Instagram played a significant role in Russian disinformation campaigns: report

It’s been more than two years since the 2016 presidential election, and researchers are still uncovering the magnitude of Russian disinformation campaign targeted at U.S. voters.

The Senate Intelligence Committee will release two new reports on Monday that detail the extreme lengths the Russian government-associated Internet Research Agency went to in order to effect the last presidential election and beyond.

One report, first published by the , was put together by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and network analysis firm, Graphika. The second report, first obtained by the , was prepared by cybersecurity company, New Knowledge and researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC.

In total, researchers analyzed 10.4 million tweets, 116,000 Instagram posts, 61,500 Facebook posts, and 1,100 YouTube videos published between 2015 and 2017 for the reports. 

One of the more revealing aspects of the reports are just what researchers are telling lawmakers about tech companies’ help, or lack thereof, in the investigations into Russian disinformation campaigns. The research panel categorized the assistance provided by Facebook, Twitter, and Google as the “bare minimum” to the Senate Intelligence Committee. According to CNN, a person familiar with the report said that social media companies could have provided more valuable data as well as presented it in a more accessible format.

The reports breakdown the Internet Research Agency’s efforts to sway and suppress voters in the 2016 election to the benefit of the Republican Party and, specifically, President Donald Trump. The reports bring a new understanding to the disinformation strategies taken by the IRA, which was by Special Counsel Robert Mueller this June.

Russian trolls spent much of its efforts in targeting conservatives and the African American community. The large majority of likes, shares, and overall engagement on IRA-run pages came from just 20 Facebook pages aimed at those groups. Those 20 pages, like “Army of Jesus,” “Being Patriotic,” and “Blacktivist,” altogether amassed 39 million likes, 31 million shares, 5.4 million reactions and 3.4 million comments. These campaigns in total reached 126 million users on Facebook.

The reports also put a spotlight on Instagram, an often overlooked platform when it comes to Russian influence. On the Facebook-owned photo-centric social media platform, one IRA-linked account targeting black American audiences, @blackstagram, alone accumulated more than 303,663 followers and had more than 28 million reactions. In fact, while investigators and the news media focused on platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the past two years, researchers found the IRA shifting its activity over to Instagram. The report claims that the IRA’s disinformation campaigns on Instagram even outperformed Facebook and will be a major tool for Russian-influence in future elections. In total, Russian Instagram accounts peddling propaganda received 187 million engagements. Around 40 percent of all IRA-linked Instagram accounts had at least 10,000 followers. It’s believed that the IRA’s campaigns reached at least 20 million Instagram users.

Russian influence didn’t all just occur online either. One noteworthy example is the page “Army of Jesus,” which targeted right wing Americans. The page ran ads offering free counseling to people with sexual addiction. One ad, pointed out by , reads “‘Struggling with addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together’ – Jesus.” It’s unknown how many people took up the group on its offer.

Researchers also uncovered an effort to erode Americans’ trust in its media organizations, push Bernie Sanders supporters to vote for Jill Stein or other third-party candidates, as well as spread the hacked DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks while promoting Julian Assange as a “freedom fighter.” Researchers also uncovered dozens of accounts with a total of more than 600,000 followers posing as U.S. news outlets. IRA pages and accounts even sold merchandise.

Russia’s influence campaign has not stopped since Trump’s election, nor has it settled on the successful tactics it deployed in 2016. For example, the report found that 6 months after the election, over on Twitter, tweets linking to YouTube videos grew by 84 percent. Along with the previously mentioned expansion on Instagram, the IRA looks to be constantly experimenting with other growing social media platforms for future misinformation campaigns.

These two new Senate reports help shine a new light on the wide range of efforts designed by the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency to sow discord in the U.S. Even with this large dataset, there’s still more to uncover and much, much more that the tech companies behind the platforms can do to help.