Russia’s high-stakes information war

Two reports about Russian cyber-campaigns on social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. election find that Kremlin-linked trolls relentlessly targeted the African-American community to boycott the election

Yevgeny Prigozhin (right), close associate of President Vladimir Putin (left). Prigozhin owns St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (centre) and has been indicted in U.S. for trying to interfere with 2016 U.S. presidential election

Most popular IRA FaceBook pages (Users, total engagement*)

Stop All Immigrants 12,471,531
Being Patriotic 11,430,366
Blacktivist 11,204,352
Heart of Texas 11,045,039
United Muslims 3,933,233
Brown Power 3,863,028
South United 3,856,912
Black Matters 3,561,661
LGBT United 3,344,331
Army of Jesus 3,232,861

YouTube: Agency uploaded more than 1,000 videos to YouTube. Russians played on police shootings of unarmed black men with channels like Don’t Shoot and BlackToLive

Facebook: Approx 77 million engagements. Of 81 pages, 30 targeted African-American audiences with 1.2 million followers, 25 pages targeted political right with 1.4 million followers
 
Instagram: ~187 million engagements. Most popular Russian account was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers
   
Twitter: ~73 million engagements. 10.4 million tweets across 3,841 Twitter accounts, mostly anti-Hillary Clinton. More than 100 Twitter accounts masqueraded as news media

*Users are active participants rather than passive viewers, sharing opinion or criticism


Source: New Knowledge, Tactics & Tropes of the IRA Pictures: Associated Press 
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