How Russia exploited racial tensions in America during the 2016 elections
By P.R. Lockhart at Vox
https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/12/17/18145075/russia-facebook-twitter-internet-research-agency-race
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More than two years after the 2016 elections, media outlets and academics are still discovering the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at American voters. Now, a pair of independent reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee add to a wealth of evidence that targeting African Americans and suppressing black turnout was a crucial aspect of this effort.
According to the reports, one from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika and others from a team of researchers from cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield Research, a group of Russian agents utilized not only Facebook and Twitter, but also sites including Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube in an effort to amplify racial divisions ahead of the 2016 elections.
“[M]essaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African Americans,” the Oxford report states.
The reports focus on the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based “troll farm” that used several social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — including ones called “Woke Blacks” and “Blacktivists” — to urge Americans to vote for third-party candidates or sit out the election entirely. Several operatives working for the group were listed in a February 2018 indictment from special counsel Robert Muller detailing how Russian nationals interfered in the 2016 election.
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