SUMMARY: The growing popularity of FaceApp, a photo filter app that allows users to transform their features by adding or removing wrinkles, is sounding alarm bells among privacy advocates and lawmakers. There are questions about how the images of people's faces could be used, especially as the app's company is based in Russia. Amna Nawaz talks to the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Joseph Jerome.
SUMMARY: From Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies, “fake news” has become a noxious presence in public discourse, especially since the 2016 presidential election. A recent New York Times video series explores the long history of Russian disinformation and its origins in what the Soviets dubbed “active measures.” Nick Schifrin speaks to Adam Ellick, who created the series, for more.
SUMMARY: A New York Times investigative report published this week details how Facebook reacted to the discovery of massive disinformation campaigns run by Russian operatives. Sheera Frenkel, who helped write the story, joins William Brangham to explain what the social network’s leadership knew before the 2016 presidential election and what, if anything, they did to address the problem.
SUMMARY: The country’s top intelligence and national security officials gave stark warnings Thursday on Russia's ongoing efforts to meddle in November’s elections. Agency heads acknowledged the threat, while touting the Trump administration’s stepped-up election security initiatives. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla tells Judy Woodruff that states need more resources to stay ahead of the threat.
SUMMARY: Facebook said on Tuesday that it has removed 32 fake, coordinated accounts, that appeared to be designed to try and influence voters with misinformation and divisive messages on cultural issues -- and they could be connected to Russia. John Yang learns more from Yamiche Alcindor.
Facebook said it has uncovered “sophisticated” efforts, possibly linked to Russia, to influence U.S. politics on its platforms.
The company said it removed 32 accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in “coordinated” political behavior and appeared to be fake.
Facebook stopped short of saying the effort was aimed at influencing the U.S. midterm elections in November, although the timing of the suspicious activity would be consistent with such an attempt.
According to a Facebook official, the company held briefings in the House and Senate this week. The official declined to be named because the briefings were private. Facebook disclosed its findings after The New York Times reported on them earlier Tuesday.
The company said it doesn’t know who is behind the efforts, but said there may be connections to Russia. Facebook said it has found some connections between the accounts it removed and the accounts connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency that it removed before and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
The earliest page was created in March 2017. Facebook says more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the fake pages. The most followed Facebook Pages had names such as “Aztlan Warriors,” ”Black Elevation,” ”Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”
Facebook says the pages ran about 150 ads for $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in U.S. and Canadian dollars. The first ad was created in April 2017; the last was created in June 2018.
The company added that the perpetrators have been “more careful to cover their tracks” than in 2016, in part because of steps Facebook has taken to prevent abuse over the past year. For example, they used virtual private networks and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf.
SUMMARY: Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted of new nuclear weapons that he says can defeat U.S. missile defenses in an address unveiling a grand vision for his country. His return to Cold War rhetoric comes a month after the U.S. announced its own plans to deploy new nuclear weapons and two weeks before the Russian election. Nick Schifrin talks with Richard Burt, former chief arms control negotiator.
SUMMARY: Primary voting in the 2018 elections is set to being in just two months. Is the U.S. voting system secure in case Russia tries to interfere? Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) join Judy Woodruff to discuss their bipartisan effort to protect future elections, as well as President Trump’s call for Republicans to take over the Russia probe and the immigration negotiations.
SUMMARY: The Wall Street Journal reported that Russia obtained classified information about how the U.S. military protects its computer networks and conducts electronic spying. The breach occurred when data was stolen by an NSA contractor, then hacked by Russia. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with The Wall Street Journal's Shane Harris.
Analysts tracking Russian influence operations find a feedback loop between Kremlin propaganda and far-right memes.
Angee Dixson joined Twitter on Aug. 8 and immediately began posting furiously — about 90 times a day. A self-described American Christian conservative, Dixson defended President Donald Trump's response to the unrest in Charlottesville, criticized the removal of Confederate monuments and posted pictures purporting to show violence by left-wing counterprotesters.
“Dems and Media Continue to IGNORE BLM and Antifa Violence in Charlottesville,” she wrote above a picture of masked demonstrators labeled “DEMOCRAT TERROR.”
But Dixson appears to have been a fake, according to an analysis by Ben Nimmo and Donara Barojan of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank. The account has been shut down. Dixson's profile picture was stolen from a young Instagram celebrity (a German model rumored to have dated Leonardo DiCaprio). Dixson used a URL shortener that is a tell for the sort of computer program that automatically churns out high volumes of social media posts whose authorship is frequently disguised. And one of her tweets attacked Sen. John McCain for his alleged support of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, echoing language in tweets from Russian outlets RT and Sputnik.
The same social media networks that spread Russian propaganda during the 2016 election have been busily amplifying right-wing extremism surrounding the recent violence in Charlottesville, according to researchers who monitor the activity. It's impossible to tell how much of the traffic originates from Russia or from mercenary sources. But there were hordes of automated bots generating Twitter posts and much more last week to help make right-wing conspiracy theories and rallying cries about Charlottesville go viral.
A sample of 600 Twitter accounts [Hamilton 68 - Tracking Russian Influence Operations on Twitter] linked to Russian influence operations have been promoting hashtags for Charlottesville such as “Antifa,” a term for activists on the far left; and “alt-left,” a term Trump used, which was interpreted by many as suggesting an equivalence between liberal demonstrators and white nationalists in the so-called alt-right.
The sample includes accounts that are openly pro-Russian like state-controlled outlets RT and Sputnik, which a joint U.S. intelligence assessment concluded are “part of Russia's state-run propaganda machine.” The sample also includes those, like “Angee Dixson's,” that seem to be written by typical Americans. And it follows automated bots that help make messages go viral and even users around the world who spread the Kremlin's messages whether or not they mean to support Russia. The network is tracked by four researchers working with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund that seeks to expose efforts to undermine Western democracy.
(A spokesperson for Sputnik took issue with the assertions about it in this article, providing 22 links to the news service's articles that she called “highly critical of the president's response to Charlottesville.” She argued that to “ignore that reality … would only mean that you are fixing the facts to push a false narrative.” The spokesperson also disputed that Sputnik is a vehicle for any purported Russian disinformation campaign.)
“The Russian influence networks we track are definitely amplifying the broader alt-right chatter about Charlottesville,” one of the researchers, J.M. Berger, said. “The major themes they have been pushing are the 'both sides are violent' argument and conspiracy theories that George Soros was behind the counter-protests, although the latter has been trending more sporadically.”
The latest Soros accusation, which PolitiFact found to be baseless, shows another aspect of how messages snowball as they pass between the American right-wing and Russian propagandists, according to Nimmo. A U.S. right-winger asserts a “fact,” a Russian news agency fuses it with a Kremlin narrative, and then American right-wing websites parrot the Russian news agency's assertion.
Soros, a Hungarian-American investor and major Democratic donor, long ago became a frequent bugaboo for the Kremlin and for Republicans. He funds the Open Society Foundations, which support democracy and development around the world — and they have given money to ProPublica, including its Documenting Hate project, while accounting for less than 3 percent of ProPublica's revenue so far this year. Many recipients of Soros' contributions are viewed as politically liberal, but some right-wingers and the Kremlin tend to see his hand (or more precisely, his wallet) in any action they perceive as left-wing.
The accusation that Soros was behind the Charlottesville counter-protesters appeared to have been first uttered by Alex Jones, the conservative conspiracy theorist and provocateur, on Aug. 14. The next day, Lee Stranahan, a host for Sputnik, repeated the claim in several YouTube videos, according to Nimmo. Stranahan was previously a prominent advocate for the #FireMcMaster campaign against national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
The pro-Russian networks are also injecting Russian propaganda about other countries into U.S. far-right circles. After Jones' InfoWars interviewed Stranahan on Aug. 15, Stranahan's charge that the U.S. is hypocritical for supporting Nazis in Ukraine (a years-old Kremlin line) while condemning them at home appeared on fringe websites such as Mint Press News, TheLastAmericanVagabond.com, BBSNews and JewWorldOrder, Nimmo found.
“Given the number of channels that propagated the narrative at the same time, it is not possible to say whether a single channel or many different channels inspired the American actors' linkage of Charlottesville and Ukraine,” Nimmo wrote in a blog post. “What does appear probable is that the U.S. activists derived their narrative directly from the Kremlin and its supporters? —? and thus amplified Russian disinformation in America.”
Some in the self-described alt-right have embraced Russian support. At an earlier protest of the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville in May, people chanted “Russia is our friend!”
Tracking disinformation online is challenging because it can be hard to discern users' motivations and affiliations. But Congressional investigators probing Russia's interference in the 2016 election are interested in how social networks spread fake news and propaganda, such as documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
“The Internet and social media provide Russia cheap, efficient and highly effective access to foreign audiences with plausible deniability of their influence,” another of the researchers working with the Alliance to Secure Democracy, Clint Watts, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March. “This pattern of Russian falsehoods and social media manipulation of the American electorate continued through Election Day and persists today.”
