New Delhi: The scale and efficacy of Russia’s disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential election were much greater than previously believed, cybersecurity firm Symantec has said in a report based on millions of tweets from its masterminds.
The report, released this week, seeks to reveal a clearly-defined pattern of spreading fake news through phony Twitter accounts, precise targeting of dissatisfied voters, and mobilisation in the form of public rallies.
ThePrint takes you through the revelations of the report, and explains how the techniques appear to be a modern-day spin on the erstwhile Soviet Union’s ‘active manipulation’ playbook.
Russia’s ‘disinformation campaign’ during 2016 US election
In October 2018, Twitter released a massive dataset of content posted by a Russian company called Internet Research Agency (IRA), consisting of “3,836 Twitter accounts and nearly 10 million tweets. These accounts had amassed almost 6.4 million followers and were following 3.2 million accounts”.
The IRA is believed to be at the heart of Russia’s global troll and fake news campaign, with alleged links to the Vladimir Putin administration.
Symantec analysed this dataset to draw some startling conclusions. The report points to meticulous planning, where Twitter accounts were registered months before being used. The average number of days between the creation of an account and its first tweet, according to the report, was 177 days.
It then outlines the mechanism the IRA allegedly used to spread fake news on Twitter: A core group of main accounts, masquerading as local news outlets, were used to push out new content. A larger pool of “auxiliary accounts” then amplified these messages. The campaign targeted both sides, but especially “dissatisfied elements”.
While most of these accounts were automated, they often showed signs of “manual intervention, such as posting original content or slightly changing the wording of re-posted content”. This was reportedly done to make the accounts seem authentic and reduce the risk of detection.
The most retweeted account got over 6 million retweets, but only a tiny fraction (1,850) of these retweets was found to be from other accounts in this dataset — indicating that most retweets came from real users influenced by the campaign.
Another disquieting revelation has been the ability of the IRA to mobilise the public for actual events and rallies. Often, according to the Symantec report, these rallies would be initiated by these fake Twitter accounts.
A step back in time
The world may only now be coming to terms with them, but Russia is said to have employed disinformation tactics since the days of the Soviet Union and its infamous intelligence agency, the KGB.
In a November 2018 New York Times video feature on the origins of Russian disinformation tactics, former KGB spies spelled out their “modus operandi”.
According to the spies, only 15 per cent of KGB’s resources, time, and manpower were spent on espionage. Most of its energies, they said, were focused on “ideological subversion” and “active measures”.
“Active measures”, “active manipulation” or “disinformation” are just terms for what we now refer to as fake news.
Disinformation is characteristically different from propaganda. While propaganda aims at making people support a particular position or regime, disinformation aims to deceive people into believing something.
According to one former spy quoted in the NYT feature, the aim of active measures was “to change the perception of reality of every American… to such an extent that with even abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusion about what is real”.
And this is achieved by sending out several contradictory signals and information.
This is best explained by an example that involves India.
Patriot & AIDS fake news
In 1984, there was shock around the world as an Indian daily, Patriot, reported that American government scientists created the “HIV virus flu” to infect gay and African people. The disease, which remains incurable, had begun to ravage patients just then, and the story was viral in Africa within a couple of years.
In the aforementioned NYT video feature, former Soviet spies accepted planting this story in Patriot.
The story died down briefly before reappearing in a Moscow daily where it was attributed to Patriot. In no time, two scholars, the Russian-born Jakob Segal and his wife, published a paper arguing that this claim was indeed true.
This report eventually got a mention in 200 reports across 80 countries.
Old playbook, new tools
With the end of the Soviet Union, it was hoped that the disinformation techniques would die too. But once Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, came to power, he began testing these techniques on Russian citizens.
In 2005, he is said to have taken these disinformation techniques overseas with the global news network Russia Today. Then, in 2013, the Russian government started funding the Internet Research Agency, testimonies from the video feature suggest.
Also read: Russian probe — Robert Mueller says charging Donald Trump was ‘not an option’