Elections and Media

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee largely endorsed the findings of the intelligence community that Russia sought to sway the 2016 US elections through a hacking and influence campaign, and they called for a “more aggressive, whole-of-government approach” to ensure future elections are not similarly compromised.

“There is consensus among members and staff that we trust the conclusions of the ICA,” Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) said, referring to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was behind hackings of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign director John Podesta’s e-mail account and had attempted to exploit public opinion by sowing false information, much of it through fake social media accounts. “But we don’t close our consideration of it,” he added. Chairman Burr also said that “the issue of collusion is still open” and would not be resolved until the committee’s work was done. He said that a deadline for the committee was the looming start of the 2018 primary season.

Facebook and Twitter have each agreed to appear before US lawmakers and testify publicly as part of a congressional probe into Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election. Google has also been invited to testify at that hearing, scheduled before the Senate Intelligence Committee on November 1, but the search giant did not immediately comment on its plans Oct 4.

The rare appearance in front of one of the most powerful panels on Capitol Hill could prove to be a uniquely uncomfortable one for the country’s top technology companies. Facebook and Twitter, at least, are set to face tough questions -- for the first time, in the open — about the Russian-backed accounts and advertisers that took advantage of their platforms to spread misinformation ahead of Election Day. For now, though, Facebook and Twitter have not yet shared whether their chief executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, respectively — would testify in front of Senate investigators.

Fight for the Future is going after the four Democratic Sens who joined with Republican Sens in voting to confirm Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to another term at the FCC. Many Democrats took to the floor during vote to decry Pai's deregulatory policies, particularly his proposal to roll back Title II classification of ISPs and rethink the Open Internet order's rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization; those against the confirmation said loudly they would vote against him, suggesting his policies were anti-consumer and anti-net neutrality. But Sens Joe Manchin (D-WV), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Gary Peters (D-MI), Jon Tester (D-MT) voted to confirm Pai for another five-year term at the agency. Fight for the Future said it was targeting those lawmakers with crowdfunded billboards to be placed in their districts calling them out for their votes.

Reps Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and Emanual Cleaver (D-MO), two black lawmakers, sharply rebuked Twitter this week for serving as “an avenue to spread racism and bigotry” — and threatened regulation if the tech industry as a whole doesn’t identify and suspend the accounts behind those messages. The calls for action came in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent on Oct 3.

For them, the tipping point appears to be reports that Russian agents sought to stir political unrest ahead of the 2016 presidential election by stoking racial tensions, even running ads targeting groups like Black Lives Matter. “As a result of the far-reaching nature of Twitter’s technology, we have seen an effort to undermine our democracy, create or fan flames of racial divisions, and spread hate speech that can ultimately cumulate into violence,” the two Democratic lawmakers wrote. “We are disturbed by the ease in which foreign actors were able to manipulate your platform to advance anti-American sentiments that both exacerbates racial tension and ultimately threatens our democracy,” they continued. “More importantly, we are disappointed by the silence from you and others in your industry on ways to counter such blatant manipulation of this medium to build racial animosity, the consequences of which are quite literally life threatening.”

Americans are increasingly confident in the news media and less so in President Donald Trump’s administration after a tumultuous year in US politics that tested the public’s trust in both institutions, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released Oct 3. The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the percentage of adults who said they had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November. Earlier in 2017, President Trump branded the entire industry as the “enemy of the American people.”

The percentage of those who said they had “hardly any” confidence in the press dropped to 45 percent from 51 percent over the same period. Confidence in Trump’s administration moved in the opposite direction. Reuters/Ipsos, which tracked confidence in major institutions every couple of months after the 2016 presidential election, found in late January that 52 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the new president’s executive branch. That dropped to 51 percent in the May survey and to 48 percent in the latest poll. Trump took office in January. In comparison, 57 percent of Americans expressed similar levels of confidence in former Democratic President Barack Obama’s outgoing administration in November.

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, apparently. The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online.

The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by US political activists. The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, apparently. People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.

What was in the ads you shared with Congress? How many people saw them? Most of the ads appear to focus on divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. A number of them appear to encourage people to follow Pages on these issues. Here are a few other facts about the ads:

• An estimated 10 million people in the US saw the ads. We were able to approximate the number of unique people (“reach”) who saw at least one of these ads, with our best modeling
• 44% of total ad impressions (number of times ads were displayed) were before the US election on November 8, 2016; 56% were after the election.
• Roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. That’s because advertising auctions are designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as a result.
• For 50% of the ads, less than $3 was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.

Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, wants Facebook to release at least some of the controversial political ads purchased by Kremlin-backed sources.

Facebook turned over those ads — roughly 3,000 of them in total, valued at more than $100,000 — to investigators on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees earlier Oct 2. Some of the posts specifically sought to stoke racial, religious or other social tensions by stirring conflict around issues like Black Lives Matter, gun control and gay rights. Rep Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House’s panel, said he planned to work with Facebook to release “a representative sampling” of the ads to the public — just in time for a hearing slated for October on the extent to which Russia spread misinformation through social networks. The goal, Schiff said, is to “inoculate the public against future Russian interference in our elections.”

The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook in 2016 tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.

Federal investigators and officials at Facebook now believe these groups and their pages were part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda and fake news across the web. Under intensifying pressure from Congress and growing public outcry, Facebook on Oct 2 turned over more than 3,000 of the Russia-linked advertisements from its site over to the Senate and House intelligence committees. The material is part of an attempt to learn the depth of what investigators now believe was a sprawling foreign effort spanning years to interfere with the 2016 United States presidential election.

A group of pro-Trump media figures are launching a super PAC aimed at making an impact in the 2018 midterms. Jeff Giesea, Mike Cernovich, and Jack Posobiec, organizers of the “Deploraball” party to celebrate President Trump’s inauguration earlier in 2017, are behind the super PAC, which is being called #Rev18. All three are known quantities in the pro-Trump alternative media that emerged during the campaign and presidency, powered by Trump’s rise; they have since distanced itself from more extreme alt-right figures, often favoring the term “new right.” Cernovich has become known as an occasional breaker of news about the White House, while Posobiec rose to prominence after playing a key role in the #MacronLeaks story. The trio plans to back anti-establishment primary challengers in the midterms.