Month: March 2024

Russian online propagandists aggressively targeted African Americans during the 2016 US election campaign to suppress votes for Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, according to new research.

Analysts found that Russian operatives used social media to “confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage” black people and other pro-Clinton blocs from voting, using bogus claims such as Clinton receiving money from the Ku Klux Klan.

Black turnout declined in 2016 for the first presidential election in 20 years, according to the US census bureau, falling to less than 60% from a record high of 66.6% in 2012. Exit polls indicated that black voters strongly favoured Clinton over Trump.

The new findings on the secret activities of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), known as the Russian government’s “troll factory”, were revealed on Monday in a pair of reports to the US Senate’s intelligence committee. One was led by experts from Oxford University and the other by New Knowledge, an American cybersecurity firm.

New Knowledge said Russia had waged a five-year “propaganda war” against the US public. The Oxford researchers said that while the propaganda was meant to “push and pull” Americans in different directions, “what is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican party – and specifically, Donald Trump”.

Both reports faulted the major social media companies – Facebook, Twitter and Google – for what they said were ongoing failures to turn over exhaustive data to US authorities investigating the Russian campaign. They said some executives had “misrepresented or evaded” and “dissembled” in statements to Congress.

Mark Warner, the committee’s senior Democrat, said new laws were needed to tackle a crisis around social media. “These attacks against our country were much more comprehensive, calculating and widespread than previously revealed,” said Warner.

More than a dozen Russians have been criminally charged with hacking and other online activity by special counsel Robert Mueller and other US prosecutors investigating Moscow’s interference in the 2016 campaign.

The new reports said that while it was well known that Russian trolls flooded social media with rightwing pro-Trump material, their subtler efforts to drive black voters to boycott the election or vote for a third-party candidate were underappreciated.

One popular bogus Facebook account created by the Russians, Blacktivist, attracted 4.6 million “likes”. It told followers in the final weeks of the campaign that “no lives matter to Hillary Clinton”, that black people should vote for the Green party candidate, Jill Stein, and that “not voting is a way to exercise our rights”.

Some black Americans were even weaponised as unwitting “human assets” for the Russian campaign, according to the researchers, who said operatives in St Petersburg worked to recruit people in the US to attend rallies and hand out literature.

The Oxford researchers found black Americans were also targeted with more advertisements on Facebook and Instagram than any other group. More than 1,000 different advertisements were directed at Facebook users interested in African American issues, and reached almost 16 million people.

The material was intended to inflame anger about the skewed rates of poverty, incarceration and the use of force by police among black Americans to “divert their political energy away from established political institutions”, the report said, adding that similar content was pushed by the Russians on Twitter and YouTube.

The New Knowledge researchers agreed that the “most prolific IRA efforts” on Facebook and Instagram were aimed at black Americans in what they called an “immersive influence ecosystem” connecting many different pages posting information and reinforcing one another.

In addition to the online posts telling black people their votes would not matter or urging them to vote third-party, Russian operatives tricked people with “vote by text message” scams and tweets designed to create confusion about voting rules, according to New Knowledge.

New Knowledge said the social media propaganda campaign should be seen as the third front in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, together with the hack and theft of Democratic party emails that were passed to WikiLeaks, and the attempt to hack online voting systems across the US.

The Oxford researchers said the lack of human editors on platforms such as Facebook was enabling propagandists. “Obviously, democracies need to take computational propaganda seriously as a threat to their public life,” they said.

Domestic turmoil may be dominating headlines about the 2024 elections, but threats from abroad have not dissipated. 

During the 2022 midterms, state actors from China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere increased their attempts to influence the outcomes of midterm races and amplify divisions in American society, according to dual reports released last month by the U.S. national security apparatus. And hostile governments scanned state election websites and copied voter data, although they did not compromise the vote itself.

Americans should understand why foreign actors want to interfere in U.S. elections, how they do it, and what we can do to protect the integrity of our electoral process as we barrel into the 2024 primary season.

Authoritarian governments such as China, Russia, and Iran have three key motivations to interfere in the 2024 election: to diminish the credibility of our democracy, distract our country with internal issues to erode U.S. leadership overseas, and shift our policy to favor their interests. If Americans lack confidence in the integrity of a democratic election or if the country plunges into a political crisis, autocrats abroad can point a finger at us to distract their own citizens from the many shortcomings of their own authoritarian political systems. And American preoccupation with internal election turmoil could weaken our foreign commitments in places like Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel, regions where these authoritarians have deep and abiding interests counter to our own.

These regimes favor certain political candidates, and in the midterms China (and even Cuba) sought to sway elections toward candidates who aligned with their agendas. A U.S. president less interested in maintaining strong American leadership overseas or supporting our allies would be a strategic win for these countries.

Nation-state actors use a variety of tools and tactics to influence our elections. They wage information-manipulation and online-influence campaigns; conduct cyber intrusions and attacks; put dirty money in our system; and contact candidates, campaigns, and diaspora communities either directly or through cutouts. The advent of generative artificial intelligence enables bad actors to conduct information campaigns and cyberattacks at unprecedented scale and volume.

AI-generated content has played a role in other democratic elections this year, including Slovakia and Argentina, where it was used to malign candidates and spread misleading information, like one viral (but fake) recording of a candidate promising to raise the price of beer. 

Campaigns and political parties are experimenting and grappling with AI in the U.S. elections. Over the past week, a robocall featuring a faked voice of President Biden urged New Hampshire voters to skip Tuesday’s primary. State and local election officials are preparing for increased cyberattacks and more realistic false images, audio, and video that could stoke false claims about election rigging as the Federal Election Commission tries to regulate such misinformation. 

To be clear, these challenges to election integrity are not posed exclusively by foreign actors. Whether in service of money, power, or chaos, anyone can use many of the tools and tactics nation-state actors have at their disposal to undermine the integrity of the election too, especially with AI at everyone’s fingertips. However, in many respects, the United States is a soft target for our foreign adversaries.

The United States is highly polarized. Tens of millions of Americans believe the lies that the election system is rigged already. Our free and open information environment leaves us susceptible to all sorts of campaigns that try to denigrate how the electoral process works. Furthermore, there are over 10,000 election jurisdictions in the country, and although elections are more secure than ever across the board, some jurisdictions still lack the resources to combat a viral image or video created in a basement, to say nothing of deterring a hostile intelligence service.

These vulnerabilities are serious but not insurmountable. Election officials and federal and state officials are working tirelessly to defend against interference in our elections. There are promising technologies that can help officials, media, and the public alike better differentiate between authentic and manipulated content. When appropriate, trusted military and defense leaders can communicate foreign adversaries’ intentions to undermine U.S. military readiness and national security, which is a key reason these adversaries are trying to destabilize democracy in the United States. Finally, if Americans are turned off by the political discourse, now more than ever is the time to participate in democracy directly. Volunteering as an election worker, for example, is an important way to see firsthand all the processes and procedures in place that safeguard the sanctity of the vote from all sorts of threats. By reinforcing our participatory democracy, we provide the best defense against authoritarians who have every interest in destabilizing the United States in 2024 and beyond. 

David Salvo and Rachael Dean Wilson are co-Managing Directors of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States