Senate Report Details Vast Scope of Russian Election Interference

A new, comprehensive report prepared for the U.S. Senate by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the network analysis firm Graphika details the vast scope of Russian interference in the 2016 election, with the explicit purpose of aiding Donald Trump. Further, the campaign has continued while Trump has been in office.

None of this is surprising, to anyone who was paying attention during the election or since, but here is the data-driven evidence of what we have seen with our own eyes.

Craig Timberg and Tony Romm at the Washington Post report:

A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia's disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images, and videos tailored to voters' interests to help elect [Donald] Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office.

...The research — by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm — offers new details of how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for interfering in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.

...The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter, and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts. The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House Intelligence Committee members, contains no information on more recent political moments, such as November's midterm elections.

"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump," the report says. "Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage members from voting."

...The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups — Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans — got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes about how Russians used other social media platforms — Google+, Tumblr, and Pinterest — that have received relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft's Hotmail service, and Google's Gmail.

The authors, while reliant on data provided by technology companies, also highlighted the companies' "belated and uncoordinated response" to the disinformation campaign and, once it was discovered, their failure to share more with investigators. The authors urged that in the future they provide data in "meaningful and constructive" ways.

..."Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike," the report said.

There is much more at the link.

What's crucial to understand about this dynamic is that none of it would have been possible without decades of groundwork laid by the Republican Party.

It would not have been possible had the Republican Party not, for example, critically undermined the sort of corporate regulation that would have prevented the monopolies and the vacuum of oversight in which social media giants proliferated, with zero accountability to the populations they exploited in reckless cash grabs.

It would not have been possible had the Republican Party not, for example, ruthlessly fomented divisions among the U.S. populace, which created fissures into which any bad actor could shove their own crowbar to create massive breaks.

It would not have been possible had the Republican Party not, for example, abandoned their responsibility of good governance, willing instead to compromise the security of the nation — and ultimately its sovereignty — in order to win.

Et cetera.

This was a long time in the making. And there is plenty of blame to go around. But let us never forget that the party who benefited from Russian interference is the party who provided them the opening. And continues to collude with Russia by failing utterly to stop the continued hijacking of our democracy by Vladimir Putin and his Oval Office puppet.