case, the Trump aides and associates seemed enthusiastic about their exchanges with the Russians. Over months of such probing, it seems that no one alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the foreign overtures.

Mr. Trump’s position on the Russian contacts has evolved over time:first, that there were none; then, that they did not amount to collusion; next, that in any case collusion was not a crime. That is mere semantics — conspiracy is the technical legal term for abetting the Russians in breaking American laws, such as those outlawing computer hacking and banning foreign assistance to a campaign.

Whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates conspired with the Russians is a central question of the investigation by Mr. Mueller, who has already charged 26 Russians and won convictions or guilty pleas from the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; the former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates; and from Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, has pleaded guilty in a separate case.

But none of the convictions to date involve conspiracy. There remains an alternative explanation to the collusion theory: that the Trump aides, far from certain their candidate would win, were happy to meet the Russians because they thought it might lead to moneymaking deals after the election. “Black Caviar,” read the subject line of an email Mr. Manafort got in July 2016 from his associate in Kiev, Ukraine, hinting at the possibility of new largess from a Russian oligarch with whom they had done business.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School and the great-granddaughter of the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, said that what Russia pulled off, through creativity and sheer luck, would have been the envy of Mr. Putin’s predecessors: puncturing the American sense of superiority and insisting on Russia’s power and place in the world.

“This operation was to show the Americans — that you bastards are just as screwed up as the rest of us,” Professor Khrushcheva said. “Putin fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States. I think this will be studied by the K.G.B.’s successors for a very long time.”

A Timeline of Parallel Threads

Direct contacts

with Russians by

Trump officials

JUNE 16, 2015

Trump announces

candidacy

Time

2016

Russian social

media fraud

Russian

hacking

Denials of

wrongdoing by

Trump and associates

MAY 26, 2016

Trump clinches

nomination

NOV. 8, 2016

Trump wins

election

Federal

investigation of

Russian meddling

JAN. 20, 2017

Inauguration

JANUARY

2018

SEPTEMBER

2018

Continuing…

By The New York Times

See the full timeline of events.

Putin Is Angry

The Russian leader thought the United States, and Hillary Clinton, had sought to undermine his presidency.]

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The first Russian advance party was tiny: two women on a whirlwind American tour. Hitting nine states in three weeks in summer 2014, Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova were supposed to “gather intelligence” to help them mimic Americans on Facebook and Twitter. They snapped photos and chatted up strangers from California to New York, on a sort of Russian “Thelma & Louise” road trip for the era of social media.

Even then, federal prosecutors would later say, the Russian government was thinking about the next United States presidential election — perhaps ahead of most Americans. Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova had been dispatched by their employer, an online propaganda factory in St. Petersburg, to prepare to influence American voters.

But why did Mr. Putin care about the election, then more than two years away? He was seething. The United States, in his view, had bullied and interfered with Russia for long enough. It was high time to fight back.

His motives were rooted in Russia’s ambivalence toward the West, captured in the history of St. Petersburg, Russia’s spectacular northern city and Mr. Putin’s hometown. Peter the Great, the brutal but westward-looking 18th-century czar, had brought in the best Italian architects to construct Russia’s “window on Europe” in a swamp.

Czar Peter’s portrait replaced Vladimir Lenin’s in Mr. Putin’s office when he took a job working for the city’s mayor in the early 1990s. Twenty-five years later, the internet offered a different kind of window on the West — a portal that could be used for a virtual invasion.

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Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, had described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, a remarkable statement from a man whose country experienced revolution, civil war, bloody purges and the deaths of 27 million people in World War II. Like many of his fellow citizens, Mr. Putin was nostalgic for Russia’s lost superpower status. And he resented what he saw as American arrogance.

The Russian leader believed the United States had relentlessly sought to undermine Russian sovereignty and his own legitimacy. The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the so-called color revolutions on Russia’s borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. It had funded pro-democracy Russian activists through American organizations with millions in State Department grants each year.

With little evidence, Mr. Putin believed this American meddling helped produce street demonstrations in Moscow and other cities in 2011, with crowds complaining of a rigged parliamentary election and chanting, “Putin’s a thief!”

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And Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, cheered the protesters on. Russians, she said, “deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”

Mr. Putin blamed Mrs. Clinton for the turmoil, claiming that when she spoke out, his political enemies “heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

The two tangled again the next year when Mr. Putin pushed for a “Eurasian Union” that would in effect compete with the European Union. Mrs. Clinton sharply dismissed the notion, calling it a scheme to “re-Sovietize the region” and saying the United States would try to block it.

By 2013, with his initial hopes for a “reset” of Russian relations dashed, Mr. Obama, like his top diplomat, no longer bothered to be diplomatic. He criticized Russia’s anti-gay legislation, part of Mr. Putin’s effort to become a global champion for conservative values, and gave a biting description of the Russian leader: “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Mr. Putin was reported to be furious.

Video

The White House via YouTubePublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

After Russian troops seized Crimea and carried out a stealth invasion of Ukraine in 2014, relations grew openly hostile.American support for the new government in Kiev and condemnation of Russian behavior heightened Mr. Putin’s rage at being told what he could do and not do in what he considered his own backyard.

If Russia had only a fraction of the United States’ military might and nothing like its economic power, it had honed its abilities in hacking and influence operations through attacks in Eastern Europe. And it could turn these weapons on America to even the score.

By making mischief in the 2016 election, Mr. Putin could wreak revenge on his enemy, Mrs. Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, damaging if not defeating her. He could highlight the polarized state of American democracy, making it a less appealing model for Russians and their neighbors. And he could send a message that Russia would not meekly submit to a domineering America.

Hence the two Russian women who toured the United States in 2014, keyboard warriors granted the unusual privilege of real-world travel, hitting both coasts, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. At that point, according to a Russian document cited by the special counsel, Mr. Putin’s intentions for 2016 were already explicit: to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”

In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.

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Russian Olympic athletes this year in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Mr. Putin had blamed the United States for pushing to investigate the doping scandal that had engulfed the team.CreditJames Hill for The New York Times]

“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”

Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”

If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.

For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties. A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote AlexanderDugin,an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”

Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”

Asked about the surging Mr. Trump in December 2015, Mr. Putin said he was “a talent, without any doubt,” and “absolutely the leader in the presidential race.” He also applied to the candidate the Russian word yarkii, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant” but which some reports mistranslated as “brilliant,” an assessment that Mr. Trump immediately began repeating.

“It’s always a great honor to be so nicely complimented,” Mr. Trump said, “by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

Moscow’s Dream Team

As Donald J. Trump emerged as the favorite for the nomination, his campaign brought on aides tied to Russia.

Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.

In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”

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They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.

To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.

Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.

Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.

Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.

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In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations andpassed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.

The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.

“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”

The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.

“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.

Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.

F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”

Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.

“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.

In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.

“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.

Video

The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.

Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.

More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.

“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.

As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.

A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.

At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.

Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.

And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.

What exactly transpired during the meeting is still a mystery, but it appears that the Russians pulled a bait-and-switch. They used the session to push for an end to the crippling economic sanctions that Mr. Obama had imposed on Russia.

Donald Trump Jr. has said how disappointed he and other campaign advisers were that they didn’t get what the Russians had promised. The campaign’s reaction to the Russian attempts to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was not to rebuff them or call law enforcement — it was to try to exploit them.

Experts who have studied Russian operations for decades see the catalog of contacts and communications between Russians and Mr. Trump’s advisers as a loosely coordinated effort by Russian intelligence both to get insight into the campaign and to influence it.

“The Russians aren’t reckless, and I don’t see them going through with this effort without thinking they had a willing partner in the dance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. officer who served as the spy agency’s station chief in Moscow.

By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.

American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.

Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.

The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.

He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

Guccifer’s Game

Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.

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A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.

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“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.

Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.

Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.

“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”

In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.

Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.

Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.

See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.

The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.

The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.

The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”

“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.

But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.

Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.

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Video

Fox News via YouTubePublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

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But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.

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In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.

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“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”

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“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.

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Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.

The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.

Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”

CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.

But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.

After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”

The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.

“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.

But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.

“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.

Video

The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.

“Because we know the ideas of Mr. Stevenson, we in our hearts all favor him,” Khrushchev said in a message passed on by the Soviet ambassador. “Could the Soviet press assist Mr. Stevenson’s personal success? How?”

Mr. Stevenson declined the offer, in language that reflected the broad American political consensus about foreign election interference. “I believe I made it clear to him,” Mr. Stevenson wrote, “that I considered the offer of such assistance highly improper, indiscreet and dangerous to all concerned.”

Russia did not deliver on Mr. Trump’s request for Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. But it had obtained something just as useful: 50,000 emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, stolen via a phishing attack by the G.R.U. Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime Trump friend, seemed to have advance word. “Trust me,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 25, it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

But WikiLeaks withheld the Podesta emails for months after receiving them from “Guccifer” in June, evidently waiting for the right moment to have the biggest impact on the race. The time came on Oct. 7, amid two blows to the Trump campaign.

See the timeline of events that surround the release of the emails.

That day, American intelligence agencies made their first official statement that the Russian government, with the approval of its “senior-most officials,” was behind the hacking and leaking of the Democratic emails.

:{:{}:

And then came a potentially lethal disclosure for the Trump campaign: the shocking “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged of groping and sexually assaulting women. The candidate desperately needed to change the subject — and that was the moment WikiLeaks posted the first of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

They were invaluable for political journalists, offering embarrassing comments from staffers about Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings and the full texts of her highly paid speeches to banks and corporations, which she had refused to release. WikiLeaks assisted by highlighting interesting tidbits in yellow.

Soon, Mr. Trump was delighting his supporters by reading from the stolen emails on the campaign trail. “Now, this just came out,” he told a fired-up crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in October, brandishing a page of highlights. “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!”

:{:{}:

“Crooked Hillary” had said “behind closed doors,” Mr. Trump declared, that terrorism was “not a threat”; that she had “a great relationship with the financial industry”; that ISIS might infiltrate groups of refugees coming to the United States; that a politician needed to have “both a public and private position” on policies; and on and on.

The quotes were taken out of context, of course, and subjected to the most damaging interpretation. But they seemed to offer a glimpse of Mrs. Clinton’s hidden views.

For the last month of the campaign, in daily releases that kept the Clinton team on the defensive, WikiLeaks delivered the Russians’ gift. If the July D.N.C. dump had been an explosion, the October series was more like unrelenting sniper fire. Whether the timing was decided by the Russians or by Mr. Assange, it proved devastatingly effective.

Imaginary Americans

Russian trolls, using fake accounts on social media, reached nearly as many Americans as would vote in the election.

:{:{}:

David Michael Smith, a Houston political scientist and activist, spotted the alarming call on Facebook. A group called Heart of Texas was suddenly urging Texans to come at noon on May 21, 2016, to protest a 14-year-old Islamic center in downtown Houston.

:{:{}:

“Stop Islamization of Texas,” the post declared, with a photo of the Islamic Da’wah Center, which it called a “shrine of hatred.” It invited protesters to prepare for battle: “Feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!”

:{:{}:

“We immediately asked, ‘What the blank is the Heart of Texas’?’” recalled Mr. Smith, who started calling friends to organize a counterprotest.

Months later, he would find out.

Heart of Texas, which garnered a quarter-million followers on Facebook, was one of 470 Facebook pages created 5,000 miles from Houston at the Internet Research Agency, the oddly named St. Petersburg company that would become the world’s most famous manipulator of social media. The two Russian employees who had visited Texas during that 2014 American tour, Ms. Bogacheva and Ms. Krylova, evidently had returned home with big ideas about how to exploit the emotional chasms in American politics and culture.

Just as the Russians’ Guccifer character had reached out to American activists, journalists and WikiLeaks, the Russian online trolls understood that their real political power would come from mobilizing Americans. The Russian company’s formula was simple: tap into a simmering strain of opinion in the United States and pour on the fuel.

Consider the Texas protest. After the Russians put up the “Stop Islamization” Facebook post, several dozen like-minded Texans added their own incendiary comments. “Allah Sucks,” wrote one, adding a threat to kill any Muslim who tried to visit him. Another wrote of the Islamic center, “Need to Blow this place up.”

A dozen yelling white supremacists turned out for the protest, at least two of them with assault rifles and a third with a pistol. Others held Confederate flags and a “White Lives Matter” banner.

Houston police managed to keep them away from a much larger crowd of counterprotesters — some of whom had responded to a second Russian Facebook call. In a blatant attempt to create a confrontation, another Internet Research Agency page, this one called United Muslims of America, had asked people to rally at exactly the same time and place to “Save Islamic Knowledge.”

The event had no lasting consequences, though clearly it could have ended in tragedy. Still, it demonstrated that young Russians tapping on keyboards in 12-hour shifts could act as puppet masters for unsuspecting Americans many time zones away.

:{:{}:

When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

See the timeline of events that shows Russia’s social media campaign.

But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Tweets from Russian Trolls, by Day

Oct. 6

18,634 tweets

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Election Day

5,000

tweets

Feb.

2016

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Oct. 6

18,634 tweets

Election Day

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

5,000

tweets

Feb.

2016

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

Feb.

2016

Bars show the number of tweets per day from Russian troll accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

March

April

May

Tweets spike on Oct. 6, the day before the Obama administration formally accuses the Russian government of hacking.

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct. 6

18,634 tweets

Oct.

Election

Day

Nov.

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, Clemson University

By The New York Times

And Facebook was only the biggest of the engines powering the Russian messages.

:{:{}:

On Instagram, there were 170 ersatz Russian accounts that posted 120,000 times and reached about 20 million people. Twitter reported that in the 10 weeks before the election some 3,814 Internet Research Agency accounts interacted with 1.4 million people — and that another 50,258 automated “bot” accounts that the company judged to be Russia-linked tweeted about the election. The trolls created at least two podcasts, posted Vine videos, blogged on Tumblr, sought donations via PayPal and even exploited the Pokémon Go craze.

Without American social media companies, the Russian influence campaign could not have operated. The St. Petersburg trolls tapped the power of Silicon Valley for their stealth intervention in American democracy.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who has studied three million Internet Research Agency tweets, said he was “impressed with both their level of absurdist creativity and keen understanding of American psychology.” They knew “exactly what buttons to press” and operated with “industrial efficiency,” he said.

The Russian troll operation had gotten its start two years before, focusing at first on government targets closer to home.

In 2014, Vitaly Bespalov, then 23, finished a journalism degree in the Siberian city of Tyumen and signed on as a “content manager” at the Internet Research Agency, which looked vaguely like a digital marketing firm and offered a relatively generous salary of $1,000 a month.

Mr. Bespalov was surprised to discover that his job was to write or swipe stories to post on counterfeit Ukrainian websites, spinning the conflict there to fit the Russian government’s view. He had to be sure always to use the word “terrorists” for the Ukrainian fighters opposed to the Russian invasion that was tearing the country apart.

“My first days on the job I was in shock — I had no idea what kind of an operation this was,” Mr. Bespalov said in a recent interview while vacationing in Ukraine: his first visit to the country about which he had written so many bogus stories.

He was put off by the company’s work but said he chose to stick around for several months, in part to study its operations. “It was very monotonous and boring,” Mr. Bespalov said. “It seemed that almost no one liked this work. But almost nobody quit, because everyone needed the money.”

Soon he began hearing about a new, secretive department inside the St. Petersburg company that was recruiting English speakers to focus on the United States.

Like Peter the Great, the Internet Research Agency borrowed Western technology while shunning Western notions of democracy. As Mr. Bespalov quickly realized, the company was not a normal business but a well-compensated tool of the Russian state. It was owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who overcame an early prison sentence for robbery to create a thriving catering business. He then built a fortune as a loyal contractor willing to provide internet trolls, mercenary soldiers or anything else required by his patron, Mr. Putin.

In the company’s new department, some 80 young English speakers worked in shifts to feed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts imitating the snark and fury of outraged Americans. They stole photos, favoring attractive young women, for their Twitter profiles. They copied or created sharp poster-like commentaries on American life and politics, only occasionally slipping up with grammatical mistakes.They focused their efforts on pages that touched American nerves, with names like “Guns4Life,” “Pray for Police,” “Stop All Invaders,” “South United” and — mimicking Mr. Trump — “America First.”

[eg pix]

If Mr. Trump was borrowing the hacked emails from the Russians for his stump speeches, the online trolls in St. Petersburg returned the favor, picking up the candidate’s populist rhetoric. Even pages that seemed nominally hostile to him often worked in his favor: “Woke Blacks” critiqued Mrs. Clinton for alleged hostility to African-Americans; “United Muslims of America” showed her with a woman in a head scarf and a slogan — “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims” — that seemed aimed at generating a backlash.

The Russians managed to call a dozen or more rallies like the one in Houston, sometimes paying unwitting American activists for their help via money transfer. The same method may have been used to get the bridge banners of Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama hung.

An Internet Research Agency Twitter account, @cassishere, posted a photo of the Putin banner on the Manhattan Bridge, winning a credit from The New York Daily News. In Washington, the Russian account @LeroyLovesUSA tweeted about suspending the Obama banner, then added more tweets with critiques of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy in stilted English.

Facebook,reluctant to step into the divisive politics of the Trump presidency, did not acknowledge the Russian intrusion until nearly a year after the election, asserting that Russia had chiefly aimed at sowing division. A closer look suggested a more focused goal: damaging Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump.

Many of the Facebook memes portrayed Mrs. Clinton as angry, corrupt or crazed. Mr. Trump was depicted as his campaign preferred: strong, decisive, courageous, willing to shun political correctness to tell hard truths. The Russian operation also boosted Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who had dined with Mr. Putin in Moscow, to draw votes from Mrs. Clinton. It encouraged supporters of Mr. Sanders to withhold their votes from Mrs. Clinton even after he endorsed her.

The impact is impossible to gauge; the Internet Research Agency was a Kremlin fire hose of influence wielded amid a hurricane of a presidential election. Christopher Painter, who had served under President George W. Bush at the Justice Department and as the State Department’s coordinator for cyberissues from 2011 to 2017, said the propaganda flood and the leaked emails certainly affected the vote. But no one can say whether it made the difference in an election decided by the tiniest of margins, fewer than 100,000 votes in three states.

“It’s impossible to know how much voter suppression it caused, discouraging people from coming out,” Mr. Painter said. “It’s impossible to know how many votes it changed.”

He added that “people don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled” — hence the strenuous efforts from Mr. Trump and his supporters to deny or dismiss the significance of the Russian interference.

A case in point would be Harry Miller, a devoted Trump supporter in Florida who was paid to organize a rally in which a woman portraying Mrs. Clinton sat behind bars on the back of his pickup truck. It turned out that the people who had ordered up the rally, “Matt Skiber” and “Joshua Milton,” were pseudonyms for Russians at the Internet Research Agency, according to the Mueller indictment.

But don’t tell that to Mr. Miller. Contacted via Twitter, he insisted that he had not been manipulated by Russian trolls.

“They were not Russians, and you know it,” Mr. Miller wrote, adding, “If you don’t then you are the one snookered.”

‘It’s a Hoax, O.K.?’

The president has created doubts about the investigation and an affinity for Russia among his supporters.

The White House statement released at 7:21 p.m. on May 17, 2017, was measured, even anodyne. Reacting to the news that Mr. Mueller had been appointed special counsel for the Russia investigation, the statement quoted Mr. Trump saying that he was “looking forward to this matter concluding quickly,” and that in the meantime he would be fighting “for the people and issues that matter most to the future of our country.”

Exactly 12 hours and 31 minutes later, early in the morning without his staff around him, he told the world what he really thought.

“This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” he wrote in a tweet.

It had been little more than a week since the president had fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but the “Russia thing” wasn’t going away. Now the president was up against someone who could become even more formidable — a careful, tenacious former Marine whose stewardship of the F.B.I. during the Bush and Obama years had been praised by Washington’s establishment.

Mr. Trump’s instinct was to fire Mr. Mueller, but he settled for a different strategy. He has used all his power to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation.

Revelation upon revelation about Russian encounters with Trump associates has followed in the months since Mr. Mueller was appointed, intensifying the fear in the White House. Mr. Trump has used his Twitter pulpit to repeatedly assault the Mueller inquiry, and has made scathing remarks at rallies about claims of Russian interference. “It’s a hoax, O.K.?” he told a Pennsylvania crowd last month. The attacks have had an impact on how Americans view the country’s national security apparatus, how they view the Russia story, even how they view Russia itself.

See the full timeline of Mr. Trump’s repeated denials and attacks.

The strategy has helped sow doubts about the special counsel’s work in part because Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors only rarely go public with the evidence they have been steadily gathering in secret interviews and closed-door sessions of a grand jury.

During a period of 146 days over this year — between the Feb. 16 indictment of the Internet Research Agency operatives and the July 13 indictment of Russian intelligence officers — Mr. Mueller’s office was effectively silent. The president was not, sending at least 94 tweets that denied he had been involved in “collusion,” called the Russian interference a “hoax” or labeled the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt.”

By July, one poll showed that 45 percent of Americans disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the investigation, a 14-point increase from January. The shift was even more dramatic among Republican voters: from 49 percent to 78 percent. More recent polls, conducted since the indictment of the G.R.U. officers and Mr. Manafort’s conviction, have shown a reversal of the trend.

The president’s aides hardly make a secret of their goal to discredit the investigation before a jury of the public. There is little expectation that Mr. Mueller would ignore Justice Department guidelines and try to indict a sitting president, so Mr. Trump’s lawyers see Congress and impeachment as the only threat. Turn the public against impeachment, the thinking goes, and Congress is less likely to act.

“Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s omnipresent lawyer, told The New York Times last month, without citing any data to buttress his assertion.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” he said. “And my client’s happy.”

Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money. But the inquiry has buffeted his presidency, provoked concern that his attempts to thwart the investigation amount to obstruction of justice and fed his suspicion that the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies — what he calls “the deep state” — are conspiring against him.

Video

The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

The desire of the president to make deals with Mr. Putin, and the longstanding skepticism of the intelligence community about Russian intentions and actions, might have made a clash inevitable. But Mr. Trump appears to have had success in persuading some Americans that the spy and law enforcement agencies are corrupt and hyperpartisan. He has scrambled alliances that solidified over decades, including the Republican Party’s reflexive support of the national security agencies. A president in open war with the F.B.I., once inconceivable, is now part of the daily news cycle.

Mr. Trump began laying the foundation immediately after he won the presidency, when he questioned the intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia had disrupted the election, and likened America’s spies to Nazis. Since taking office, he has worked with partners in Congress to cast the agencies as part of an insurgency against the White House.

It continued in July, when he stood next to Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and declared that he trusted the Russian president’s assurances that Moscow was innocent of interfering in the 2016 election.

And it continues today. Early one morning last week, hours before flying to Pennsylvania to honor the victims of the flight that crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, the president fired off a tweet that appeared to quote something he had seen on Fox News.

:{:{}:

“‘We have found nothing to show collusion between President Trump & Russia, absolutely zero, but every day we get more documentation showing collusion between the FBI & DOJ, the Hillary campaign, foreign spies & Russians, incredible.’”

The reshuffling of alliances has seeped into the media, where the president’s reliable allies have been joined by voices on the left to dismiss the Russia story as overblown. They warn of a new Red Scare.

On Fox News, the network where Sean Hannity fulminates nightly about Mr. Mueller and his team, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the left-leaning news site The Intercept and a champion of government whistle-blowers, has appeared regularly to dismiss revelations about the investigation and decry officials “willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes,” in order to damage Mr. Trump.

Multiple frenzied television segments and hyped news stories have given credence to the concerns of Mr. Greenwald and others about a 21st-century McCarthyism. And critics of the “deep state” were given powerful ammunition after the release of text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the Russia investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, that revealed their animosity toward Mr. Trump. The pair, who were involved in a romantic relationship at the time, have been skewered regularly on Mr. Hannity’s show as the “Trump-hating F.B.I. lovebirds.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s glowing words about Mr. Putin and Russia have created a new affinity for Russia — in particular its social conservatism and toughness on terrorism — among Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters.

During a period of myriad accounts about Russia’s attempts to disrupt the last election, the percentage of Republicans who view Mr. Putin favorably has more than doubled (from 11 percent to 25 percent), according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Democrats are now far more likely than Republicans to see Russia as a threat. An October 2017 poll showed that 63 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans said they saw “Russia’s power and influence” as a significant threat to the United States.

Once again, Mr. Trump has flipped the script in the party of Reagan: A country that was once seen as a geopolitical foe is now embraced by many Republicans as a bastion of Christianity and traditional values.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that despite the country’s relative economic and military weakness, Mr. Putin had often played a poor hand deftly. “Across many dimensions, Putin is using all kinds of instruments of power,” he said.

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“It feels to me,” the former ambassador said, “like he’s winning and we’re losing.”

On July 16, the president woke early in Helsinki, hours before he was to sit face to face with Mr. Putin. The meeting came three days after Mr. Mueller indicted the 12 Russian intelligence officers. Once again, Mr. Trump dashed off a tweet.

“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Russia’s foreign ministry responded with a simple tweet hours later.

“We agree.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research. Graphics by Larry Buchanan, Karen Yourish, Derek Watkins and Denise Lu. Produced by Andrew Rossback.

The Story Behind the Story

To help make sense of the Russia investigation, reporters looked for lessons from the coverage of another complex White House affair: Watergate. A Times Insider column tells the story.

Related Coverage

A Timeline Showing the Full Scale of Russia’s Unprecedented Interference in the 2016 Election, and Its Aftermath

Sept. 20, 2018

Image

Collecting the Details of the Russia Investigation in One Place

Sept. 20, 2018

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-troll-farm-13-suspects-indicted-for-interference-in-us-election/2018/02/16/2504de5e-1342-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?utm_term=.134288596a93

National Security

Russian troll farm, 13 suspects indicted in 2016 election interference

By Devlin Barrett, Sari Horwitz and Rosalind S. Helderman

February 16

The Justice Department’s special counsel announced a sweeping indictment Friday of a notorious Russian group of Internet trolls — charging 13 individuals and three companies with a long-running scheme to criminally interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, was named in the indictment as the hub of an ambitious effort to trick Americans online into following and promoting Russian-fed propaganda that pushed 2016 voters toward then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and away from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

The indictment charges that the Russian efforts began in 2014, when three of the Russian conspirators visited 10 states, gathering intelligence about U.S. politics. Officials say that as the operation progressed, the suspects also engaged in extensive online conversations with Americans who became unwitting tools of the Russian efforts. The indictment does not accuse the Russian government of involvement in the scheme, nor does it claim that it succeeded in swaying any votes.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said the suspects “allegedly conducted what they called ‘information warfare against the United States,’ with the stated goal of spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

The suspects, Rosenstein said, “took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists.”

On Twitter, President Trump declared that he was vindicated.

“Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President,” he wrote. “The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!”

[Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat unchecked]

The 37-page indictment includes some startling accusations against the election trolls, including that when news broke in September that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was investigating their activity, one of them wrote: “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” The person, named as Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, allegedly added: “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.”

Such accusations suggest that Mueller’s investigators were able to penetrate deep into the internal communications of the St. Petersburg troll farm, but the indictment does not spell out how they gained such access.

Friday’s indictment provides the most exhaustive description to date of allegations about Russian interference in the election, describing an 80-person team with specialists in graphics, data analysis and search-engine optimization that set out to con Americans online.

At times, they paid people to engage in political theater, such as paying for the construction of “a cage large enough to hold an actress depicting Clinton in a prison uniform,” according to the charges. It is against U.S. law for non-Americans to make expenditures or disbursements in an effort to affect the outcome of a U.S. election.

'It is spooky'

Prosecutors said the Russians, using fake identities, contacted Trump campaign staffers in Florida offering to hold rallies to support Trump. Susie Wiles, who was co-chair of the Trump campaign in Florida in August 2016 and later became the campaign’s chief Florida staffer, said no campaign official was aware of the Russian effort.

“It’s not the way I do the business; it’s not the way the Trump campaign in Florida did business,” she said. “It is spooky. It is awful. It makes you look over your shoulder. It shouldn’t happen. I’m anxious for this to be uncovered so this never happens again.”

In Congress, politicians in both parties condemned the alleged Russian interference.

“We have known that Russians meddled in the election, but these indictments detail the extent of the subterfuge,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement. He accused the indicted Russians of “a sinister and systematic attack on our political system.”

“Today’s announcement underscores why we need to follow the facts and work to protect the integrity of future elections,” he added.

But that very task — taking steps to prevent future election meddling — has thus far stymied the leaders and committees on Capitol Hill investigating Russian actions. In the House, the parties are openly accusing one another of prioritizing political attacks over taking real steps to protect the country.

“Today’s indictments should lay to rest any assertions by President Trump that the special counsel’s investigation is a ‘hoax’ or a ‘witch hunt,’?” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. “At this point, any step President Trump may take to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation — including removing Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein or threatening to remove special counsel Mueller directly — will have to be seen as a direct attempt to aid the Russian government in attacking American democracy.”

Prosecutors said the Internet Research Agency kept a list of real Americans whom its employees had contacted using false personas and asked to assist the effort. The list, which numbered more than 100 people by late August 2016, included the U.S. citizens’ contact information, a summary of each person’s political views and the activities the Russians had asked them to undertake.

None of those charged are in custody, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office. Russia does not allow its citizens to be extradited to the United States to face trial, so it is unlikely the individuals will be turned over, but the indictment probably will prevent them from traveling outside Russia.

Some of the Russians posed as Americans and, without revealing their Russian identities, “communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities,” the indictment said.

By February 2016, the suspects had decided whom they were supporting in the race, according to the indictment, which quoted an instruction to Internet Research Agency specialists to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them.)” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was running for the Democratic nomination.

Prosecutors say some Russian employees of the troll farm were chastised in September 2016 when they had a “low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton” and were told it was “imperative to intensify criticizing” the Democratic nominee in future pieces.

Stolen identities

The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Many of the charges center on the use of at least a half-dozen bank accounts to buy ads online or participate in political activism.

[Russian ads show sophistication of influence campaign]

:{:{}:

In a related move, prosecutors announced that a Santa Paula, Calif., man had pleaded guilty Monday in Washington to identity fraud, admitting that he made tens of thousands of dollars by creating hundreds of bank accounts, often using stolen identities. Richard Pinedo, 28, sold the accounts to unidentified offshore users, apparently including suspects connected to the Russia probe.

Prosecutors released documents unsealed Friday that showed that Pinedo was charged Feb. 7 after entering a plea deal five days earlier in which he agreed to cooperate with investigators in exchange for an advisory sentencing guideline of 12 to 18 months in prison.

Pinedo attorney Jeremy Lessem said his client “had absolutely no knowledge” of who his purchasers were or what they did with the information he sold, adding that to the extent his actions may have assisted anyone in interfering with the election, that “was done completely without his knowledge or understanding.”

:{:{}:

One of those indicted Friday was Yevgeniy ViktorovichPrigozhin, a well-known figure that the Russian news media has identified as the financial backer of the Internet Research Agency. He is a caterer who has been nicknamed “Putin’s chef” because of his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering, two Russian businesses also charged by Mueller’s team Friday, previously have been identified as Prigozhin vehicles.

“The Americans are very impressionable people, and they see what they want to see,” Prigozhin told Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency in response to the indictment. “I respect them very much.”

Referring to the list of indicted individuals, he added: “I am not at all disappointed that I appear in this list. If they want to see the devil — let them.”

The Internet Research Agency was at the center of Silicon Valley’s investigation into Russian meddling during the 2016 election. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google all found evidence that the private firm used social media to divide American voters across a range of polarizing issues, including race, religion, gun rights and immigration.

A Twitter spokesman said: “Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election, in part by abusing social media platforms, go against everything we at Twitter believe. Any activity of this kind is intolerable, and we all must do more to prevent it.”

The Internet Research Agency is regarded as the most prominent part of the Russian disinformation campaign, although congressional investigators pushed for evidence of other operations, including from countries other than Russia, that shared the same purpose.

Anton Troianovski in Berlin and Craig Timberg, Spencer S. Hsu and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.

How Russian Facebook ads worked

The notorious Kremlin-linked ‘troll farm’ and the Russians trying to take it down

Twitter to tell 677,000 users they were had by the Russians. Some signs show the problem continues.

Devlin Barrett

Devlin Barrett writes about national security and law enforcement for The Washington Post. He has previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and the New York Post, where he started as a copy boy. Follow

Sari Horwitz

Sari Horwitz covers the Justice Department, law enforcement and criminal justice issues nationwide for The Washington Post, where she has been a reporter for 33 years. Follow

Rosalind Helderman

Rosalind Helderman is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2001.

no lnx

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http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-mueller-probe-indictment-of-12-russians-for-hacking-democrats/3087/

indict 29 pp

p. 2

Defendants VIKT OR BORISOVICH BORIS ALEKSEYEVICH

ANTONOV, DMITRIY SERGEYEVICH IVAN SERGEYEVICH YERMAKOV,

ALEKSEY VIKTOROVICH LUKASHEV, SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH MORGACHEV,

NIKOLAY YURYEVICH KOZACHEK, PAVEL VYACHESLAVOVICH YERSHOV, ARTEM

ANDREYEVICH ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH OSADCHUK, and

ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH POTENIKIN were GRU officers who knowingly and

intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury

(collectively the ?Conspirators?), to gain unauthorized access (to ?hack?) into the computers of

U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from

these computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S.

presidential election.

Starting in at least March 2016, the Conspirators used a variety of means to hack the email

accounts of Volunteers and employees of the U.S. presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton (the

?Clinton Campaign?), including the email account of the Clinton Campaign?s chairman.

By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators also hacked into the computer networks of

the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National

Committee The Conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of

and DNC employees, implanted hundreds of ?les containing malicious computer code

(?malware?), and stole emails and other documents from the and DNC.

By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators began to plan the release of materials stolen

from the Clinton Campaign, and DNC.

Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands

of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including

frum book does not name:

russian dis-info 400 ppl, 20m rubles (400K$ per mo; 40 rooms0 russian version of FB, made fake ppl on US soc media 115; 100K ads; target 10 m ppl in slected districts and states; msg reached 126M FB users 116.

russia ~ Fr Macron, so vidfeo ell cut hand wash inverted; rebel media posobiec got adv notce of email dump; big overlap betw anti-marcon and pro djt, 18K bots; 118

cernovich pizzagate guy got WH leaks (susan rice unmasked)

---

wiki

Internet Research Agency (IRA) (Russian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language): Агентство интернет-исследований, also known as Glavset\2] and known in Russian Internet slang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang) as the Trolls from Olgino) is a Russian company, based in Saint Petersburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg), engaged in online influence operations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_operations) on behalf of Russian business and political interests. The Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections (report) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assessing_Russian_Activities_and_Intentions_in_Recent_US_Elections_%28report%29) issued in January 2017 by the United States Intelligence Community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community) has described the Agency as a troll farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_farm) financed by a Putin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin) ally with ties to Russian intelligence services, with some of the trolls having previously been used to advocate online for pro-Russia causes in Ukraine. The agency has employed fake accounts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_puppetry) registered on major social networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network), discussion boards, online newspaper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_newspaper) sites, and video hosting services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_hosting_service) to promote the Kremlin's interests in domestic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_Vladimir_Putin) and foreign policy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_Vladimir_Putin) including Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine) and the Middle East (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East) as well as [attempting to influence the 2016 United States presidential election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections). More than 1,000 employees reportedly worked in a single building of the agency in 2015.

The extent to which a Russian agency has tried to influence public opinion using social media became better known after a June 2014 BuzzFeed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed) article greatly expanded on government documents published by hackers earlier that year.\3] The IRA gained more attention by June 2015, when one of its offices was reported as having data from fake accounts used for biased [Internet trolling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll). Subsequently, there were news reports of individuals receiving monetary compensation for performing these tasks.[1]

On 16 February 2018, a United States grand jury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury) indicted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment) 13 Russian nationals and 3 Russian entities, including the Internet Research Agency, on charges of violating criminal laws with the intent to interfere "with U.S. elections and political processes", according to the Justice Department.[4]

Contents

[hide]

1Origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Origin)

2Organizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Organizers)

2.1Strategic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Strategic)

2.2Tactical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Tactical)

3Offices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Offices)

3.1In Saint Petersburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#In_Saint_Petersburg)

3.2In other cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#In_other_cities)

4Work organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Work_organization)

5Trolling themes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Trolling_themes)

6Organized anti-Ukrainian campaign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Organized_anti-Ukrainian_campaign)

7Reactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Reactions)

8Assessments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Assessments)

9Additional activities of organizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Additional_activities_of_organizers)

9.1Rallies and protests organized by IRA in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Rallies_and_protests_organized_by_IRA_in_the_United_States)

10Lawsuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Lawsuit)

11Indictments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Indictments)

12Notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Notes)

13See also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#See_also)

14References (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#References)

15Further reading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Further_reading)

16External links (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#External_links)

Origin

See also: Web brigades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades)

The company was founded in mid-2013.\5] In 2013, Novaya Gazeta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta) newspaper reported that Internet Research Agency Ltd's office was in [Olgino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olgino), a historic district of Saint Petersburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg).[6]

The terms "Trolls from Olgino" and "Olgino's trolls" have become general terms denoting trolls who spread pro-Russian propaganda, not only necessarily those based at the office in Olgino.[7][8][9]

Organizers

Strategic

Russian newspaper Vedomosti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedomosti) links the approved-by-Russian-authorities strategy of public consciousness manipulation through new media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media) to Vyacheslav Volodin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Volodin), first deputy of the Vladimir Putin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin) Presidential Administration of Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Administration_of_Russia).[5][10]

Tactical

External video| Why are Russian trolls spreading online hoaxes in the U.S.? (https://youtu.be/6hUze1e0OiM), PBS News Hour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS_News_Hour) (PBS is a publicly funded American broadcaster), 8 June 2015 ^[11] |

RUSSIAN INVASION: Bots and trolls take over the web! (https://youtu.be/43L2GODdQnc) RT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_%28TV_network%29) (RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government), 3 June 2014[12]

Journalists also note that Alexey Soskovets (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexey_Soskovets&action=edit&redlink=1), who had participated in the Russian youth political community, was directly connected to the office in Olgino, and that his company, North-Western Service Agency, won 17 or 18 (according to different sources) contracts for organizing celebrations, forums and sport competitions for authorities of Saint Petersburg and that Soskovets' company was the only participant in half of those bids. In mid-2013 the agency won a tender for providing freight services for participants of Seliger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seliger_%28forum%29) camp.[6][13]

In 2014, according to Russian media, Internet Research Ltd. (Russian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language): «Интернет исследования») was founded in March 2014, joined IRA's activity. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta)reported that this company is a successor of Internet Research Agency Ltd.[14] Internet Research Ltd. is considered to be linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin), head of the holding company Concord Management and Consulting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_Management_and_Consulting). The "Trolls of Olgino" are considered to be his project. As of October 2014, the company belonged to Mikhail Bystrov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bystrov), who had been the head of the police station at Moscow district of Saint Petersburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovsky_District,_Saint_Petersburg).[15]

Russian media point out that according to documents, published by hackers from Anonymous International (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_International), Concord Management is directly involved with trolling administration through the agency. Researchers cite e-mail correspondence, in which Concord Management gives instructions to trolls and receives reports on accomplished work.[8] According to journalists, Concord Management organized banquets in the Kremlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Kremlin) and also cooperated with Voentorg and the Russian Ministry of Defence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Defence_%28Russia%29).[citation ^needed]

Despite links to Alexei Soskovets, Nadejda Orlova, deputy head of the Committee for Youth Policy in Saint Petersburg, disputed a connection between her institution and the trolling offices.[6]

Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessikka_Aro), who reported extensively on the pro-Russian trolling activities in Finland, was targeted by an organized campaign of hate, disinformation and harassment.[16][17][18]

Offices

In Saint Petersburg

In Olgino

As reported by Novaya Gazeta, in the end of August 2013, the following message appeared in social networks: "Internet operators wanted! Job at chic office in Olgino!!! (st. Staraya Derevnia), salary 25960 per month (USD$780 as of 2013). Task: posting comments at profile sites in the Internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. Reports via screenshots. Individual schedule [...] Payment every week, 1180 per shift (from 8.00 to 16.00, from 10.30 to 18.30, from 14.00 to 22.00). PAYMENTS EVERY WEEK AND FREE MEALS!!! Official job placement or according to contract (at will). Tuition possible."[6]

As reported by media and former employees, the office in Olgino had existed and had been functioning since September 2013. It was situated in a white cottage,[7] 15 minutes by an underground railway from Staraya Derevnia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staraya_Derevnya_%28Saint_Petersburg_Metro%29) station, opposite Olgino railway station.[6] Workplaces for troll-employees were placed in basement rooms.[13][19]

Savushkina Street

According to Russian online newspaper DP.ru (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B1%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B3), several months before October 2014 the office moved from Olgino to a four-story building at 55 Savushkina Street.[15][20] As reported by journalists, the building is officially an uncompleted construction and stayed as such as of March 2015.[14]

A New York Times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times) investigative reporter was told that the Internet Research Agency had shortened its name to "Internet Research," and as of June 2015 had been asked to leave the 55 Savushkina Street location "a couple of months ago" because "it was giving the entire building a bad reputation." A possibly related organization, FAN or Federal News Agency, was located in the building. The New York Times article describes various experiences reported by former employees of the Internet Research Agency at the Savushkina Street location. It also describes several disruptive hoaxes in the US and Europe, such as the Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Chemicals_Plant_explosion_hoax), that may be attributable to the Internet Research Agency or similar Russian-based organizations.[21]

In other cities

Novaya Gazeta reported that, according to Alexey Soskovets, head of the office in Olgino, North-Western Service Agency was hiring employees for similar projects in Moscow and other cities in 2013.[6]

Work organization

More than 1,000 paid bloggers and commenters reportedly worked only in a single building at Savushkina Street in 2015.[22] Many other employees work remotely. According to BuzzFeed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed), more than 600 people were generally employed in the trolls' office earlier, in June 2014.[3] Each commentator has a daily quota of 100 comments.[6]

Trolls take shifts writing mainly in blogs on LiveJournal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal) and Vkontakte (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkontakte), about subjects along the propaganda lines assigned. Included among the employees are artists who draw political cartoons.[14] They work for 12 hours every other two days. A blogger's quota is ten posts per shift, each post at least 750 characters. A commenter's norm is 126 comments and two posts per account. Each blogger is in charge of three accounts.[15][20]

Employees at the Olgino office earned 25,000 Russian rubles per month; those at the Savushkina Street office earned approximately 40,000 Russian rubles.[15][20] In May 2014, Fontanka.ru described schemes for plundering the federal budget, intended to go toward the trolling organization.[8][5] In 2017 another whistleblower said that with bonuses and long working hours the salary can reach 80,000 rubles.[23]

An employee interviewed by The Washington Post (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post) described the work:

I immediately felt like a character in the book 1984 by George Orwell — a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.[24]

Trolling themes

According to the testimonies of the investigative journalists and former employees of the offices, the main topics for posts included:[6][9][15][20]

Criticism of Alexei Navalny (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny), his sponsors, and Russian opposition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_opposition) in general;[14]

Criticism of Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine)'s and the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States)' foreign policies, and of the top politicians of these states;

Praise for Vladimir Putin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin) and the policy of the Russian Federation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Federation).

Praise for and defense of Bashar al-Assad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad).[25]

Journalists have written that themes of trolling were consistent with those of other Russian propaganda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_propaganda) outlets in topics and timing. Technical points used by trolls were taken mainly from Russia Today (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_Today) content.[14][20]

A 2015 BBC investigation identified the Olgino factory as the most likely producer of a September 2015 "Saiga 410K review" video where an actor posing as U.S. soldier shoots at a book that turns out to be a Quran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran), which sparked outrage. The BBC found among other irregularities that the soldier's uniform is not used by the U.S. military and is easily purchased in Russia, and that the actor filmed was most likely a barman from Saint Petersburg related to a troll factory employee.[26][27]

The citizen-journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen-journalism) site Bellingcat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Higgins#Bellingcat) identified the team from Olgino as the real authors of a video attributed to the Azov Battalion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion) in which masked soldiers threaten the Netherlands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Netherlands) for organizing the referendum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Ukraine%E2%80%93European_Union_Association_Agreement_referendum,_2016) on the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93European_Union_Association_Agreement).[28]

Organized anti-Ukrainian campaign

See also: Media portrayal of the Ukrainian crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_portrayal_of_the_Ukrainian_crisis)

In the beginning of April 2014 there began an organized online campaign to shift public opinion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion) in the Western world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_countries) in a way that would be useful for Russian authorities regarding the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%9315_Russian_military_intervention_in_Ukraine). Hacked and leaked documents from that time contain instructions for commenters posting at the websites of Fox News (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel), The Huffington Post (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Huffington_Post), TheBlaze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheBlaze), Politico (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico), and WorldNetDaily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldNetDaily). The requirement for the working hours for the trolls is also mentioned: 50 comments under news articles per day. Each blogger has to manage six accounts on Facebook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook), post at least three posts every day, and participate twice in the group discussions. Other employees have to manage 10 accounts on Twitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter), publishing 50 tweets every day. Journalists concluded that Igor Osadchiy was a probable leader of the project, and the campaign itself was run by Internet Research Agency Ltd. Osadchiy denied his connection to the agency.[3][3]

The company is also one of the main sponsors of an anti-Western exhibition Material Evidence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Evidence).[29]

In the beginning of 2016, Ukraine's state-owned news agency Ukrinform (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrinform) claimed to expose a system of bots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot) in social networks, which called for violence against the Ukrainian government and for starting "The Third Maidan".[nb ^1] They reported that the organizer of this system is the former anti-Ukrainian combatant Sergiy Zhuk from Donbass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donbass). He allegedly performed his internet activity from Vnukovo District (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vnukovo_District) in Moscow.[30]

Reactions

In March 2014, the Polish version of Newsweek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek) expressed suspicion that Russia was employing people to "bombard" its website with pro-Russian comments on Ukraine-related articles.\31] Poland's governmental [computer emergency response team (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_emergency_response_team) later confirmed that pro-Russia commentary had flooded Polish internet portals at the start of the Ukrainian crisis.[32][33] German-language media websites were also flooded with pro-Russia comments in the spring of 2014.[34][35][36][37][38]

In late May 2014, the hacker group Anonymous International (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_International) began publishing documents received from hacked emails of Internet Researches Agency managers.[5][9]

In May–June 2014, internet trolls invaded news media sites and massively posted pro-Russian comments in broken English.[39][5][40]

In March 2015 a service enabling censorship of sources of anti-Ukrainian propaganda in social networks inside Ukraine was launched.[41][42]

The United States Justice Department announced the indictment on 16 February 2018, of the Internet Research Agency while also naming more than a dozen individual suspects who allegedly worked there as part of the special counsel’s investigation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_%282017%E2%80%93present%29) into criminal interference with the 2016 election.[43]

Assessments

Russian bloggers Anton Nosik (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Nosik), Rustem Adagamov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustem_Adagamov), and Dmitriy Aleshkovskiy have said that paid Internet-trolls don't change public opinion. Their usage is just a way to steal budget money.[8][5][9]

Leonid Volkov, a politician working for Alexei Navalny (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny)'s Anti-Corruption Foundation, suggests that the point of sponsoring paid Internet trolling is to make the Internet so distasteful that ordinary people are not willing to participate.[21]

The Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Chemicals_Plant_explosion_hoax) in 11 September 2014, was the work of IRA.[21]

Additional activities of organizers

Main article: Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections)

Based on the documents published by Anonymous International, Concord holding company was linked to the funding of several media outlets in Ukraine and Russia, including Kharkiv News Agency,[9] News of Neva, Newspaper About Newspapers, Business Dialog, and Journalist Truth.[8]

The Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Chemicals_Plant_explosion_hoax) of September 11, 2014, which claim an explosion at a chemical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical) plant in Centerville (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centerville,St.Mary_Parish,Louisiana), St. Mary Parish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St.Mary_Parish,_Louisiana), Louisiana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana), has been attributed in June 2015, by the New York Times Magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Magazine), as "a highly coordinated disinformation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation) campaign" and that the "virtual assault" was the work of the Internet Research Agency.[44]

Three months later, the same accounts posted false messages on Twitter about an Ebola (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola) outbreak in Atlanta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta) under the keyword #EbolaInAtlanta, quickly relayed and picked up by users living in the city. A video was then posted on YouTube, showing a medical team treating an alleged Ebola victim at Atlanta Airport. On the same day, a different group launched a rumor on Twitter under the keyword #shockingmurderinatlanta, reporting the death of a disarmed black woman shot by police. Again, a blurry and poorly filmed video is broadcast to support the rumor.[45]

In September 2017 Facebook said that ads had been "geographically targeted".\46][47] Facebook revealed that during the [2016 United States presidential election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election), IRA had purchased advertisements on the website for US$100,000, 25% of which were geographically targeted to the U.S.[48] Facebook's chief security officer said that the ads "appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum".[46][47]

According to an October 17, 2017 BuzzFeed News (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News) report, IRA duped American activists into taking real action via protests and self-defense training in what would seem to be a further attempt to exploit racial grievances.[49]

On 16 February 2018, IRA, along with 13 Russian individuals and two other Russian organizations, was indicted following an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller) with charges stemming from "impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of government."[50]

On March 23, 2018, The Daily Beast revealed new details about IRA gathered from leaked internal documents,\51] which showed that IRA used Reddit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit) and [Tumblr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr) as part of its influence campaign.[52] On the same day, Tumblr announced that they had banned 84 accounts linked to IRA, saying that they had spread misinformation through conventional postings rather than advertisements.[53][54]

Rallies and protests organized by IRA in the United States

On April 4, 2016, a rally in Buffalo, New York (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo,_New_York) protested the death of India Cummings, a black woman who had recently died in police custody. IRA's "Blacktivist" Facebook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook) account actively promoted the event and reached out directly to local activists on Facebook Messenger asking them to circulate petitions and print posters. "Blacktivist" supplied the petitions and poster artwork.[51]

A rally on April 16, 2016, protesting the death of Freddie Gray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Freddie_Gray) attracted large crowds in Baltimore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore). IRA's "Blacktivist" Facebook group promoted and organized the event, including reaching out to local activists.[55]

On April 23, 2016, a small group of white-power demonstrators held a rally they called "Rock Stone Mountain" at Stone Mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain) Park near Stone Mountain, Georgia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain,Georgia). They were confronted by a large group of protesters, and some violent clashes ensued. The protest was heavily promoted by IRA accounts on Tumblr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr), Twitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter), and Facebook, and the IRA website blackmatters.com. The IRA used its Blacktivist Facebook account to reach out, to no avail, to activist and academic Barbara Williams Emerson, the daughter of Hosea Williams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosea_Williams), to help promote the protests. Afterward, RT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT%28TV_network%29) blamed anti-racist protesters for violence and promoted two videos shot at the event.[51]

On May 2, 2016, a second rally was held in Buffalo, New York (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo,_New_York), protesting the death of India Cummings. Like the April 4 rally, the event was heavily promoted by IRA's "Blacktivist" Facebook account, including attempted outreach to local activists.[51]

On May 21, 2016, two competing rallies were held in Houston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston) to alternately protest against and defend the recently opened Library of Islamic Knowledge at the Islamic Da'wah Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Houston). The "Stop Islamization of Texas" rally was organized by the Facebook group "Heart of Texas". The posting for the event encouraged participants to bring guns. A spokesman for the group conversed with the Houston Press (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Press) via email but declined to give a name. The other rally, "Save Islamic Knowledge", was organized by another Facebook group called "United Muslims of America" for the same time and location. Both Facebook groups were later revealed to be IRA accounts.[56][57]

On May 25, 2016, the Westboro Baptist Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church) held its annual protest of Lawrence High School (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_High_School%28Kansas%29) graduation ceremonies in Lawrence, Kansas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence,Kansas). The "LGBT United" Facebook group organized a counter protest to confront the Westboro Baptist Church protest, including by placing an ad on Facebook and contacting local people. About a dozen counter protesters showed up. Lawrence High School students did not participate in the counter protest because they were skeptical of the counter protest organizers. "LGBT United" was an IRA account that appears to have been created specifically for this event.[58]

"LGBT United" organized a candlelight vigil on June 25, 2016, for the Pulse nightclub shooting victims in Orlando, Florida (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando,_Florida).[59][60]

IRA's "Don't Shoot" Facebook group and affiliated "Don't Shoot Us" website tried to organize a protest outside St. Paul, Minnesota (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St.Paul,Minnesota) police headquarters on July 10, 2016, in response to the July 6 fatal police shooting of Philando Castile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile). Some local activists became suspicious of the motives behind the event because St. Paul police were not involved in the shooting. Castille had been shot by a St. Anthony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St.Anthony,Minnesota) police officer in nearby Falcon Heights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heights,_Minnesota). Local activists contacted "Don't Shoot." After being pressed on who they were and who supported them, "Don't Shoot" agreed to move the protest to St. Anthony police headquarters. The concerned local activists investigated further and urged protesters not to participate after deciding "Don't Shoot" was a "total troll job." "Don't Shoot" organizers eventually relinquished control of the event to local organizers, who subsequently declined to accept any money offered by "Don't Shoot" to cover expenses.[61][62]

A Black Lives Matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter) protest rally was held in Dallas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas) on July 10, 2016. A "Blue Lives Matter" counter protest was held across the street. The "Blue Lives Matter" protest was organized by the "Heart of Texas" Facebook group controlled by IRA.[63][59][57]

The Blacktivist Facebook group organized a rally in Chicago to honor Sandra Bland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Bland) on July 16, 2016, the first anniversary of her death. The rally was held in front of the Chicago Police Department (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Police_Department)'s Homan Square (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square)building. They passed around petitions calling for a Civilian Police Accountability Council ordinance.[64][65]

17 "Florida Goes Trump" rallies were held across Florida on August 25, 2016. The rallies were organized by IRA using their "Being Patriotic" Facebook group and "march_for_trump" Twitter account.[66]

The "SecuredBorders" Facebook group organized the "Citizens before refugees" protest rally on August 27, 2016, at the City Council Chambers in Twin Falls, Idaho (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Falls,_Idaho). Only a small number of people showed up for the three hour event, most likely because it was Saturday and the Chambers were closed. "SecureBorders" was an IRA account.[67]

The "Safe Space for Muslim Neighborhood" rally was held outside the White House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House) on September 3, 2016. At least 57 people attended the event organized by the IRA's "United Muslims of America" Facebook group.[68]

"BlackMattersUS", an IRA website, recruited activists to participate in protests on the days immediately following the September 20, 2016, police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Keith_Lamont_Scott) in Charlotte, North Carolina (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte,_North_Carolina). The IRA paid for expenses such as microphones and speakers.[69]

The "Miners for Trump" rallies held in Pennsylvania on October 2, 2016, were organized by IRA's "Being Patriotic" Facebook group.[66]

A large rally was held in Charlotte, North Carolina (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte,_North_Carolina) on October 22, 2016, protesting the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Keith_Lamont_Scott). BlackMattersUS recruited unwitting local activists to organize the rally.[70] BlackMattersUS provided one activist with a bank card to pay for rally expenses.[69]

Anti-Hillary Clinton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton) "Texit" rallies were held across Texas on November 5, 2016. The "Heart of Texas" Facebook group organized the rallies around the theme of Texas seceding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_secession_movements) from the United States if Hillary Clinton is elected. The group contacted the Texas Nationalist Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Nationalist_Movement), a secessionist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessionist) organization, to help with organizing efforts, but they declined to help. Small rallies were held in Dallas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas), Fort Worth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Worth), Austin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin), and other cities. No one attended the Lubbock (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubbock) rally.[71][72][73]

A Trump protest called "Trump is NOT my President" attracted 5,000 to 10,000 protestors in Manhattan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan) on November 12, 2016. Protesters marched from Union Square (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Square,_Manhattan) to Trump Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower). The protest was organized by BlackMattersUS.[74]

The IRA's "United Muslims of America" Facebook group organized the "Make peace, not war!" protest on June 3, 2017, outside Trump Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower) in New York City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City). It is unclear whether anyone attended this protest or instead attended the "March for Truth" affiliated protest held on the same day.[68][75][76]

Lawsuit

In May 2015, a trolling company employee Lyudmila Savchuk in Saint Petersburg sued her employer for labor violations,\77] seeking to disclose its activities. [Ivan Pavlov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov_%28lawyer%29) from human rights defending initiative Team 29 represented Savchuk, and the defendant "troll-factory" agreed to pay Savchuk her withheld salaries and to restore her job.[78]

Indictments

On 16 February 2018, 13 individuals were indicted by the Washington, D.C. grand jury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury) for alleged illegal interference in the 2016 presidential elections, during which they strongly supported the candidacy of Donald Trump, according to special counsel Robert Mueller's office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_%282017%E2%80%93present%29). IRA, Concord Management (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_Management_and_Consulting) and Concord Catering were also indicted. It was allegedly that IRA was controlled by Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin), a wealthy associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin.[79][80]

The indicted individuals are Mikhail Ivanovich Bystrov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bystrov), Mikhail Leonidovich Burchik (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mikhail_Leonidovich_Burchik&action=edit&redlink=1), Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aleksandra_Yuryevna_Krylova&action=edit&redlink=1), Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anna_Vladislavovna_Bogacheva&action=edit&redlink=1), Sergey Pavlovich Polozov (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sergey_Pavlovich_Polozov&action=edit&redlink=1), Maria Anatolyevna Bovda (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_Anatolyevna_Bovda&action=edit&redlink=1), Robert Sergeyevich Bovda (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Sergeyevich_Bovda&action=edit&redlink=1), Dzheykhun Nasimi Ogly Aslanov (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dzheykhun_Nasimi_Ogly_Aslanov&action=edit&redlink=1), Vadim Vladimirovich Podkopaev (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vadim_Vladimirovich_Podkopaev&action=edit&redlink=1), Gleb Igorevitch Vasilchenko (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gleb_Igorevitch_Vasilchenko&action=edit&redlink=1), Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Irina_Viktorovna_Kaverzina&action=edit&redlink=1), Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin) and Vladimir Venkov (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vladimir_Venkov&action=edit&redlink=1).[80] None of the defendants is in custody.[81]

On March 15, President Trump imposed financial sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_America%27s_Adversaries_Through_Sanctions_Act) on the 13 Russian and organizations indicted by Mueller,[82] preventing them from entering the United States to answer the charges should they wish to.

Notes

Jump up "Maidan" refers to Independence Square (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidan_Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev), which became synonymous with mass political protests following the 2004 Orange Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution) and the 2013 Euromaidan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan), i.e. the two Maidans