How Russia trolled us

Rebecca Zisser / Axios

During the 2016 election, Russia ran a disinformation campaign that was intentionally hard to track but is finally being decoded, Axios Sara Fischer reports:

• Russian operatives used many small, segregated campaigns across many automated platforms that often aren't monitored by people, making it harder to get caught in the moment, if at all.
• Why it matters: It will take a whole lot of investigative reporting to understand the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign that was used to meddle in the election and cause division. But the contours now are emerging.
• We weren't prepared: The government's lagging understanding of social media technology leaves tech companies to monitor themselves — which didn't provide much incentive for them to keep close tabs on how their platforms were being used for electoral manipulation.
• Following the money: A lot of the revelations don't find that Russians had tremendous paid budgets on separate platforms/products, but it's starting to add up: Google: "tens of thousands" ... Facebook: $100,000 ... Twitter: $270,000+.

A New York Times front-pager — "Russians Spun American Rage Into a Weapon, by Nick Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi — gleans these additional clues from "the trail of Russian digital bread crumbs":

• "The Russian campaign ... appears to have been tailored to exploit the companies' own strategies for keeping users engaged. Facebook, for example, pushed people to interact more in Groups like the ones set up by the Russians."
• "The Russians appear to have insinuated themselves across American social media platforms and used the same promotional tools that people employ to share cat videos, airline complaints and personal rants."
• "Boosted by Russian accounts, the material was quickly picked up by other American users of Facebook, spreading the posts to an even bigger audience. The Russian presence appeared to be layered throughout different platforms: Some of the Facebook accounts, including Being Patriotic, had linked accounts on Instagram and Twitter, according to deleted content captured in Google's cache."

Be smart: We're barely beginning to figure out what happened online during the 2016 election, and the 2018 midterms are coming up fast — a vast new field for mischief and misinformation.

• It's highly unlikely regulation — government-mandated or self imposed — will prevent cheap election interference in time for next year.

Go deeper: Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, has been tracking Russian Facebook and ad tech use for months. His latest report looks at the organic tactics used by Russian-controlled pages, links and engagements that he estimates cold have reached or influenced hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.

"As sprawling as it was sophisticated" ... "Russian operatives bought ads across several of Google's services without the company's knowledge," the WashPost reports on A1:

• "Google found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents whose targets included Google's YouTube and gmail services, along with the company's signature search engine and its DoubleClick ad network."
• Why it matters: "The revelation about Google ... adds it to a growing list of iconic tech companies used by a dis­information operation ... approved by the Kremlin. Twitter and Facebook already had disclosed some Russian accounts, and U.S. investigators say other companies likely were exploited as well."
• What's next: "Executives for Facebook and Twitter will testify before congressional investigators on Nov. 1. Google has not said whether it will accept a similar invitation to do so."

Source: Axios