The various accounts were used together to promote events and encourage donations to the group’s campaigns. In another example, the Oxford report cites “Black Matters US,” a Russian-created group that spanned multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, and an independent website, all sharing stories about police violence. In one example, the New York Times notes that the IRA ran YouTube channels called “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive” that shared content about police violence and Black Lives Matter. The new reports on the IRA argue that the targeting of African Americans through messaging about black identity, police violence, and white supremacy was so thorough that it should be looked at as its own unique propaganda effort. These efforts aimed to use America’s history of racism to diminish the country’s international standing, and similar tactics were also used to stir up tensions in countries in Africa and Asia. and stoked racial tensions ahead of the 1984 Olympics. In the 1960s and 1980s, old KGB and Soviet influence operations aimed to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. The latest reports say Russian misinformation efforts targeting black Americans were much larger than previously reportedĪs Philip Ewing explained for NPR in 2017, stories of Russian misinformation explicitly designed to amplify racial tensions are not new. “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 New Knowledge report notes. These efforts evolved into attempts to influence racial justice activism after the election, as Russian groups contacted black activists running legitimate groups and attempted to set up real-world events. But the reports highlight the level of complexity Russian groups employed to exploit already existing tensions in the US, and, as the Atlantic’s David Graham notes, amplify attacks already being levied by Donald Trump as a candidate. It is impossible to know exactly how much impact the social media efforts, which also whipped up fears about voter fraud, actually had on the 2016 elections.
The group “created an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem,” the New Knowledge report notes. Several operatives working for the group were listed in a February 2018 indictment from special counsel Robert Muller detailing how Russian nationals interfered in the 2016 election. Petersburg-based “troll farm” that used several social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram - including ones called “Woke Blacks” and “Blacktivists” - to urge Americans to vote for third-party candidates or sit out the election entirely.
The reports focus on the Internet Research Agency, a St.
“essaging 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 Oxford report states. Now, a pair of independent reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee add to a wealth of evidence that targeting African Americans and suppressing black turnout was a crucial aspect of this effort.Īccording to the reports, one from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika and others from a team of researchers from cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield Research, a group of Russian agents utilized not only Facebook and Twitter, but also sites including Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube in an effort to amplify racial divisions ahead of the 2016 elections. More than two years after the 2016 elections, media outlets and academics are still discovering the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at American voters.
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