The Pro-Trump Russian Internet Trolls are Back

In the final days of the 2020 presidential election, Russian interference to benefit Donald Trump is on the rise, especially through online disinformation campaigns.  As a CNN piece reports, the efforts are more sophisticated than what was seen in 2016 and, sadly, I am certain that some Republican "friends" and acquaintances will be sharing bogus stories without ever fact checking them.  When you see a piece by a supposed news outlet you've never heard of, odds are good that the story is false and or originates with foreign actors or even the GOP - Republicans have floated a raft of doctored images in just the last week. On the good news front, Facebook in particular seems to be making slightly more of an effort to ferret out the Russian operations, but much more needs to be done.  Here are excerpts from the CNN piece:

People associated with the infamous St. Petersburg troll group that was part of Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election are trying to target Americans again, Facebook announced Tuesday -- citing a tip from the FBI.

As CNN's Donie O'Sullivan reports: The disrupted operation used fake personas including realistic-looking computer-generated photos of people, a network of Facebook accounts and pages that had only a small amount of engagement and influence at the time it was taken down, and a website that was set up to look and operate like a left-wing news outlet. 

The good news is this particular operation seemed to be in its infancy and had a small following. It was just trying to get off the ground. The bad news is there's probably a lot more of this happening that hasn't been detected. And even though this was small, they still managed to convince unwitting real freelance writers, including Americans, to write for them.

Facebook and the US intel community were caught totally off-guard in 2016. There were some fake Russian Black Lives Matter Facebook pages, for instance, that had more than 300,000 followers. So Facebook and USG has more resources dedicated to rooting out this stuff now and I think that means that it would be a lot harder for a covert operation to gain such a huge following. 

But, no doubt, the trolls are evolving. The campaign that was uncovered Tuesday showed signs of greater sophistication at covering its tracks and trying to conceal who was behind it than some previous attempts. We also saw them use "deepfake," computer-generated images as profile photos on fake accounts -- literally pictures of people that do not exist. 

The companies [Facebook and Twitter] say they are sharing information with each other, and a few weeks ago companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others met with officials from FBI, DHS and DNI (one company that wasn't there was TikTok!). So there is collaboration happening, but I know from speaking to people at the companies there are tensions, too. The companies have very different approaches in how they handle misinformation -- even from [Trump] the President.

I think how this year's election plays out online (and we are all online a lot more right now) will be characterized by misinformation from domestic actors and what tech companies do or don't do about it. ... Look at how many deceptive and misleading videos top Republicans shared over two days earlier this week!