The Cybersecurity 202: The Facebook ad dump shows the true sophistication of Russia’s influence operation

The following article by Derek Hawkins was posted on the Washington Post website May 11, 2018:

The massive trove of Facebook ads House Intelligence Committee Democrats released Tuesday provides a stunning look into the true sophistication of the Russian government’s digital operations during the presidential election.

We’ve already heard a lot from the U.S. intelligence community about the hacking operation Russian intelligence services carried out against Democratic party computer networks to influence the election in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump.

But this is the first time we have a swath of empirical and visual evidence of Russia’s disinformation campaign, in the form of more than 3,000 incredibly specific and inflammatory ads purchased by an Internet troll farm sponsored by the Kremlin.

The ads clearly show how Russia weaponized social media, the senior Democrat on the panel investigating Moscow’s interference in the presidential election said.

Russians “sought to harness Americans’ very real frustrations and anger over sensitive political matters in order to influence American thinking, voting and behavior,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement. That’s why Schiff and other lawmakers pushed to release the ads publicly: “The only way we can begin to inoculate ourselves against a future attack is to see first-hand the types of messages, themes and imagery the Russians used to divide us.”

The 3,500 ads purchased by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, or IRA, were funneled with laser precision to narrow categories of social media users.

My colleague Tony Romm reports that the troll farm used Facebook’s targeting tools to deliver the Russian-fed propaganda to a range of specific user groups, from black or gay users to fans of Fox News. He writes: “In many cases, the Kremlin-tied ads took multiple sides of the same issue. Accounts like United Muslims of America urged viewers in New York in March 2016 to ‘stop Islamophobia and the fear of Muslims.’ That same account, days later, crafted an open letter in another ad that accused [Hillary] Clinton of failing to support Muslims before the election.”

The Russian agents didn’t stop there, Tony notes: “They relied on Facebook features to target specific categories of users. An IRA-backed account on Instagram aimed a January 2016 ad about ‘white supremacy’ specifically to those whose interests included HuffPost’s ‘black voices’ section.”

The IRA sought to capitalize on the controversy over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem—and even, as Tony found, get people to protest for and against Beyoncé. NBC reports that the ads even shopped anti-immigrant messages to fans of specific Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. This effort to lure social media to engage with Russian-fed propaganda like this clearly required a sound knowledge of Americans and their politics that is especially staggering when you see the ads in full.

Get ready for more of this.

This type of “hybrid” cyberoperation is the new standard for state-sponsored election interference campaigns, said Peter W. Singer, a strategist at the New America think tank.

“The future of these campaigns is hybridization — in terms of state and criminal actors working together,” Singer told me. Going forward, he said, we’ll see more “attacks targeting both the networks and the beliefs and conversations of people behind the networks.” 

As Singer notes: “When it comes to cyberoperations and information warfare or influence campaigns, the way we conceive of them is we keep them separate.” But, as the ads make very clear, Russia “didn’t separate them,” he said. 

After the Democrats released the ads, Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has studied Russian online influence campaigns, broke down how some of the IRA’s targeting worked:

The ads on Facebook and Instagram reached at least 146 million people between mid-2015 and mid-2017.

Facebook acknowledged Thursday it had not anticipated the two-pronged approach.

“In the run-up to the 2016 elections, we were focused on the kinds of cybersecurity attacks typically used by nation states, for example phishing and malware attacks. And we were too slow to spot this type of information operations interference,” the company said in a statement.

The company said it has made “important changes to prevent bad actors from using misinformation to undermine the democratic process” but conceded there’s no silver bullet. “This will never be a solved problem because we’re up against determined, creative and well-funded adversaries,” Facebook said. (And it wasn’t just Facebook: Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman said earlier this year the company removed 944 suspicious accounts that were of suspicious IRA origin, which it posted here.)

The ad trove adds color to details about the IRA that we already know from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into election interference.

Mueller’s February indictment of the now-infamous group of Internet trolls was chock-full of colorful details about the St. Petersburg-based group and read like something out of a spy novel. As my colleagues Devlin Barrett, Sari Horwitz and Rosalind S. Helderman reported at the time:

“The indictment charges that the Russian efforts began in 2014, when three of the Russian conspirators visited 10 states, gathering intelligence about U.S. politics. Officials say that as the operation progressed, the suspects also engaged in extensive online conversations with Americans who became unwitting tools of the Russian efforts.”

he indictment described “an 80-person team with specialists in graphics, data analysis and search-engine optimization that set out to con Americans online,” my colleagues wrote. “At times, they paid people to engage in political theater, such as paying for the construction of ‘a cage large enough to hold an actress depicting Clinton in a prison uniform,’ according to the charges.”

Mueller’s charges against 13 individuals and three companies included conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud.