IRA employees traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions in 2014. The IRA’s activity wasn’t confined to social media, either. About a dozen people, known as “specialists,” would run an account at a time. The IRA consolidated all of its US operations into one department called the “Translator” department, which appears to have operated like a typical digital media startup with different agents focusing on specific platforms, monitoring analytics, and even graphic designers.
“The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers,” the New York Times wrote about the hoax. One of its first large-scale misinformation projects was the Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax in September 2014, when IRA members created a completely fake explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. The lines up with what we already knew about the IRA’s activity. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. “These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. “IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. It started in 2014.Īccording to Mueller’s report, the IRA began creating fake Facebook accounts and small groups as early as 2014. Here’s everything we know about Russian interference from the report. Fake online personas were able to communicate with members of the Trump campaign - who were unaware they were ever communicating with foreign nationals. It was even able to hold real-life rallies, mobilizing hundreds of people at a time in major cities like Philadelphia and Miami. Twitter accounts it created were portrayed as real American voices by major news outlets. The IRA was able to reach up to 126 million Americans on Facebook via a mixture of fraudulent accounts, groups, and advertisements, the report says. By the end, it used analytical tools and the built-in network effect of massive social media platforms to create large artificial grassroots political organizations that were aggressively targeting both Republicans and Democrats.
The agency learned how to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the span of four years. The report, which concludes that Trump didn’t commit a crime but “also does not exonerate him ,” gives us a clear and exhaustive look at the scope, focus, and results of the IRA’s efforts. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign provides one of the most detailed looks at how Russia’s Internet Research Agency - the infamous Kremlin-linked troll farm - tried to hijack the 2016 election and swing the vote in favor of Donald Trump.