Russia’s Voter Suppression Operation Echoed Trump Campaign Tactics
The report prepared for Congress has eerie similarities to the president’s 2016 social media strategy.
The big new development in the Russian collusion story is a pair of reports examining how Russian agents used social media to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign by trying to suppress black votes, along with those of other demographic groups generally unfriendly to Trump. As NBC News put it, with blunt candor: “Russia Favored Trump, Targeted African-Americans with Election Meddling, Reports Say.”
The two reports were commissioned by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, which assigned independent researchers to examine Russian influence efforts across multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. This massive influence campaign—it led to more than 300 million engagements from 2015 to 2017, researchers say—was orchestrated by the Internet Research Agency, the Putin-aligned Russian firm, a dozen of whose employees were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February.