The extent and sophistication of Russian operatives using social media to sabotage the 2016 presidential elections continues to grow. Most of the exposes have been ferreted out by American media outlets - excluding Fox News and Breitbart, of course - and at this point in time it appears that American social user users seem to have viewed Russian authored fake news and fake social media shares up to 340 million times. That's right, that equates to almost one viewing for every living American. Why Facebook, Twitter, Google and other massive corporations sat on this information so long (and allowed it to happen in the first place) and have been less than forthcoming are questions that to be answered. It seems inconceivable that no one at any of these massive tech companies detected the scope of the Russian efforts. Were they lazy, incompetent, or simply focused on raking in money without any regard to the cyber attack being conducted against American's democracy. Two pieces look at the situation, one in The Daily Beast and the other in the Washington Post. First highlights from The Daily Beast:
ccording to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim.”These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences.
“We, the black people, we stand in one unity. We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate,” one of the men says in a November video that warned Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim. We don’t stand for her.”
Williams and Kalvin’s content was pulled from Facebook in August after it was identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account, The Daily Beast has confirmed with multiple sources familiar with the account and the reasons for its removal. Williams and Kalvin’s account was also suspended from Twitter in August. But the YouTube page for Williams and Kalvin remains live at press time.
It’s reminiscent of the Russian attempts to impersonate a California-based Muslim group and piggyback off of the Black Lives Matter protests to spread the Kremlin’s message. But this time, the Kremlin operation used real people, not just memes and hijacked hashtags.
The discovery of living, breathing, real-life avatars for Kremlin talking points deepens and complicates the emerging picture of how Russian propaganda reached what Facebook alone estimated last week were 10 million users in the United States—a number considered by many outside experts to be a lowball estimate.
According to Clint Watts, a former FBI counter terrorism agent who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian cyber-attacks, using third party contractors from both inside Russia and countries with cheap labor is a method used by the Kremlin to “muddy the waters on attribution” of propaganda.
“Often, (the Kremlin) will contract out entities to do this so they can say, ‘You can’t prove that it’s us,’” Watts told The Daily Beast. “It’s pretty routine for them to try to gain resources through third parties and contract cutouts.”
Williams and Kalvin were hardly the only fronts used in the Russian campaign effort to throw the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Bogus LGBT personas and bogus black activist personas were created, as were bogus "American patriot" personas, all of which pumped out false propaganda pieces that were picked up by the gullible on the right - I have one "friend" who continues to fall for these types of fake news efforts - as well as hard core bigots. As the Washington Post reports even Google's gamil seems to have been co-opted by Russian only to eager to destabilize America by placing an unfit lunatic in the White House. Here are highlights from the Times piece:
Russian operatives bought ads across several of Google’s services without the company’s knowledge, the latest evidence that their campaign to influence U.S. voters was as sprawling as it was sophisticated in deploying the technology industry’s most powerful tools.
The revelation about Google, made by people familiar with an internal company investigation, adds it to a growing list of iconic tech companies used by a disinformation operation that U.S. intelligences services have said was 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.
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, said the people familiar with the internal investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters that had not been made public.
Adding to the significance of the discovery, the Russian ads bought on Google do not appear to be the work of the Internet Research Agency, the shadowy Russian troll farm linked to previous disclosures by companies. Facebook has said that it, too, has been studying thousands of ads that may have been bought by operatives working somewhere other than the Internet Research Agency.
The revelations add to the evidence that the Russian disinformation campaign had not only multiple targets among U.S. technology companies but also multiple centers of operations.
“We see the Russia presence on social media metastasizing,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “The extent of the Russian presence just continues to grow and grow, and I don’t think we yet have any kind of full understanding of just how expansive this presence may have been.”
Schiff said congressional investigators will ask the companies “why it has taken them so long to discover the Russian use of their technology and how thorough their forensic effort has been, what the impediments are, and how much work remains to be done, and, of course, most importantly, how are they going to ferret this out in the future.”
Several independent researchers also have found that the Russian disinformation flowed across platforms and onto the wider Web, taking advantage of technology that allows advertisers to identify potential voters and follow and re-target ads to them based on their political inclinations. The goal was to influence voting behavior, in some cases by suppressing turnout. Albright also has found links to Russian disinformation on Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram, as well as Twitter, Facebook and Google. Clicking on links on any of these sites allowed Russian operatives to identify and track Web users wherever they went on the Internet.
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