I did mention the issue of Russia’s bots and paid trolls in the midst of my comprehensive summary of Trump’s documented collusion with Russia, but it bears repeating.
Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as "bots," to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.
The bots' end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year's elections.
Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia's operatives. Their participation, however, wasn't necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.
In other words whenever there was bad news about Trump, or someone would try and discuss Hillary Clinton online, or were a Bernie Supporter, they would be bombarded with bot generated auto responses either attacking Hillary or supporting Trump using fake news and Wikileaks dumped information provided by the Kremlin through Sputnik News and RT America laundered by Breitbart, InfoWars and other Trump friendly sites.
And it wasn’t just the bots, it was also the legions of paid trolls who were flooding Twitter and Facebook to soldier online for their preferred candidate — Trump.
"This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence," said one former U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.”
Russia also used "trolls," hundreds of computer operatives who pretended to be Trump supporters and posted stories or comments on the internet complimentary to Trump or disparaging to Clinton. Sources close to the inquiry said those operatives likely worked from a facility in St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to that tactic.
"Russian bots and internet trolls sought to propagate stories underground," said Mike Carpenter, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration whose job focused on Russia. "Those stories got amplified by fringe elements of our media like Breitbart."
"They very carefully timed release of information to shift the news cycle away from stories that clearly hurt Mr. Trump, such as his inappropriate conduct over the years," he said, referring to the October release of a video in which Trump bragged about grabbing women's genitals. That event corresponded with a surge in bot-related traffic spreading anti-Clinton stories.
An additional Russian tool was the news from its prime propaganda machine, Russia Today, with a global television and digital media operation and a U.S. arm, RT America.
Y’know that annoying egg shaped troll that just wouldn’t stop dropping anti-Hillary propaganda posts and would go on and on, and on again, about how awesome and super neato Trump was who simply wouldn’t listen to anything resembling reason, or facts, or common sense?
Yeah, those guys weren’t from Ohio or Appalachia — they were from Macedonia and Albania paid by the Kremlin to mess with Hillary and her supporters in any way that they could. Targeting Bernie fans on Facebook to help drive a deeper and deeper wedged between them and Hillary, between them and the DNC. It’s was all part of a Russian backed cyber campaign strategy.
If anyone thinks all they did was steal information from the DNC and Podesta, they’re sorely mistaken. They also attacked races down ballet after stealing and strategically sharing information from the DCCC.
But there was never anything quite like the 2016 election campaign, when a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.
“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all this material was out there and could be used against me.”
...
“This is not a traditional tit-for-tat on a partisan political campaign, where one side hits the other and then you respond,” said Kelly Ward, executive director of the D.C.C.C. “This is an attack by a foreign actor that had the intent to disrupt our election, and we were the victims of it.”
Why the Russian government might care about these unglamorous House races is a source of bafflement for some of the lawmakers who were targeted. But if the goal of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, was to make American democracy a less attractive model to his own citizens and to Russia’s neighbors, then entangling congressional races in accusations of leaks and subterfuge was a step in the right direction.
...
The document dump’s effectiveness was due in part to a de facto alliance that formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States. The hackers, working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0, used social media tools to invite individual reporters to request specific caches of documents, handing them out the way political operatives distribute scoops. It was an arrangement that proved irresistible to many news outlets — and amplified the consequences of the cyberattack.
This wasn’t just about Trump, this was a all-out assault on our political system. Flooding it with negative reports designed to cripple the democratic party and it’s candidate, overwhelming them with one-sided reports designed to put them in the worst light possible.
It was cyber sabotage.
Paid foreign sabotage designed to tilt our politics to Russian goals.
And it worked.