By Robert McMillan, Deepa Seetharaman and Georgia Wells
The alleged Russian campaign to manipulate the U.S. presidential
election was orchestrated by what amounted to a propaganda startup,
with finance and graphics departments, performance targets and a
sophisticated social-media strategy designed to gain maximum
attention, according to U.S. authorities.
The federal indictment issued Friday against the Internet
Research Agency describes in rich detail an institution with a deep
understanding of Silicon Valley technology that allegedly
manipulated tools designed to foster open discussion and turned
them into weapons for causing discord.
The IRA's opinion-influencing unit, set up in 2014 to exploit
social media, had at least 80 staff by 2016, and a stated goal to
spread "distrust towards the candidates and the political system in
general," the indictment says. Employees of that division crafted
viral Facebook posts and widely-followed, fraudulent Twitter
accounts, according to the indictment. The indictment, secured by
special counsel Robert Mueller, also named two related companies
and 13 Russian nationals allegedly involved in the scheme.
The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations have
detailed ways the Russian efforts allegedly played out in the U.S.,
with hundreds of thousands of Americans following fake Facebook
pages and some even participating in bogus events that the
provocateurs organized.
Friday's indictment provides the clearest portrait yet of how
that disruption was allegedly coordinated. Based in St. Petersburg,
Russia, IRA employees used free email accounts and online
cryptocurrency exchanges, and concealed their Russian origin using
virtual private networks and U.S. computer servers, the U.S.
indictment says. They used stolen identities to open PayPal
accounts, from which they also paid for Facebook and Instagram ads
to promote their online groups, according to the indictment.
U.S. authorities say the IRA leveraged these tools to organize
flash-mobs in Florida, run ads for "Miners for Trump" in
Pennsylvania and to pay a U.S. resident to dress up like Hillary
Clinton in a prison uniform at a West Palm Beach rally.
Operational goals were subject to internal audits. In September
2016, an employee was chastised for not criticizing Hillary Clinton
enough in a Facebook group called Secured Borders, and was
instructed to step up the criticism in future posts, according to
the indictment.
The charges show how social media, anonymity and messaging
technologies that minted citizen journalists during the Arab Spring
came to be turned on their head by Russian operatives to sow
disinformation during the 2016 election, said John Scott Railton, a
researcher with the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for
International Studies.
"Back in the day if you wanted to run a coup d'état, one of the
first things you needed to do was to capture the TV station,
capture the radio," he said. But in the era of Facebook and
Twitter, that is no longer the case, he said.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any government effort to influence
the U.S. election, and the Russian Embassy in Washington didn't
respond to a request for comment.
The IRA had a monthly budget of more than $1.25 million to
conduct influence operations in various countries, the indictment
says. In 2014, it created a special team called the Translator
Project that fostered campaigns on social media including Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter, and also Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube, according
to the indictment.
Working in split shifts designed to make it seem like they were
in U.S. time zones, project staffers allegedly posted topics on
these networks that would resonate with extreme viewpoints held by
Americans. They spent thousands of dollars a month promoting their
messages, and used engagement metrics -- quantifying the size of
the audience reached and the number of likes and comments -- to
refine them, while developing fictitious U.S. personas into
"leaders of public opinion," according to the indictment.
By the time of the election, many of the Translator Project's
groups had snagged hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting followers,
the indictment says.
IRA employees also stole the identities of legitimate
organizations and real Americans to add credibility to their cause,
according to the indictment. Ahead of the presidential election,
they allegedly created the Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which claimed
to be the Twitter account for the Tennessee Republican party. The
false account amassed more than 100,000 online followers, more than
seven times the 14,000 followers the official Twitter account of
the Tennessee Republican Party has attracted, according to
calculations by the Journal.
In a statement posted to its website Friday, the Tennessee
Republican Party said that it had filed "multiple" reports to
Twitter complaining about the @TEN_GOP account. "Each report was
either dismissed by Twitter or never responded to," the party
said.
Twitter didn't comment on the @TEN_GOP account, but said the
alleged Russian efforts to disrupt the election "go against
everything we at Twitter believe." As part of its preparation for
the U.S. midterm elections, Twitter said it is monitoring trends
and spikes in conversations for possible manipulation activity.
YouTube didn't respond to a request for comment.
Facebook reiterated its plans to expand its safety and security
team to 20,000 people by the end of 2018. "We know we have more to
do to prevent future attacks," the company said.
Facebook and Twitter said they were working with a Federal
Bureau of Investigation task force on election tampering.
The indictment describes in detail how the IRA allegedly
organized real-world events throughout the U.S. through Facebook
advertisements and direct contact with activists who supported
certain causes, tactics previously reported by the Journal and
other media outlets.
The IRA page "Born Patriotic" purchased Facebook ads to promote
several pro-Trump rallies in Florida in August 2016 that reached
59,000 Facebook users in Florida, according to the indictment. More
than 8,300 Facebook users clicked on the ads, which routed users to
Being Patriotic's page on Facebook, the indictment says.
The IRA pages covered some event costs, like travel and
equipment rental, transmitting funds to activists through wire
transfers and other means, the indictment says.
The alleged Russian influence campaign seemingly flew under the
radar of the technology companies. Facebook, Twitter and Google
didn't launch investigations into the Russian influence campaign
until after the presidency was decided.
Starting last September, Facebook and other companies publicly
reported that they had identified Russian expenditures on their
platforms. The indictment says that media reports that Facebook was
working with Mr. Mueller's team spooked the IRA operatives,
prompting them to start destroying evidence.
"We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our
activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks
together with the colleagues," a co-conspirator emailed a relative
at the time, according to the indictment. "I created all these
pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written
by their people."
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com, Deepa
Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and Georgia Wells at
Georgia.Wells@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 17, 2018 08:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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