Disinformation Report: An Investigation into Russian IRA Activities in 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Disinformation Report: An Investigation into Russian IRA Activities in 2016

newknowledge.com

71 pointsehudla35 comments

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.

>The fact that people still claim it had no effect is a PRODUCT of their efforts.

I hate to sound flippant, but circular claims like that are gonna get called out on HN.

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?

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?

Internet Research Agency, not the Irish Republican Army.

Apparently not the Individual Retirement Agency either.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Perhaps clarify which IRA you mean in the title.

Yeah I was confused on this too.

Done.

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

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)?

"Good people" wouldn't want their image degraded by the discovery of such tactics. Even when they don't really do these things but they just potentially could, they will be a target by their opposition (George Soros style).

That means only "bad people" who don't care about integrity would do this.

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.

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

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.

> If you watch the election coverage from 2016, they were going on about Russia minutes after Trump clinched it.

Russian influence was being discussed and warned about well before the election.

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.

> If you watch the election coverage from 2016, they were going on about Russia minutes after Trump clinched it.

Months before.

Here's POLITICO, 7 months before the election: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/donald-trump...

Heck, here's the Sydney Morning Herald covering it nearly 5 months before the election—the Russian involvement was world news well before the election: https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/trumpputin-russia...

The weird idea that Russian involvement was something invented after the election as an excuse for the result is...inconsistent with the easily verified facts.

The ranking history for this post is weird (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

Mods often manually weigh down stories and it is extremely opaque when it happens.

That's how HN works - a flag is much stronger than a downvote on reddit, more than a couple of received flags will remove submission from front page.

/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/ (last hour) https://imgur.com/a/3HUbU2W (screenshot for posterity)

It's getting lots of votes and then the flags kicked in. Given the charged (US) partisan nature of anything touching on the Russian political influence operations, intense flagging isn't a surprise.

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)...

It was covered extensively during the election.

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

Remember when the term "fake news" was coined, before Trump embraced it for his own use? It was originally referring to inexplicable growth in stories from invented news outlets.

This is from 2 days before the election: https://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing...

One substantial difference worth noting between the Russian astroturfing and astroturfing from other countries is that Russian crime have been refining their ability to automate human-like behavior for ad-fraud purposes. For those not familiar with ad fraud, there's been an arms race between criminal organizations to emulate human behavior clicking on ads and the advertising companies trying to detect it. The resulting algorithms have dual use properties that can be applied to astroturfing (e.g. https://www.trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Bedep-tr...).

> The scale was massive, yet no one noticed this astroturfing campaign until the election

It was being discussed in major US and even major foreign media outlets several months before the election.

> All this talk of Russia astroturfing

Astroturfing was not the whole of the Russian influence campaign.

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