
Disinformation Report: An Investigation into Russian IRA Activities in 2016 - ehudla
https://www.newknowledge.com/disinforeport
======
meroes
I have been disturbed by the flippant HN response to these findings
(especially in a related thread yesterday). I listened to a radio program this
week (KPFA or KQED can't remember) with one of the researchers whose findings
were in the Senate report.

I was blown away by the magnitude and the tactics used, starting years before
the elections laying groundwork.

The researcher did not pull punches, calling it straight up espionage.
Unwitting Americans were personally contacted by the IRA, an agency whose
funding is closely tied to Russian intelligence and whose members have been
indicted by the Special Counsel. Groups on both sides were bolstered with IRA
funding, organizing, propaganda, and social media support. Once a movement or
fb page or protest gained enough momentum, the IRA then sabotaged the movement
by reframing them as violent, stupid, liberal, racist, or whatever buzzword
they co-opted for effect. They would also frame the protest as artificial,
fake, funded by outsiders, etc - anything to poison the well or co-opt an
originally well meaning or organic group.

One end goal was to disillusion support for protests in general. The severity,
indsidiousness, and sophistication cannot be overstated. The fact that people
still claim it had no effect is a PRODUCT of their efforts.

~~~
orf
Not to mention the immediate flagging of _any_ such post. Sure, political
posts are frowned upon here but this is an extensive report on a widespread
disinformation campaign utilizing the tech that no doubt a number of HN
readers helped create, or help maintain.

I wonder who would benefit from flagging this off the frontpage as quickly as
possible?

------
DanAndersen
There's consistently a lot of shock and outrage about foreign interference in
American elections, however there seems to be no feasible solutions to the
problem. If, as people seem to be doing, "election interference" doesn't mean
hacked voting machines but 'hacked voters' (exposure to subversive foreign
propaganda), then there is no defense against it without going to what we
would consider a repressive state. Low-cost social-media memes, groups, and
bot-comments are a super-weapon that can be deployed against any government
that purports to be 'democratic' in its methods.

At a _minimum_ , to actually combat 'foreign interference in elections,' the
US would need to: \- rigorously require anyone paying for political ads on
social media to be US citizens, \- require anyone posting comments on US-
visible political social media topics to also be US citizens, \- limit the
exposure of US citizens to foreign media, both state-sponsored and 'private'
\- place additional surveillance or suspicion on first/second-generation
immigrants who may be spreading latent ideological memes from foreign
governments

In short, a China model rather than a traditionally Western model. In a
globalized society with such free flow of information, is it even possible to
have a national democracy that doesn't implicitly give the rest of a world
voting access through rival-state mechanisms?

------
cosarara
Internet Research Agency, not the Irish Republican Army.

~~~
opless
Yes, that time where the American public knowingly funded terrorism against
one of their political allies.

 _sigh_

Thank goodness for the good friday deal.

wait what? the tories broke that deal by their deals with the DUP, and about
to rip it to pieces with threats of a hard brexit?

surely not!

 _sigh_

------
ehudla
These statistics about the dataset are interesting:

~10.4 million tweets (of which ~6 million were original) across 3841 twitter
accounts

~1100 YouTube videos across 17 account channels

~116,000 Instagram posts across 133 accounts

~61,500 unique Facebook posts across 81 Pages

There were ~77 million engagements on Facebook, ~187 million engagements on
Instagram, and ~73 million engagements on original content on Twitter.

------
akhilcacharya
The more we discover the more it becomes apparent how absolutely _terrified_
these folks were of Hillary Clinton.

~~~
beauzero
I don't see proof of that. I do see proof that they sought to divide the USA
into hostile micro political factions.

~~~
akhilcacharya
They nearly exclusively attempt to prop up anti-Hillary sentiment from both
the left and right. They only switched to criticizing trump - and even then
only sometimes, since they’ve also target the Mueller probe - after he was
elected.

~~~
dragonwriter
That's consistent with an attempt to weaken and divide America without being
especially _afraid_ of Clinton, if they judged up through the election that
Clinton was most likely to win (and, therefore, the highest value to weaken
support for so that her Administration would be beset by conflict on all
sides) and (given that despite the wide ranging support for anti-Clinton
sentiment, there was strong focus on pro-Trump efforts even in the primary)
that Trump was the weakest, most compromised and/or compromisable candidate.

------
ehudla
One interesting tidbit in the report is the claim that the platforms
intentionally scrubbed potentially useful metadata from the data they provided
the Senate.

------
aarestad
Perhaps clarify which IRA you mean in the title.

~~~
ehudla
Done.

~~~
JadeNB
The title is still "Disinformation Report: An Investigation into Russian IRA
Activities in 2016".

------
moe22
This kind of org seems cheap enough to setup.

So I am just wondering why can't the same model be used (secretly or openly)
to hack minds to do good? What would it take?

It feels like Bill Gates web presence is a fledgling example of it. There was
this Cass Sunstein/Obama admin "nudge" attempt which probably was a little too
ahead of its time(?).

What would such an org look like in 10 years and what would you like to see
them achieve in terms of hacking society (positively)?

~~~
r00fus
The memo that Sunstein wrote that you're referring to was in regards to
competing with corporate power with similar state up-front advertisement spend
(think PSA), not subversive mind-control like on display in the posting.

The corporate-owned politicians have spent decades convincing people that if
the government tells you something, the gov is lying or somehow up to no good.

Sunstein wanted to push back on that.

------
ehudla
I expected to see here more discussion of the methodology, tools, data
analysis in the report.

------
mynameishere
_reaching 126 million people on Facebook_

So, that's like a 500 dollar budget? Somewhere in that range?

 _Partisan content was presented to targeted groups in on-brand ways, such as
a meme featuring Jesus in a Trump campaign hat on an account that targeted
Christians_

It's an unbelievably tacky picture of Jesus wearing a red MAGA hat. Yeah,
that's why people voted for him. I mean, yeah. The multi-million dollar ad
campaigns from Clinton had nothing on crap sourced from 4chan.

If you watch the election coverage from 2016, they were going on about Russia
minutes after Trump clinched it. Minutes. All together. And this shit is still
going on. I was trapped in Atlanta airport shortly after the election and CNN
had 4 hours of shameless Russia Russia Russia propaganda. And they're still at
it. Joe McCarthy would have died of shame before carrying on like this.

Anyone interested in how propaganda really works needs to consider the top
down, nationwide, nonstop campaign to destroy the president. Even if you hate
the guy, consider just how much power is being exerted to negate an election.
It's interesting if you look at this--because it's actual power, unlike silly
two-bit posts on Facebook.

That same power could plausibly be turned in the opposite direction, and the
left will be utterly staggered, like fish out of water.

~~~
deepakhj
The special counsel, NY Attorney General, SDNY and Eastern Virginia courts,
etc are all following the rule of law. Hilary Clinton's foundation and
Benghazi investigation went on for how long and turned up zilch.

------
tareqak
The ranking history for this post is weird
([http://hnrankings.info/18710482/](http://hnrankings.info/18710482/)):

21:10 - 7

21:15 - 4

21:20 - 2

21:25 - 1

21:30 - 1

21:35 - 26

21:40 - 27

~~~
i_am_proteus
/me puts on tinfoil hat

It's even weirder in context. See links below. Was this deliberately
manipulated off the front page?

[http://hnrankings.info/1/1-10/](http://hnrankings.info/1/1-10/) (last hour)
[https://imgur.com/a/3HUbU2W](https://imgur.com/a/3HUbU2W) (screenshot for
posterity)

------
mcantelon
The scale was massive, yet no one noticed this astroturfing campaign until the
election... and this astroturfing campaign dwarfed all other competing
astroturfing campaigns by other states/NGO factions?

All this talk of Russia astroturfing without any additional context, as if
they're the only party astroturfing (Democrat-affiliated ShareBlue, for
example, was kicked out of a large subreddit due to astroturfing)...

~~~
orf
It was covered _extensively_ during the election.

However as time goes on more evidence emerges. That's natural.

