YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night.
All
of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended
up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy
Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the
Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching
Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election.
A
New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of
the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American
politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans
were broadcasting across social media platforms.
The
Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders”
and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one
conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur
from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police
beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them,
sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.
Other
posts on the Russian pages used stilted language or phrases rarely
found in American English. Yet their use of borrowed ideas and arguments
from Americans, which were already resonating among conservatives and
liberals, demonstrated a deft understanding of the political terrain.
The Russians also paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of
American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate
most widely, and among which audiences.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
“This is cultural hacking,” said Jonathan Albright,
research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital
Journalism. “They are using systems that were already set up by these
platforms to increase engagement. They’re feeding outrage — and it’s
easy to do, because outrage and emotion is how people share.”
All
of the pages were shut down by Facebook in recent weeks, as the company
conducts an internal review of Russian penetration of its social
network. But content and engagement metrics for hundreds of posts were
captured by CrowdTangle, a common social analytics tool, and gathered by Mr. Albright.
One
Russian Facebook page, the United Muslims of America, frequently posted
content highlighting discrimination against Muslims. In June 2016, it
posted a video originally made by Waqas Shah, 23, an online video
creator from Staten Island. In the video, Mr. Shah dressed in a thobe, a
traditional ankle-length gown worn by Arab men, walked through New
York’s Union Square, where he is shoved and harassed by another actor
pretending to be a bully to see how bystanders react.
The
video ends with Mr. Shah pointing out New York’s hypocrisy: The city
claims to be a “melting pot,” but no one intervened while he was getting
harassed. Mr. Shah’s original video, posted on YouTube in June 2016,
was a viral hit that attracted more than three million views. A week
after he posted it, United Muslims of America copied the video to its
group page without the original YouTube link, a process known as
ripping. There, Mr. Shah’s video become the Russian page’s most popular
post, earning more than 150,000 interactions.
Mr.
Shah said when he noticed the ripped video, he wrote to the
administrator of the United Muslims account, asking them to add the link
to his original YouTube video. His main concern, Mr. Shah said, was
that the page was stealing his views. Told that his video had been used
by Russian accounts to sow division in the United States, Mr. Shah said
there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
“There are always going to be people who manipulate things to their agenda,” he said.
When
Being Patriotic posted a brief message last year rallying Americans
against proposals to expand refugee settlements in the United States, it
was liked, shared or otherwise engaged with by more than 750,000
Facebook users. Eventually, it came across the feed of Len Swanson, 64, a
Republican activist from Houston and an avid Trump supporter.
Mr. Swanson, who frequently posts long commentaries on LinkedIn and Facebook, then used the message and photo to open one of his own posts, attacking Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. The message Mr. Swanson borrowed also appears on a conservative meme website, with a photo that at least one newspaper has credited to the United States Navy.
“I
usually publish an article several times a week, to keep driving the
narrative,” Mr. Swanson said in an interview. He was not bothered, he
said, by becoming an unwitting cog in the Russian propaganda machine.
“You know we do the same damn thing over there,” Mr. Swanson said. “What
do you think — we’re saints?”
In early 2016, Being Patriotic copied and pasted a story from the conspiracy site
InfoWars, saying that federal employees had taken “land from private
property owners at pennies on the dollar.” The Russian page added some
original text: “The nation can’t trust the federal government anymore.
What a disgrace!”
This
past March, another of the Russian pages, Secured Borders, reposted a
video that it attributed to Conservative Tribune, part of the
conservative and pro-Trump sites run by Patrick Brown. The video, which
falsely claims that Michigan allows Muslim immigrants to collect welfare
checks and other benefits for four wives, originated on a YouTube channel called CleanTV. The Facebook post has been removed, but a version remains up on the meme site Me.Me.
Mr. Brown did not respond to an email seeking comment. But Gerald McGlothlin, the president of CleanTV — and a contributor to other sites run by Mr. Brown — confirmed in an email that his company had created the original YouTube video.
The Blacktivist Facebook page appears to have specialized in passionate denunciations of the criminal justice system and viral videos
of police violence, many of them gathered from Facebook and YouTube. In
May, Blacktivist also posted a message drawn from news stories about the death of Jayson Negron,
a teenager in Bridgeport, Conn., during a confrontation with police.
Such posts soon found an authentic audience: The Negron post was
reposted by a verified Facebook account belonging to Black Lives Matter
Chicago, according to a cached copy.
As
lawmakers debate tighter regulation for companies like Facebook, the
trail of Russian digital bread crumbs underscores how difficult it will
be to purge social media networks of foreign influence, or even to
hamper the covert propaganda campaigns carried out on social platforms
by Russia, China and other countries.
Copying
other people’s content without proper attribution can be a violation of
the social networks’ rules. But the content itself — the videos, posts
and Instagram memes borrowed and shared on the Russian pages — are not
explicitly violent or discriminatory, so they do not violate the rules
of those services. Instead, they are precisely the type of engaging
content these platforms are hungry for.
The
Russian campaign also appears to have been tailored to exploit the
companies’ own strategies for keeping users engaged. Facebook, for
example, pushed people to interact more in Groups like the ones set up
by the Russians, where users can “share their common interests and
express their opinion” around a common cause. LinkedIn, the professional
social network owned by Microsoft, is geared toward encouraging users
like Mr. Swanson to create articles and other content.
“The
strategies are no mystery,” said Michael Strangelove, a lecturer on
internet culture at the University of Ottawa. “Foreign powers are
playing within the rules of the game that we wrote.”
A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment. LinkedIn said Mr. Swanson’s post did not violate the site’s terms of service.
“The
challenges posed by the dissemination of fake news and other harmful
content through technology platforms are serious,” said Nicole Leverich,
a spokeswoman for LinkedIn. “We actively address suspected violations
of LinkedIn’s terms of service such as harassment, fake profiles, and
misinformation on our platform.”
The
Russians appear to have insinuated themselves across American social
media platforms and used the same promotional tools that people employ
to share cat videos, airline complaints and personal rants. Many of the
posts on Being Patriotic also match pre-made, shareable graphics on
sites like ConservativeMemes.com, nestled alongside other conservative
content made for sharing on social media.
Boosted
by Russian accounts, the material was quickly picked up by other
American users of Facebook, spreading the posts to an even bigger
audience. The Russian presence appeared to be layered throughout
different platforms: Some of the Facebook accounts, including Being
Patriotic, had linked accounts on Instagram and Twitter, according to
deleted content captured in Google’s cache.
John
W. Kelly, the founder of Graphika, a commercial analytics company in
New York, said the Russians appeared to have a consistent strategy
across different platforms. Graphika has tracked thousands of social
media accounts whose content closely tracks Russian information
operations, promoting articles and videos about WikiLeaks dumps of
stolen emails and “false flag” conspiracies about Syrian chemical
weapons.
The
Russian accounts intermingle with real groups of Facebook or Twitter
users — from white nationalists to Bernie Sanders supporters — and seek
to manipulate and radicalize them, Mr. Kelly said.
The
Russian-influenced networks frequently promote obscure conservative
YouTube channels such as the Next News Network and the Trump Breaking
News Network, driving up their views and advertising revenue. A video
posted in February by a conservative internet radio host, who claimed that 30 politicians
were about to be arrested in connection with the “Pizzagate” hoax,
racked up more than 300,000 views on YouTube. Another YouTube video, claiming that Michelle Obama had 214 personal assistants and had purchased four yachts with taxpayer money, had close to a million views.
Rather
than construct fake grass-roots support behind their ideas — the public
relations strategy known as “Astroturfing” — the Russians sought to
cultivate and influence real political movements, Mr. Kelly said.
“It
isn’t Astroturfing — they’re throwing seeds and fertilizer onto social
media,” said Mr. Kelly. “You want to grow it, and infiltrate it so you
can shape it a little bit.”
No comments:
Post a Comment