Russian government operatives used social media in 2016 to help the Trump campaign.
A sophisticated effort targeted African Americans to suppress their enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton.
From the New York Times:
“The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.
“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there.
“The New Knowledge report, which was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled release on Monday, is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. They are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and the other companies whose platforms were used.”
From the Washington Post:
THE BIG IDEA: A new report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee reveals that the Russians, in their bid to boost President Trump, have been more fixated than previously understood on trying to dampen African American political engagement.
“Researchers at Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm, spent seven months analyzing millions of social media posts that major technology firms turned over to congressional investigators. Their goal was to understand the inner workings of the Internet Research Agency, which the U.S. government has charged with criminal offenses for interfering in the 2016 election.
“It turns out that African Americans were targeted with more Facebook ads than any other group, including conservatives.
“Three of the four most-liked Facebook posts put up by the Russian influence effort came from an account called Blacktivist that urged the community to be more cynical about politics. African Americans were urged to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein throughout the month before the 2016 election. A post on Oct. 29 that year declared: “NO LIVES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON. ONLY VOTES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON.” A message on Nov. 3 added: “NOT VOTING is a way to exercise our rights.”
“On Twitter, four of the Russian agency’s five most‐retweeted accounts catered exclusively to African Americans.
“On Instagram, all five of the most-liked posts created by the Russians were aimed at African American women. They included the hashtags #blackpower, #blackpride, #unapologeticallyblack, #blacklivesmatter, #icantbreathe, #riot and #blackgirlskillingit.
“The influence operation – run out of St. Petersburg – was sophisticated, relentless and became more effective with time. Its goal was to manipulate identity politics to tear America apart. The Soviet Union had also tried to heighten racial divisions during the Cold War, but their operatives lacked access to the technology platforms that now make it so easy.
“Messaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities … including police violence, poverty, and disproportionate levels of incarceration,” the report says. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
Discover how the Russians influenced Black Americans to change their votes in 2016 so Hillary Clinton would lose the election to Donald Trump.
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I think that this strategy need much more media exposure. I hope that happens. I heard a brief reference to the report this morning.
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Can you imagine if – when Richard Nixon was President – the main question that everyone was insisting was most important was whether the illegal actions done by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) directly led to Nixon’s defeat of McGovern?
Can you imagine if – when Richard Nixon was President – we had supposed “progressives” (likely Russian bots) posting everywhere (like on the NY Times article linked above) that the only thing that matters is whether McGovern would have won if the Nixon campaign had obeyed the law. Can you imagine if haters of democracy back then insisted that since we don’t have “proof” that the crimes changed the outcome, the fact that dirty and illegal stuff went on is totally unimportant and we must allow Nixon to continue to rule and just wait for the next election and offer up a “better” candidate than the terrible awful McGovern who would have ruined this country forever.
Can you imagine anyone but right wing haters of democracy insisting that we should stop talking about the criminal activity of the Nixon campaign — and stop investigating it — because he would have won anyway so it doesn’t matter whether he broke the law or covered up for those who did?
I think that what gets lost here is that it doesn’t matter how successful this Russian effort was (and I think it was very successful). What matters is who at Facebook, at Palantir (which was helping Cambridge Analytica while the owner, Peter Thiel sat on the Facebook board) and in the Trump campaign made it possible for Russians to identify who to target with their propaganda. What matters is who made it possible for the Russians or Cambridge Analytica (with help from Palantir) to mine the data. And who has been covering up for them since 2016 and firing anyone who wouldn’t stop investigating what Trump doesn’t want investigated.
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Hillary called African Americans “superpredators” fer pity’s sake! Her husband was instrumental in getting black men locked up by the thousands and black women and children kicked off welfare with no other means of support. No one needed the Russians’ help in “suppressing enthusiasm” for Hillary among African American voters!
How about the elite take some personal responsibility for themselves sometimes, especially since they’re always so keen to push it on other people?
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BTW, I should say, “Her husband, with Hillary’s enthusiastic support….” Please don’t pretend that Hillary played no role in Bill’s administration.
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Well, that’s sure enough for me to know that fake Republican Robert Mueller should be locked up instead of wasting his time investigating Russian meddling and how the Trump campaign helped the meddling and then how Trump covered it up.
Because really, this is not about breaking the law at all, but whether Hillary DESERVED to be the victim of a crime by a Republican candidate. And obviously there are some people here who think she deserved it. And that’s really what matters.
After all, Hillary devoted her entire life to making sure African-Americans were known throughout the land as superpredators and she did nothing at all for them except help racists hate them more. Right, dienne77?
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yep
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Hillary Clinton said: “Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”
The full context of this incident does link children and superpredators, but nowhere in the speech does she directly label African-American youth this way.
FYI, dienne 77, the fact that you claimed that Hillary Clinton specifically said that “African-Americans” were super predators” when she was talking about “gangs” that your racist beliefs ASSUMED were African-American says much more about your own racism than Hillary’s.
But thanks for demonstrating the Russian bot techniques in all their glory and how they were repeated by people who should have known better.
By the way, Hillary made that remark about kids in 1996 and not only did Bill Clinton win that election with many votes from African-Americans, but Hillary Clinton served two terms as Senator in which she received the votes of African-Americans. Of course, that was before people like dienne77 spent so much time and effort telling African-American voters that Hillary Clinton specifically singled out African-Americans as super predators because to white people like dienne77, gangs means there are no white or Latino or Asian gangs ever and all gang members are, of course to dienne77, African-American and that is exactly what Hillary Clinton meant more than 20 years ago and everything she ever did for the following 20 years proved that she was the most racist white person in history, unlike Trump.
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^^^BTW I would never ask you to take responsibility for any of your misstatements because America is so grateful rot everyone who tells th e world that Hillary Clinton not only called African-Americans suerpredatorts just to help support racism, but everything she did as a NY Senator and Secretary of State for the next 20 years was in action to those racist beliefs. Because the truth doesn’t really matter when you are a bot.
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Tho there’s some truth in that, I don’t know whether it resonates w/Afro-Americans.
It’s anecdotal, but I’ve been ‘taking the pulse’ for yrs on CSPAN’s am call-in show; a disproportionate # of callers-in are black. The drift has been nearly universal that blacks find they have always done better under Dem admins & that’s why they vote that way. During election season, black woman callers always spoke up for Hillary. Since 2015, the phenomenon of black Trump-supporters showed up (about 1 in 10-15 black male callers)– always men; almost always about immigration (occasionally a younger man talking up Rep economics). Complaints about incarceration & welfare policies frequent but blamed on racism, not on WC [or HRC].
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The congressional “grilling” of Facebook and other social media execs has revealed just how clueless Congress members are about how social media functions. The thing that most needs to be changed is the rule that says that social media are merely “platforms” and bear no responsibility for what appears on their so-called “platforms”. But, how are social media different from newspapers that publish reader letters? A newspaper isn’t merely a “platform” and bears responsibility for what the reader letters it allows to be published. Unless Congress legislates that social media bear responsibility for verifying what appears on their media, Congress will reap the whirlwind as government loses control of governance and social media determines politics and policy.
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Watching Malcolm Nance on MSNBC now connecting this with neo-Nazis (he used the incorrect term alt-right) like David Duke. I feared this in 1989 and now it has come to fruition. I just never imagined that the virus would occupy the American presidency and completely take over the Republican Party. George Bush stood up to Duke and Individual-1 because he also knew this malignancy had the potential of destroying this nation. If this continues, who will be our Edward Gibbon?
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Russkies helped individual number one win the primary races. Without Russian and Facebook help DT doesn’t win!! DT is illegitimate. This is all that matters. Everything he has done is illegal. Try him et al for treason as a common citizen. Bill from Dunedin
Sent from my iPhone
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Anyone interested in Russian intervention in to 2016 National Election should read Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s new book “Cyberwar” (2018). It discusses the range of propaganda and deception tactics employed by Russian trolls and hackers behind the secene.
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