Russia targeted black voters in attempts to suppress Democrat turnout in presidential election, Senate report says

Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election included targeting African-Americans across all major social media platforms and attempting to suppress Democratic voter turnout, two reports have revealed.

The US Senate commissioned both studies to better understand Russia’s interference operations during the presidential vote. The first report was compiled by private researchers and was expected to be released on Monday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It says “active” Russian interference operations exist on social media platforms and the Russian operation discovered after the 2016 election was much broader than once thought.

The study repeats several conclusions that special counsel Robert Mueller, the US intelligence community and the Senate and House intelligence committees had already made – that many of the postings focused on race, that they were primarily intended to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, and that the ultimate goal was to sow division in America.

Researchers analysed more than 10 million tweets, 116,000 Instagram posts, 61,000 Facebook posts and 1,000 videos posted by the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) – the troll factory indicted by Mr Mueller earlier this year.

“The most prolific IRA 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.

It adds, 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”.

Members of the Senate committee have called for action from Silicon Valley and Congress in the wake of the reports, describing the extent of Russia’s actions as “more comprehensive, calculating and widespread” than previously thought and saying it should act as a “wake-up call”.

Russian accounts attempted to connect with Americans and recruit assets through unconventional means such as selling merchandise with certain messages, making specific follower requests, offering jobs and even publicising helplines that could encourage people to unknowingly disclose sensitive information that could be used against them.

The report was compiled by cybersecurity firm New Knowledge with data provided by the Senate committee from tech majors Facebook, Twitter and Google parent company Alphabet.

A spokesperson for Twitter said it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service”. Google declined to comment.

Along with another report which is expected to be released by the panel, the study is the first comprehensive analysis of Russian interference on social media beyond what the platforms themselves have said.

There are reportedly still live accounts tied to the original Internet Research Agency, which was named in an indictment by the special counsel in February because of an expansive social media campaign intended to influence the 2016 vote. Some of those accounts have a presence on smaller platforms as the major companies have tried to clean up after Russian activity was discovered.

“With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future,” the researchers wrote.

The report says none of the companies turned over complete datasets to Congress and some “may have misrepresented or evaded” questions during testimony about the interference, by intentionally or unintentionally downplaying the scale of the problem.

One major finding of the study is the breadth of Russian interference that appeared on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and was not as 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 activity to Instagram.

There were reportedly 187 million engagements with users on Instagram, with at least 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 “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground”.

A representative for Facebook said the company had “not seen” the findings and declined to comment on its specifics. “We continue to fully cooperate with officials investigating the IRA’s activity on Facebook and Instagram around the 2016 election,” the statement said.

The second report, compiled by researchers at the University of Oxford and called the Computational Propaganda Research Project, was also partly based on data from the Senate panel. It noted peaks in IRA advertising and organic activity – posts, shares and comments by users – often corresponded with important dates in the US calendar, crises and international events.

That report says IRA posts focused on the United States started on Twitter as far back as 2013, and evolved into a multi-platform strategy. Researchers from Oxford said organic postings were much more far reaching than advertisements, despite Facebook’s sole focus on adverts when the company first announced it had been compromised, in 2017.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, said “these reports are proof positive that one of the most important things we can do is increase information sharing between the social media companies who can identify disinformation campaigns and the third-party experts who can analyse them”.

The leading Democrat on the panel, Mark Warner of Virginia, said it was “time to get serious” about the issue.

“That is going to require some much-needed and long overdue guardrails when it comes to social media,” he said. “I hope these reports will spur legislative action in the Congress and provide additional clarity to the American public about Russia’s assault on our democracy.”

Additional reporting by AP