Majority of Russian Facebook Ads Focused on Race

A Russian placed Facebook ad.

A number of studies have dispelled the myth that "economic anxiety" motivated working class white voters to support Donald Trump in 2016.  Instead, racial animus combined with a fear of lost "white Privilege" was the real motivator.  Now, a review of Russian placed Facebook ads underscores that the Russians sensed this ugly motivation and played it to the hilt, doing all it could to fan the flames of racism and instill even more animus.  Trump supporters - and Republicans in general - can try to disclaim their ugly motives, but the studies and now the Russian Facebook ads tell the real story.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Russian Facebook effort.  Here are highlights:

More than half of the Facebook ads created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency to influence Americans during and after the last presidential election made references to race, according to a new analysis by USA Today. The news organization reviewed every one of the 3,517 IRA ads released to the public earlier this week by the House Intelligence Committee (IRA), and its reporters discovered that nearly 2,000 of the ads referred to race — accounting for some 25 million impressions from targeted Facebook users.

Previous examinations of a smaller selection of the ads established that the IRA worked to influence voters using already contentious American issues like race, immigration, gun rights, sexual orientation, and political party tribalism, but this new analysis makes it clear that racial tension was the Russian operation’s go-to wedge.

Fifty-five percent of the ads targeted race, which was also a primary angle for many of the 24 percent of ads that focused on crime or policing. The IRA’s use of divisive racial ads ramped up as Election Day approached in 2016, as well as after Trump was elected. In fact, the vast majority of ads from September 2016 to May 2017 focused on race in one way or another. 

The ads, which were purchased in rubles using 470 fake accounts and pages, rarely made direct references to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or any of the other politicians who ran in the 2016 cycle. (Very few ads targeted swing states, either.) Instead the IRA mostly mimicked the style and tactics of identity groups on opposing sides of the American electorate and tried to reinforce or expand already existing divisions.

[A]nother ad — targeting users who liked the fake “Being Patriotic” page — ran in mid-October in 2016 and showed an image of police officer’s funeral and decried “another gruesome attack on police by a [Black Lives Matter] movement activist.”

As one academic commented to USA Today in response to their findings, Russian intelligence agencies have been attempting to leverage U.S. racial discord since the 1950s. Those efforts have now obviously gotten a lot easier in the age of social media and ad micro-targeting.

The 3,500 ads released by the House Intelligence Committee are also only a fraction of the IRA’s overall Facebook activity, as it shared around 80,000 posts on Facebook using its accounts and pages, as well.

In February, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians on charges of attempting to meddle in the 2016 election, including several people associated with the Internet Research Agency. The indictment alleged that the Russians’ efforts were often intended to help Trump defeat Clinton. All told, the IRA’s operation is estimated to have targeted as many as 126 million U.S. Facebook users between 2015 and 2017.