Donald Trump’s Facebook support …
Posts that circulated to a targeted, swing-state audience on the social media site railed against illegal immigrants and claimed “the only viable option is to elect Trump.” They were shared by what looked like a grassroots American, anti-immigrant group called Secured Borders, but Congressional investigators say the group is actually a Russian fabrication designed to influence American voters during and after the presidential election.
Donald Trump’s Twitter support …
There is evidence that Twitter may have been used even more extensively than Facebook in the Russian influence campaign last year. In addition to Russia-linked Twitter accounts that posed as Americans, the platform was also used for large-scale automated messaging, using “bot” accounts to spread false stories and promote news articles about emails from Democratic operatives that had been obtained by Russian hackers.
As more troll farms and propaganda sites are uncovered, it’s clear that not only did Russia steer the national conversation during the 2016 election, it’s still going on.
After a weekend when Americans took to social media to debate President Trump’s admonishment of N.F.L. players who do not stand for the national anthem, a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the issue with hashtags such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.
Why would Russia play both sides of the issue? Because playing up racial schisms as a means of hurting the United States is a strategy that goes back well before the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian ads during the election followed a similar strategy, with ads designed to inflame voters on either side of an issue.
“Their goal was to spread dissension, was to split our country apart, and they did a pretty good job,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ads included those designed to play directly to Trump voters, and to play up the idea that the “deplorables” were being unfairly deplored.
“How dare they accuse Donald Trump of racism and sexism just because he’s concerned about the well-being of Americans??” read one using an image of actor Jack Nicholson, dated Oct. 19. “If wanting to remove criminal alien scum from our streets is racist and deplorable, then by all means count me in that basket!”
Executives from Twitter are preparing to give congressional testimony at a point where it seems that social networks may be even more laden with artificial accounts generated by Russian troll farms than Facebook—accounts that may have been more important in the election. On both services, the number of people apparently interested in certain aspects of stories, and the way that the public leaned on these stories, was distorted by hundreds of thousands of fake “users” that existed only as software.
At a point where the relationship between social media and “serious news” is often fluid, it’s likely that what appeared to be high interest in these issues from an army of fake Twitter and Facebook users, may have encouraged more traditional media to give these items more attention.
Facebook has been notably successful in keeping ads for certain categories of products, including items it sees as too risque, from being distributed on its site. Which makes claims that it was unable to police the generation of political ads from outside the US suspect.
Twitter is just … a mess.
Twitter has struggled for years to rein in the fake accounts overrunning its platform. Unlike Facebook, the service does not require its users to provide their real name (or at least a facsimile of one) and allows automated accounts — arguing that they are a useful tool for tasks such as customer service. Beyond those restrictions, there is also an online black market for services that can allow for the creation of large numbers of Twitter bots, which can be controlled by a single person while still being difficult to distinguish from real accounts.
Even now, any tweet from Donald Trump draws an instant response from thousands of clearly automated accounts (many of them out to score in the lucrative “selling cheap merch to Trump supporters” market). The presence of those accounts, and Twitter’s unwillingness or inability to police the vast numbers of fake accounts, means that every Twitter user is part of a kind of an ugly, ongoing Turing test, where they are daily bombarded by stories and opinions meant to steer their thinking, sourced from automated sites.
Bot accounts didn’t just help to shape the 2016 election, they’re pushing the national conversation right now. They’re driving up divisive discourse, and making it more difficult in every way to conduct any sort of civil conversation that would help genuinely heal any rifts.
Because keeping those rifts open, and generating new ones, it’s the job these bots were created to do.