Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a meeting
on Tuesday in the Black Sea town of Sochi, Russia. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik via AP)
on Tuesday in the Black Sea town of Sochi, Russia. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik via AP)
Whistleblower Chris Wylie Explains How Cambridge Analytica Helped Fuel U.S. "Insurgency"
Instagram is the new frontier of Russian disinformation efforts, but Putin can still reach Trump directly
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THE BIG IDEA: The Russians keep coming.
Facebook announced Monday afternoon that it took down a network of Russian-backed accounts that were posing as American voters in swing states. The social media company said the operation appeared well-resourced, reflected a sophisticated understanding of the culture wars that divide Americans, and bore all the hallmarks of the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed troll farm that interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Fifty fake accounts were removed from Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook. Only one of the accounts that was taken down was a traditional Facebook page. This reflects how America’s adversaries continue to be aggressive and entrepreneurial, evolving to maximize their impact.
Graphika, a social media analysis firm that examined the operation for Facebook, published a 30-page report about the fake pages, which were still in audience-building mode: “Multiple accounts praised Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Accounts from both sides of the political spectrum attacked Joe Biden; some also attacked Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.”
“The reason that networks of phony accounts are drawn to Instagram is because disinformation is increasingly visual in nature, and that’s what Instagram specializes in,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
“The disclosure from Facebook served as more evidence of what Trump has repeatedly questioned — that Russian actors not only interfered in the 2016 election but are continuing their efforts to interfere in American democracy,” Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker report. “The task of safeguarding U.S. elections from interference by Russia and other foreign actors has been a source of tension in the Trump administration, with the president repeatedly calling the allegations of Russian involvement in 2016 a ‘hoax’ and top security officials being forced to tiptoe around the issue.”
Facebook’s announcement comes ahead of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s scheduled testimony before Congress on Wednesday. Lawmakers have been champing at the bit to question him about what the company is doing to safeguard U.S. elections in 2020. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Zuckerberg said Facebook is in a “much better place now” to stop disinformation, with better artificial intelligence technology to detect nefarious activity and more staff focused on the problem. But he also said the problem posed by disinformation has worsened since 2016, and he said the U.S. government deserves part of the blame. “Unfortunately, the U.S. did not have a particularly strong response to Russia after 2016 so it sent the signal to other countries that they could get in on this, too,” he said.
To wit, Facebook also announced yesterday that it disabled three disinformation campaigns that originated in Iran. They were almost certainly sanctioned by the government in Tehran.
Mark Zuckerberg walks to a meeting in the Russell Senate Office building. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
-- Non-state actors are pursuing innovative approaches, as well. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports, for instance, that Islamic State militants have been posting short propaganda videos in recent weeks to TikTok, the social network that’s popular with teenagers right now.
“The videos—since removed, in line with the app’s policy—featured corpses paraded through streets, Islamic State fighters with guns, and women who call themselves ‘jihadist and proud,’” per Georgia Wells. “Many were set to Islamic State songs. Some included TikTok filters, or images, of stars and hearts that stream across the screen in an apparent attempt to resonate with young people. … The app, owned by Beijing-based Bytedance Ltd., features short videos that started becoming popular in the U.S. in 2018 and has been embraced by teens. It was the third-most installed app world-wide in the first quarter, behind Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp and Messenger, and about 30% of users are under the age of 18.”
-- Twitter announced yesterday that it plans to create a new policy to combat manipulated media, including deep fake videos, ahead of the 2020 election. These distorted videos are increasingly realistic and lifelike. Twitter is asking for public feedback.
-- It’s a brave new world out there, and authoritarians keep trying to turn technological tools into instruments of oppression: The Russians passed a law earlier this year that lets Vladimir Putin take all the country’s Internet traffic off the World Wide Web if he decrees that there’s an “emergency.” The latest development is that the Putin administration now plans to hold annual exercises to prepare for such a scenario by effectively turning off the Internet.
“A new posting appeared October 21 on Russia’s official government website to announce the exercise plans,” according to Meduza, a Latvia-based online news outlet that covers the Kremlin. “An executive order allowing for the exercises will take effect on November 1. Specific arrangements to test the Russian Internet’s isolation capabilities have been developed by the Communications Ministry and approved by the FSB, the Defense Ministry, the Federal Security Service, the Emergencies Ministry, and the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control.” The FSB is the successor to the KGB, where Putin was once an officer.
-- Bloomberg News posted a chilling story this morning about the expansion of the surveillance state in Moscow: “The fourth of 10 basic rules Western spies followed when trying to infiltrate Russia’s capital during the Cold War—don’t look back because you’re never alone—is more apt than ever. Only these days it’s not just foreigners who are being tracked, but all 12.6 million Muscovites, too. Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel.”
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Trump says Hillary Clinton is 'accusing everybody of being a Russian agent'
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-- The stories about disinformation efforts should be read against the backdrop of a major update in L'Affaire Ukraine: Current and former U.S. officials say that Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for information he could use against political rivals came as he was being urged to adopt a hostile view of that country by its regional adversaries, including Putin.
“Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election” Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima report. “Neither of those foreign leaders specifically encouraged Trump to see Ukraine as a potential source of damaging information about [Biden], nor did they describe Kyiv as complicit in an unsubstantiated 2016 election conspiracy theory … But their disparaging depictions of Ukraine reinforced Trump’s perceptions of the country and fed a dysfunctional dynamic in which White House officials struggled to persuade Trump to support the fledgling government in Kyiv instead of exploiting it for political purposes …
“The role played by Putin and Orban, a hard-right leader who has often allied himself with the Kremlin’s positions, was described in closed-door testimony last week by George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state … Kent cited the influence of those leaders as a factor that helped sour Trump on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the months leading up to their July 25 phone call … The efforts to poison Trump’s views toward Zelensky were anticipated by national security officials at the White House … But the voices of Putin and Orban took on added significance this year because of the departure or declining influence of those who had sought to blunt the influence of Putin and other authoritarian leaders over Trump. …
“Trump spoke with Putin by phone and met with Orban at the White House in the weeks between Zelensky’s April 21 election and his May 20 inauguration. Trump also spoke with Putin on June 28, during a global summit in Japan, and by phone on July 31, days after the call in which he solicited a ‘favor’ from Zelensky. … Trump turned to Putin for guidance on the new leader of Ukraine within days of Zelensky’s election. In a May 3 call, Trump asked Putin about his impressions of Zelensky, according to a Western official familiar with the conversation. Putin said that he had not yet spoken with Zelensky but derided him as a comedian with ties to an oligarch despised by the Kremlin.”
-- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in Russia today to meet with Putin about Syria’s future. “Erdogan’s meeting with Putin, the Syrian government’s most powerful supporter, was widely expected to center on the thorny aftermath of Turkey’s military operation and the rapidly shifting Syrian map of control, as U.S. troops withdraw and competing factions rush to fill the void,” Kareem Fahim and Sarah Dadouch report. “Putin’s role as Syria’s central power broker was bolstered after the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing its remaining troops from the north.”
-- Programming note: Today’s 202 comes to you from the great state of Texas. I’m here to cheer on the Nationals against the Houston Astros in Games 1 and 2 of the World Series. I’m on vacation for the rest of the week to focus on baseball, and then attend my college reunion, but the newsletter is in the able hands of my colleagues. I’ll be back on Monday, when hopefully Washington has won the championship.
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