Separate studies from University of Oxford researchers and the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, released by the US Senate intelligence committee, reveal insights into how Russian agents sought to influence US elections through social media.
INSTAGRAM'S "MEME WARFARE"
Both reports show misinformation on Facebook's Instagram might have had broader reach than the interference on Facebook itself.
The New Knowledge study says that since 2015, the Instagram posts generated 187 million engagements, such as comments or likes, compared with 77 million on Facebook.
The barrage of Instagram "memes" has only grown since the 2016 election. Russian agents shifted their focus to Instagram after the public last year became aware of the widespread manipulation on Facebook and Twitter.
NOT JUST ADS
Revelations last year that Russian agents used roubles to pay for some of their propaganda ads drew attention to how gullible tech companies were in allowing their services to be manipulated.
But neither ads nor bots were as effective as unpaid posts by human agents pretending to be Americans. Such posts were more likely to be shared and commented on, and they rose in volume during key dates in US politics.
DEMOGRAPHIC TARGETING
Both reports found Russian agents tried to polarise Americans in part by targeting African-American communities extensively. They did so by campaigning for black voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, according to the Oxford report.
The reports also support previous findings that the influence operations sought to polarise Americans by sowing political divisions on issues such as immigration and cultural and religious identities.
PINTEREST TO POKEMON
The New Knowledge report says the Russian troll operation worked in many ways like a conventional corporate branding campaign, using different technology services to deliver the same messages to different groups.
Among the sites infiltrated with propaganda were image-heavy websites such as Pinterest and Tumblr, chatty forums such as Reddit and a geopolitics blog promoted from Russian-run accounts on Facebook and YouTube.
WHAT NOW?
Both reports warn some of these influence campaigns are ongoing.
The Oxford researchers note that 2016 and 2017 saw "significant efforts" to disrupt elections around the world not just by Russia but by domestic political parties spreading disinformation. They warn online propaganda represents a threat to democracies and urge social media companies to share data with the public far more broadly than they have so far.
