Russian Trolls and the Trump Campaign Both Tried to Depress Black Turnout

[QueEx]

New internet accounts are Russian ops designed to sway U.S. voters, experts say



BY TIM JOHNSON
tjohnson@mcclatchydc.com
June 01, 2018 09:10 AM


WASHINGTON - A new Russian influence operation has surfaced that mirrors some of the activity of an internet firm that the FBI says was deeply involved in efforts to sway the 2016 U.S. elections, a cybersecurity firm says.

A website called usareally.com appeared on the internet May 17 and called on Americans to rally in front of the White House June 14 to celebrate President Donald Trump’s birthday, which is also Flag Day.

FireEye, a Milpitas, Calif., cybersecurity company, said Thursday that USA Really is a Russian-operated website that carries content designed to foment racial division, harden feelings over immigration, gun control and police brutality, and undermine social cohesion.

The website’s operators once worked out of the same office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency had its headquarters, said Lee Foster, manager of information operations analysis for FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted 13 Russians, the Internet Research Agency and two other Russian entities Feb. 16, charging them with operating a “troll factory” to sow discord in the United States and influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The indictment says the Russians posted divisive and politically charged content on U.S. social media, including false stories, and posed as U.S. activists as part of a broad campaign “to interfere with the elections and political processes.” Twelve of the indicted Russians worked for the Internet Research Agency.

“We’re not saying it (USA Really) is the Internet Research Agency but there are a number of indicators that suggest it is,” Foster said.

The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia launched similar campaigns to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign and sway it in Trump's favor. Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign was involved with those efforts. Trump has repeatedly and sharply denied such allegations, calling Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt."

The new website’s banner declares in English: “America will wake up on June 14th!” It carries a drawing of the White House and a fluttering U.S. flag as a backdrop.

Foster said the site has over 100 articles and they are posting an average of nine articles a day.


Russians involved in the website work for the Federal News Agency, which is known by its Russian acronym FAN and closely follows the Kremlin line on international issues. Ownership of the agency is not publicly known.

The new website may be part of a pending broader campaign, Foster said.

“There are a bunch of other domains as well that play on USA Really that we are monitoring that haven’t launched,” he said.

But so far, he said, Russians haven’t been pushing the website and its stories using robotic networks, or botnets, to promote them on social media, and they may be holding back. The House intelligence committee recently released thousands of Facebook posts that they said were Russian creations.

USA Really has created a Facebook page and a Twitter account. On Friday afternoon, after a McClatchy reporter queried Facebook about the USA Really page, the company said it disabled it. The Twitter account remained active, with 385 followers.

“They may also be contemplating what risks are involved if we were able to positively ID Russia trying to influence the 2018 mid-terms. To what extent does that undermine denials about 2016 activity? I’m sure that’s something that’s playing around in their minds as well,” Foster said.

Foster spoke along with other FireEye researchers at the end of the Fifth Annual Government Forum on Cyber Threat Intelligence, which the company partly sponsored.

Russian hackers and internet operatives have meddled in elections in eastern and western Europe, often with the purpose of discouraging voters rather than swaying the vote, said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye iSIGHT.

“It’s not always easy to change an outcome (of an election) but they can delegitimize the process and create doubt,” Hultquist said.

The USA Really website contains a mix of articles taken from U.S. sources or carrying a USA Really credit and written in poor English. One article suggested that Louisiana should secede. Louisiana’s economy would still place it 45th out of 211 countries around the world, it said.

Another article said rabid squirrels were terrorizing Florida. One headline suggested that the U.S. government is preparing for World War III.

“New bloodshed in Wisconsin. Thousands of victims,” read the headline of one article that was actually about a mosquito invasion.

A posting from May 25 said the “USA Really” campaign officially starts on June 14 with the slogan, “USA as it is.”

“We invite all Americans - all who cares(sic) about the country - to celebrate this. Come up to the White House on June 14th at 2:00 p.m. to congratulate America,” it said.

A short YouTube video posted April 17, purportedly from the Federal News Agency, said USA Really “will focus on promoting information and problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the U.S. political elite.”


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[QueEx]

A short YouTube video posted April 17, purportedly from the Federal News Agency, said USA Really “will focus on promoting information and problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the U.S. political elite.”

 

[QueEx]

How do bots and trolls work to infiltrate social media platforms and influence U.S. elections? We take a closer look at these insidious online pests to explain how they work. NY Times Video

 

[COINTELPRO]

Have you noticed that this is being oversold by the corporate media. There was no Russian influence on the elections, the electorate chose the well known positions of President Trump to go on this global reign of terror using sanctions and tariffs. Under President Obama, they used the threat of violence and assassinations, and even nuclear war. These people can interoperate between Republican and Democrat.

In any event, they are having a psychotic break with reality. The international community should do nothing to further agitate them such as imposing retaliatory measures. These countries should use this as an example to slowly move away from the trading relationship they may have had with the U.S. since it now being used as a weapon to force you to adopt their values and beliefs.

 

[QueEx]

Senate Intelligence Committee agrees Russia tried to help Trump win election

On Tuesday, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a report backing up the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia attempted to help President Trump win the 2016 election.

"The Russian effort was extensive and sophisticated, and its goals were to undermine public faith in the democratic process, to hurt Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and to help Donald Trump," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the committee's vice chairman, said. The committee is continuing to investigate any collusion that may have happened between Russia and the Trump campaign. Earlier this year, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Trump ally Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), said they determined that some intelligence agencies made errors in their assessment of Russia and its intentions during the election.

Source: Reuters


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[QueEx]

Trump is due to meet with Putin soon.

If trump asks Putin about these “bots”, I feel pretty certain Putin will tell Trump he is not interfering with US Elekshun; and I feel even surer that Trump will tell us = “Putin says he has not and is not interfering in U.S. Elekshun.”

 

[muckraker10021]

DID RUSSIA AFFECT THE 2016 ELECTION? IT’S NOW UNDENIABLE

In the wake of the Mueller indictment of a Russian troll farm, any attempt to claim that the 2016 presidential election wasn’t affected by Russian meddling is laughable.

https://www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-election-its-now-undeniable/

 

[QueEx]

Russian Trolls and the Trump Campaign Both Tried to Depress Black Turnout

Two new reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee underscore how much the Internet Research Agency targeted African Americans—echoing efforts by the campaign.

Black Lives Matter activists protest at a Hillary Clinton rally in Atlanta in October 2015.TAMI CHAPPELL / REUTERS

Perhaps the most striking takeaway from a pair of new reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is the consistency and persistence with which Russian trolls sought to depress the black vote in the 2016 election.


That workers for the Internet Research Agency—a “troll farm” with close ties to the Kremlin—targeted African Americans has been clear for more than a year, emerging in a series of reports in fall 2017, and then receiving new attention in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA and several associated individuals.


But the two reports, commissioned from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Projectand New Knowledge, provide an overwhelming amount of detail and information. There’s a remarkable amount of crossover between the Russians’ tactics and what the Donald Trump campaign said it was doing late in the 2016 race.

Read: Trump’s ‘voter suppression operation’ targets black voters​

According to the Oxford team, African Americans were the single group targeted most heavily by the IRA—and it wasn’t even a close margin.

“Messaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African Americans,” the report states. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead.”


Many of these messages were explicit, talking at length about how not voting was the right step, and attacking Hillary Clinton for past statements, such as a 1990s comment about “superpredators.”


The New Knowledge report concurs, noting that “the most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities.” A sprawling visualization in the report shows the extent and interlinkage between various parts of the push—the graphic is such a mess of spaghetti ties that it’s almost impossible to track individual connections, which seems like the point. New Knowledge, too, highlights the extensive voter-suppression efforts.

Persuading African Americans to stay home was a staple of the Trump campaign’s approach, too. Barack Obama had twice won the presidency by motivating black turnout. Trump’s path to victory hinged on getting as many white voters to come out as possible while hoping the Obama coalition stayed home—or persuading them to do so.

Trump enacted a crude version of this from the stump, attacking Clinton and Democrats for their treatment of black voters, but making only peremptory, sloppy attempts at outreach (“What the hell do you have to lose?”), while continually treating minorities as an other. Meanwhile, his campaign was conducting a more elaborate version electronically, as Businessweek reported in late October 2016:

Instead of expanding the electorate, [the campaign chairman Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

The reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg described an animation that a staffer had produced with cartoonish characters, reenacting Clinton’s “superpredator” remark. As officials told them, this was part of the attempt to persuade black voters to stay home.

At the time of the story, this seemed amateurish to many observers—the Clinton campaign was believed to possess a fearsome data machine, while the Trump team was messing around with memes. Then came the election results, with Clinton’s shocking loss. In retrospect, it’s clear just how powerful this kind of lo-fi influence operation can be, even if it’s impossible to calculate the specific impact it had on the election.

The new reports don’t just show the scale of the Russian efforts—they also show how similar the content and techniques of the IRA and the Trump campaign were. Trump’s critics have speculated about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian trolls, but so far—despite the many Trump associates who had contacts with Russian officials, no evidence has appeared connecting the campaign to the IRA.


Read: The history of Russian involvement in America’s race wars

In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the Russians were simply making informed choices based on what the Trump campaign was doing publicly. As any independent expenditure group can attest, being banned from communicating with a campaign doesn’t even begin to prevent you from discerning that campaign’s message and amplifying. Moreover, the Russians wouldn’t have needed much originality to hit on exploiting racial divisions within America, because, as Julia Ioffe has written, that was a well-established Soviet tactic long before Trump or Facebook.

But the congruency of the Trump and Russian efforts is notable, even in the absence of any coordination, because the president continues to deny—contra most members of his own administration—that the Russians even intervened in the 2016 election at all, much less to aid him. His denials are incredible, in the literal sense of the word, but the new evidence of how closely Russian tactics mirrored his own makes the way Moscow tried to help elect Trump even clearer.

Thx help could have had a powerful influence on the election results, too. New Knowledge concludes that Russian operations were more successful in penetrating the black community than any other group that was targeted. And prior analyses have found that declining black turnoutin key states that Trump narrowly won, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, could have made the difference. Clinton would likely have struggled with black voters even without the IRA and the Trump campaign helping to depress turnout, but it turns out those memes weren’t nearly as childish, or as low-tech, as they seemed.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ia-trump-focus-depressing-black-votes/578302/


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[QueEx]

Was Black Lives Matter affected by the Russians ???