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By Joseph Menn
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Russian actors, apparently linked to the government, actively participated in the distribution of controversial content and the promotion of extreme themes during the run-up to the US mid-term elections on Tuesday, but strive to hide their footsteps, according to government investigators, academics and security companies.
Researchers studying the spread of misinformation on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other platforms have said that this new, more subtle tactic has allowed most so-called information operations campaigns to survive the purges of big business. social media and to avoid any control of the government.
"The Russians certainly do not escape this decision," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. "They have adapted over time to increased concentration (US) on influence operations."
US intelligence and law enforcement officials say Russia has used misinformation and other tactics to support President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. The Russian government rejected all allegations of electoral interference.
A clear sign of Russia's determination to disrupt US political life was revealed last month by unrevealed accusations against a Russian who is an accountant in a St. Petersburg-based company known as the Internet Research Agency.
After spending $ 12 million on a project to influence the US election through social media in 2016, the company has budgeted $ 12.2 million for the previous fiscal year and then proposed to spend $ 10 million in the first half of 2018, revealed court records.
The indictment indicates that the Internet Research Agency used fake social media accounts to publish information on politically charged topics, including race, gun control and immigration. The instructions were detailed and explained how to make fun of some politicians during a specific news cycle.
While the objectives of distributing the content of division remained the same, the methods evolved in several ways, according to the researchers. On the one hand, there has been less use of pure fiction. People have been sensitized to the search for completely wrong stories and Facebook uses external checkers to at least slow down their circulation on its pages.
"We have done a lot of research on false news and people are becoming less aware of what it is, so it has become a less effective tactic," said Priscilla Moriuchi, a former head of the National Security Agency is now a threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, threat manager.
Instead, Russian stories have amplified Internet stories and "memes" that originally came from the far left or from the American far right. Such messages seem more authentic, are more difficult to identify as foreign, and are easier to produce than invented stories.
Renee DiResta, director of research at security firm New Knowledge, said her company had compiled a list of alleged Russian accounts on Facebook and Twitter similar to those suspended after the 2016 campaign.
Some of them grabbed Brett Kavanaugh's candidacy to the Supreme Court to rally the Conservatives, while others used memes from Occupy Left Democrats. Some operators of the collection accounts have established themselves as far right experts and had accounts on Gab, the social network favored by the far right.
Brookie said that while Russian accounts could be a hot topic, spillovers would often be generated by related issues.
But this is not necessary when the main subject is sufficiently discordant. Take the idea of "Blexit", an appeal to Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party. The Daily Beast said it captured 250,000 tweets with the Blexit hashtag during a 15-hour gust last week and discovered that 40,000 of them came from descriptors who participated in campaigns. 39, information in Russia.
Although jumping on existing treads is easier than what Russia did in 2016, other new tactics have been more complex.
In the October indictment and an operation previously uncovered by Facebook, the instigators used Facebook's messaging service to urge others to buy advertisements and recruit American radicals to promote real events.
These measures allowed the Russians to avoid stronger detection systems and to blend in with the crowd.
"They are calling on Americans to drive more polarizing and more vitriolic content," Brookie said. "Any given solution must first and foremost be based on factual facts and on what keeps our country closer to each other."
(Joseph Menn Report in San Francisco, edited by Jonathan Weber and Neil Fullick)
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