The use of social media to spread political disinformation has been widely acknowledged, but two new reports show that the Russian-linked influence campaign spread way beyond Facebook and Twitter.
The two new reports, conducted for the Senate's intelligence committee, detailed the widespread impact of online propaganda leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Researchers found that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm behind the disinformation campaign, left few social media platforms untouched.
IRA-linked content was found heavily on popular platforms Instagram and YouTube, and also on smaller platforms like Pinterest, SoundCloud, Vine, and even Pokémon Go.
"The breadth of the attack included games, browser extensions, and music apps created by the IRA and pushed to targeted groups," New Knowledge researchers wrote in their report. "It was designed to exploit societal fractures, blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself."
Here are all the social media platforms identified in the most recent reports on the Russia-linked disinformation campaign:
The breadth of Instagram's role in Russian propaganda was relatively unknown until now. Monday's reports showed just how central Instagram, a Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform, was to the operation: an estimated 116,000 posts from 133 accounts, 20 milion users reached, and 187 million engagements.
"Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony," New Knowledge said in its report.
Researchers found that Instagram engagement actually outperformed Facebook, which it attributed to the photo-sharing service "being more ideal for memetic warfare."
Memes were used often by the accounts, and were recycled and repurposed often. They were used to post conspiracy theories, voter fraud allegations, recruit human assets, and organized public events.
The reports saw an uptick in Instagram activity from the IRA after the 2016 presidential election, which researchers credit as a response to "increased scrutiny" put on Facebook and Twitter.
The New Knowledge report concluded that Instagram would be "a key battleground" platform for propaganda and political influence in the future.
A Facebook spokesperson issued the following statement to Business Insider:
“As we've said all along, Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency. We continue to fully cooperate with officials investigating the IRA's activity on Facebook and Instagram around the 2016 election. We've provided thousands of ads and pieces of content to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for review and shared information with the public about what we found. Since then, we've made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”
The two reports analyzed more than 1,100 YouTube videos, across almost 20 channels, connected to the disinformation campaign. YouTube was one of the platforms that researchers looked into the most and found to be among the most impactful — along with Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
The report from Oxford and Graphika found that YouTube videos "were predominantly used to target African Americans." New Knowledge identified 59% of the channels and 96% of the content on YouTube from the IRA was "related to Black Lives Matter & police brutality."
The New Knowledge report also criticized Google for its comments in 2017 that "these channels’ videos were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population." Researchers say that with the findings, the statement "appears disingenuous now."
Google declined to comment to Business Insider.
From the New Knowledge report: "Tumblr was used to disseminate memes and reblog existing content – particularly those found on Instagram ... There were extensive efforts to target Black communities on Tumblr, particularly youth and urban communities."
Operations that took place on Tumblr were referenced in proceedings during the federal investigation — and indictment — into Russians associated with the disinformation campaign, the report notes.
Tumblr has confirmed its platform was used for "state-sponsored disinformation campaigns," and that Tumblr accounts were used for "cross-pollination" with related Facebook pages and Twitter users. In March 2018, Tumblr started in to post usernames it determined were engaging in propaganda activities. With the latest additions in November, the list is up to 197 names.
Tumblr did not provide additional comment to Business Insider, but did point to a post written in March detailing steps the platform had taken.
