How Russia's Propaganda Campaign Exploited America's Prejudices
By SAM THIELMAN Published OCTOBER 12, 2017 6:00 AM
Reporters and analysts have long suspected and, over the past several weeks, confirmed that Russian cyberactors were running propaganda campaigns under the noses of three major tech companies—Facebook, Twitter and Google—during the 2016 elections. Even Microsoft’s Bing network reportedly sold ads to the Russians.
Those interlocking propaganda campaigns didn’t consist of merely stumping for Donald Trump or deriding Hillary Clinton. Instead, most of the ads unearthed thus far appear to have been devoted to reinforcing the American electorate’s own prejudices; that gambit appears terribly obvious and unsubtle in hindsight, as the contents of the ads continue to trickle out in the press. But no one spotted it at the time.
For example, YouTube videos recently uncovered by the Daily Beast feature two black men with African accents deriding Black Lives Matter and calling Clinton an “evildoer” while praising WikiLeaks. One meme posted on a Russian troll-operated Facebook account read—with a dropped article worthy of Boris Badenov—“Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my family to get me out of jail than out of cemetery.”
Facebook has said the Russian-bought ads were probably viewed 10 million times; Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright has suggested that the ads actually were viewed hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of times. Nevertheless, such examples of ham-handed propaganda likely didn’t raise eyebrows at the time because the function of social media is to affirm its users, said Gordon Borrell, CEO of ad industry analytics firm Borrell Associates.
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