Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let there be snark.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Everybody saw this coming.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Infrastructure week. at last.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania.  Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

You are here: Home / Politics / Mueller Report / The Mueller Report Book Club – II. Russian “Active Measures” Social Media Campaign

The Mueller Report Book Club – II. Russian “Active Measures” Social Media Campaign

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This post is in: ,

(pp 14-35)

Much of this chapter is redacted under “Harm to Ongoing Matter,” (HOM) presumably referring to the court case against 13 employees of the Internet Research Agency (IRA). A few redactions are labeled “Personal Privacy” (PP) and “Investigative Technique,” (IT) and there seems no need to try to decipher them.

The unredacted part of the chapter is a story that has appeared in the news many times. I’ll outline it and provide a few juicy quotes.

The IRA is funded by Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin and companies he controlled, including Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering. It conducted social media operations in the United States with objectives of sowing discord and later electing Donald Trump president, starting in at least 2014. By February 2016, the IRA was supporting Trump against Clinton. Proghozin was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in December 2016.

The operations included running accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, holding rallies, and buying advertisements. The accounts looked like they belonged to individuals, groups, and activists of various sorts – rightwing, black, political, and religious. The IRA also ran a bot network on Twitter to amplify their messages. By the end of the 2016 election, they had reached millions of people.

(testimony of Colin Stretch, General Counsel of Facebook) (“We estimate that roughly 29 million people were served content in their News Feeds directly from the IRA’s 80,000 posts over the two years. Posts from these Pages were also shared, liked, and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation. Our best estimate is that approximately 126 million people may have been served content from a Page associated with the IRA at some point during the two-year period.”). The Facebook representative also testified that Facebook had identified 170 Instagram accounts that posted approximately 120,000 pieces of content during that time. Facebook did not offer an estimate of the audience reached via Instagram. (Footnote 6, p. 15)

The chapter contains numerous specific examples of tweets and other social media from the IRA, including @TEN_ GOP, which pretended to be “the informal voice of the Tennessee GOP,” and “Miners for Trump,” which held rallies in Pennsylvania.

“Main idea: Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump – we support them)”

The IRA recruited Americans across the political spectrum to help spread its message. This section, starting on page 31, also contains both HOM and PP redactions. Members of the Trump campaign shared or retweeted IRA matter. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Michael T. Flynn all retweeted IRA tweets against Hillary Clinton.

IRA employees also tried to contact Trump campaign members directly, representing themselves as US persons. The IRA’s contacts included requests for signs and other materials for rallies and requests to promote the rallies and help coordinate Iogistics. Some campaign volunteers agreed to provide the requested support (for example, agreeing to set aside a number of signs), the investigation has not identified evidence that any Trump campaign official understood the requests were coming from foreign nationals.

A name that may be worth keeping in the back of your mind is “Project Lakhta,” which is mentioned as a larger project that includes the IRA operations. The rest of that paragraph is redacted.

 

Reader Interactions

23Comments

  1. 1.

    TenguPhule

    the investigation has not identified evidence that any Trump campaign official understood the requests were coming from foreign nationals.

    Must resist obvious joke.

  4. 4.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I agree with Dorothy A. Winsor: This particular allegation is new and horrifying, but we already knew Trump was a rapist. I’m also seeing some degree of apparent surprise on Twitter. But the public and the media seemingly decided during the earlier revelations that this was not a problem.

    Perhaps a post might discuss the casual dismissal of the indications that our president’s past history includes rape and boasting about it.

  6. 6.

    J R in WV

    @TenguPhule:

    Why fight it!

    Zdravstvuyte, tovarishch, mne nuzhno nemnogo Trampa, chtoby Amerika snova stala velikoy, pozhaluysta!

    Or, “Hello, friend, I need some Trump Make America Great Again signs, please.” In plain English, this time.

    No one could suspect that first guy isn’t an American working to make Trump president!!

    ETA: I used Google Translate, so don’t hit me too hard for the almost certain errors in that Russian version!

  7. 7.

    J R in WV

    There are always people who didn’t hear a clear and obvious accusation at the time, and those folks may be surprised and disturbed by hearing it this time. After all, lots of folks are disappointed in their President by now. I don’t know if it’s going to make much difference.

    This is a clearly horrific event, the description is clear and specific, there’s no beating around the bush about what he did. So maybe it will make a difference, along with the kids in concentration camps, the lack of safe and sanitary conditions, etc.

    The woman lawyer we saw being quizzed by three federal judges, she had trouble keeping a straight face while making the arguments her bosses sent her there to make. I was actually a little surprised by the end of the questioning that she didn’t apologize to the judges and announce her resignation, as the case she was told to make was obviously phony and fraudulent, that these kids were obviously being mistreated in every way.

    She will never live that video down, ever. She is truly a nazi, helping normalize fascist concentration camp treatment of innocent kids who obviously deserve asylum, if only they knew the magic words to request it. Who is going to want to date that kind of person? Or accept them as a customer for hair styling, or dental work, or as a medical patient? Bake a wedding cake for … oh wait, she won’t need that, will she?

  8. 8.

    MJS

    This is off topic, but in the last two days, we’ve had 1) a witness who worked for Trump testify that he would definitely take things of value from a foreign government if it would help his campaign; 2) this administration argue in court that providing toothbrushes and soap to those being detained is not necessary for a “safe and sanitary” environment; 3) Trump call for, then call off, an attack on Iran; 4) Trump threaten a reporter with imprisonment for taking a picture of a letter Trump showed him; and 5) an announcement that ICE will now be rounding up immigrant families. I’m sure there are other things I’ve missed.

    Speaker Pelosi and other reluctant members of Congress, we can’t wait any longer.

  13. 13.

    Mandalay

    Yesterday’s stunning news was that Trump was the adult in the room. Today’s stunning news is that Trump is classier than Britain’s next prime minister….

    Police were called to the home of Boris Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, in the early hours of Friday morning after neighbours heard a loud altercation involving screaming, shouting and banging…

    A neighbour told the Guardian they heard a woman screaming followed by “slamming and banging”. At one point Symonds could be heard telling Johnson to “get off me” and “get out of my flat”…

    The neighbour said they recorded the altercation from inside their flat out of concern for Symonds. On the recording, heard by the Guardian, Johnson can be heard refusing to leave the flat and telling Symonds to “get off my fucking laptop” before there is a loud crashing noise.

    Symonds is heard saying Johnson had ruined a sofa with red wine: “You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything.”

    The neighbour said: “There was a smashing sound of what sounded like plates. There was a couple of very loud screams that I’m certain were Carrie and she was shouting to ‘get out’ a lot. She was saying ‘get out of my flat’ and he was saying no. And then there was silence after the screaming. My partner, who was in bed half asleep, had heard a loud bang and the house shook.”

  14. 14.

    chris

    @Cheryl Rofer: I sounds very much as if the cops tried to cover it up.

    "When contacted by the Guardian, the police initially said they had no record of a domestic incident at this address." Hope it's a coincidence that it's same police force – that Johnson used to command – that has spent year not bringing charges for offences by Johnson's campaign pic.twitter.com/YeAZJ7DG7C— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) 21 June 2019

    ETA: And what Mandalay said

  15. 15.

    TenguPhule

    @J R in WV:

    Who is going to want to date that kind of person? Or accept them as a customer for hair styling, or dental work, or as a medical patient? Bake a wedding cake for

    Sadly, we know where she’ll find them. They’re the ones suing to get out of union dues, catering to same sex couples, paying for medical insurance which allows women to get abortions.

    There are millions of them.

  17. 17.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @zhena gogolia: It’s been slow going so far, setting out the particulars of the investigation, and not much new in the IRA section. The next section gets a little more interesting. Like many great works of literature, it builds slowly.

  18. 18.

    Mandalay

    @chris:

    …sounds very much as if the cops tried to cover it up

    Yes, they initially attempted a cover up…:

    When contacted by the Guardian on Friday, police initially said they had no record of a domestic incident at the address. But when given the case number and reference number, as well as identification markings of the vehicles that were called out, police issued a statement saying: “At 00:24hrs on Friday, 21 June, police responded to a call from a local resident in [south London]. The caller was concerned for the welfare of a female neighbour.

  19. 19.

    TenguPhule

    Officials told the Post that agents would detain parents and children in hotel rooms until they the entire family can be deported together.

    I don’t believe them. There is no fucking way they’re detaining them in hotels based on their authorized budget. Where are they really going to send them?

  21. 21.

    Steve in the ATL

    @TenguPhule: could be 2 or 3 star hotels, though that would violate the “safe and sanitary” requirement. We’re talking *no* room service.

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