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Mike Lee when Biden said he wants to cut SS & Medicare

Versus

Mike Lee when he says he wants to cut SS & Medicare

June 23, 2025 at 2:41 PM

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A picture of a wizard in blue robes holding two blocks of cheese. The background has a landscape with a mountain and stars in the sky.
The caption reads: Replenishing my mana (eating cheese from the fridge at 3am)

March 15, 2025 at 11:52 AM

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February 26, 2025 at 3:03 AM

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The transformation is almost complete.

February 23, 2025 at 11:20 PM

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#trmup #TRUMP

A picture that resembles a TIME magazine cover except the top reads TRUMP in all caps. In the center is a picture of trump smiling with clown makeup on, wearing a jester hat and his usual blue suit with a red tie. The background is a city that seems to be in disrepair because it is blurry and grungy looking.
In the bottom left corner it reads "elect a clown expect a circus."

February 20, 2025 at 5:38 PM

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A revolution without singing and dancing is not worth having.

A mugshot of Emma Goldman with her famous quote "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution."

January 11, 2025 at 4:53 AM

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@lightweaver369.bsky.social

This section tells us that the social media apps we use are aware of these disinformation campaigns but so far haven't taken much effort to inform their users. It's up to us to be aware of and work to expose these accounts.

highly supportive of the Trump campaign. Of those sites, a number are also ••I A second report produced by the contractor examined the network's of more covert connections to the Kremlin. " efforts to promote allegations of voter fraud in advance of the election, IHI• •I --. IX. (U) U.S. GOVERNMENT RESPONSE (U) Throughout the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign period, the IRA was a largely obscure entity operating far from America's borders inside a stand-alone building in St. Petersburg, Russia. Despite the fact that the IRA began planning and implementing its electoral interference as early as 2014, its existence and activities were not well known to the wider American public and the U.S. Government until well after the election had passed. Even the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, authored as the Intelligence Community's comprehensive account of Russia's attack on the U.S. election, made no more than a passing · reference to the cadre of professional trolls housed in the IRA.275 In early September 2017, Facebook-under significant pressure from this Committee and the broader United States Congress-disclosed a collection of accounts linked to the IRA"beginning to bring the scope of

Automation is also getting better. Bots-already advanced in sophistication relative to predecessor generations-are becoming harder and harder to detect. Researchers, including . Emilio Ferrara and his team from the University of Southern California and the University of Indiana, have studied the increasing sophistication of automated accounts. Their research suggests a detection "arms race,'' between the purveyors of automated activity and those intent on its reliable identification, similar to the fight against the indiscriminate dissemination of commercial content to vast unsoliciting audiences, or "spam,'' in the past.289 (U) In addition, as the larger social media platforms begin to increase their detection capabilities, disinformation tactics have begun to shift to accommodate those changes. Influence operatives have begun to move away from targeting Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, transitioning to messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. These direct interactions are much harder to detect and if these tactics are scaled, they could have a significant effect on target audiences. (U) The evolution and proliferation of the core influence techniques used by the IRA could jeopardize facets of American society that have yet to be attacked by;influence operatives. The same bots, trolls, click-farms, fake pages and groups, advertisements, and algorithm-gaming the IRA used to conduct an information warfare campaign can be repurposed to execute financial fraud, stock-pumping schemes, digital advertising manipulation, industrialized marketing of counterfeit prescription drugs, and scaled deceptions that spread malware. Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg testified to the Committee in 2018 that, "Our focus is on inauthenticity, so if something is inauthentic, whether it's trying to influence domestically or trying to influence on a foreign. basis-and actually a lot more of the activity is domestic-we take it down."291 But as the IRA's approach suggests, the curre…

groups each conducted an independent, expert analysis of the social media company-provided dataset. Combining this dataset with the TAG's own internal research and data analytic capabilities, the TAG working groups studied U.S. social media platforms for indications of additional and undiscovered Russian foreign influence activity. Ultimately, the three TAG working group leads provided their findings and analysis to the Committee in a series of presentations that included staff briefings, a closed Member briefing, and a full Committee public hearing held on August 1, 2018. ' (U) The TAG working groups each published their findings in two public reports that were released.on December 17, 2018. The efforts ofthe 1TAG working groups, and the team leads specifically, resulted in two valuable publications that have significantly informed the Committee's understanding of Russia's social media-predicated attack against our democracy. The Committee supports the general findings of the TAG working groups, and notes that much of this Volume's analysis is derived from their work. The two reports are attached as addendums to this Volume. · XI. (U) RECOMMENDATIONS, (U) This challenge requires an integrated approach that brings together the public and private sectors. This approach must be rooted in protecting democratic values, including freedom of speech and the right to privacy. The Federal government, civil society, and the private sector, including social media and technology companies, each have an important role to play in deterring and defending against foreign influence operations that target the United States. A. (U) Industry Measures (U) The Committee recommends that social media companies work to facilitate greater information sharing between the public and private sector, and among the social companies themselves about malicious activity and platform vulnerabilities that are exploited to spread disinformation. Formalized mechanisms for collaboration that facilitate c…

$U) Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft already maintain a common database of digital fingerprints identifying violent extremist videos. These four companies also participate in a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab run by the Anti-Defamation League's Center for Technology and Society. • (U) Dozens of tech companies participate in the Global Network Initiative, a tech policy forum devoted to protecting digital rights globally. · I ~, I • • (U) Other examples include the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, whose goal is to substantially disrupt terrorists' ability to disseminate violent extremist propaganda, and glorify real-world acts of violence; and the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance, a nonprofit partnership between industry, government, and academia that enables cooperation to disrupt cyber-crime. · (U) Two models from the world of financial intelligence are the UK's Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce ~nd the United States' Financial Crimes Enforcement. I Exchange. ) (U) At the urging of the Committee, social media companies have begun to share indicators, albeit on an ad hoc basis. (U),;The Committee further recommends that social media companies provide users with: • \ (U) Greater transparency about activity occurring on their platforms, including disclosure ·of automated accounts (i.e., bots); • (U) Greater context for users about why they see certain content; • (U) The locational origin of content; and, • (U) Complete and timely public exposure of malign information roperations. (U) Social media platforms are not consistent in proactively, clearly, and conspicuously notifying users that they have been exposed to these efforts, leaving those who have been exposed to the false information or accounts without the knowledge they need to better evaluate future social media content that they encounter. Notifications to individual users should be clearly stated, device neutral, and provide users all the information necessary to under…$

January 4, 2025 at 3:54 PM

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No wonder Elon bought Twitter, that was their main resource as far as getting their content seen by as many people as possible.

$"If you can get indigenous content, tum that into a conspiracy, and filter that into the mainstream media, that's a textbook,case .... As an information warfare missile, that was a direct hit."219 (U) Another example of an effective IRA influence operation carried out on Twitter was conducted using the @Jenn _Abrams account. The persona associated with @Jenn_ Abrams had accounts on multiple platforms, but most notably amassed over 80,000 followers on Twitter. This persona would tweet about everything from segregation to the futility of political correctness, and she would eventually be cited by more than 40 U.S. journalists before being taken down by Twitter in late 2017. John Kelly was among those following@Jenn_Abrams on Twitter. In testimony during a closed Committ;ee hearing, Kelly-described the ability of IRA . influence operatives to infiltrate entire swaths of the political ecosystem on Twitter, of either ', ideological persuasion, using the persona: ' Now ... we 're lighting up Jenn Abrams' account and all of the peoplefollowing her are lit up . ... So she had almost the entirety of the activist right, a good bit of the activist left, because remember the IRA has puppets on both sides - they are actually the same people running the machines - building her credibility. And then down below she's managed to make inroads and followers hip among the mainstream conservative part of that network, and she's even got a few of the mainstream liberal folks following her. 220 (U) The IRA was also successful using Twitter accounts feigning left-leaning ideological sentiment. An example cited by Laura Rosenberger in te~timony to the Committee, @wokeluisa -\\\hich was still active in 2018 and had over 50,000 followers - claimed to be an AfricanAmerican politiCal science major in New York. Content produced under the guise ofthis persona would eventually appear "1n more than two dozen news stories from outlets such as BBC, USA Today, Time, Wired, Huffington Post, and BET."22…$

) IRA opei:atives were not, however, entirely absent from Google and its subsidiaries. Among the Google products that contributed to the wide-ranging character of the IRA' s information warfare campaign, Y ouTube was by far the most utilized by operatives. ill addition to IRA activity on YouTube, Google also uncovered evidence that Russian operatives utilized some of the company's advertisement products and services during the 2016 election campaign period. Using Gmail accounts connected to the IRA, influence operatives reportedly purchased $4, 700 worth of search advertisements and more traditional display advertisements in relation to the 2016 presidential election. 225 (U) Americans also engaged with a separate $53,000 worth of politically themed advertisements that either had a connection to a Russian internet or physical building address, or had been purchased with Russian rubles. It is unclear, however, whether these ads are tied to the Russian government. The content of these ads spans the political spectrum, and features 'messages alternately disparaging and supporting candidates from both major political parties, as well as the then incumbent U.S. President. The total amount of advertisement spending related to the election on Google AdWords was about $270 million, making the Russia-linked purchases on the Google platform miniscule by comparison. Gmail addresses and other Google applications were also utilized to establish accounts on both Facebook and Twitter. According to Renee DiResta, "YouTube, G+, and other properties were leveraged to either host content or to support personas. "226 (U) As a tool of information warfare, the Google "Search" application pre·sents a distinct method for broadly disseminating disinformation. Google's search engine is by far the most utilized on the internet,'however Google has been criticized for its failure to address issues with its PageRank algorithm. Periodically, particularly in the context of fast breaking news, Goog…

any geopolitical issue of significance to Moscow-MH-17, the White Helmets, the N ovichok poisonings in the UK-and you will be served up a set of top results consisting of outlandish conspiracy theor~es emanating from Russia."228 (U) Private sector entities around the world dedicate sustained effort to manipulating the Google Search algorithm for commercial benefit. "Search-engine optimization," which entails maximizing the likelihood of favored content appearing among the highest ranked query results, is a standard marketing firm capability routinely used in the promotion of businesses and products. The IRA's 2016 information warfare campaign featured some of the same capabilities. According to the Department of Justice indictment, the IRA devoted an entire department to search-engine optimization, the objective of which was the elevation of the IRA's content in the search results of Americans, in furtherance of the IRA's 2016 information warfare campaign. 229 I ' (U) Y ouTube. Distinct from Facebook and Twitter, the Y ouTube platform is not independently conducive to rapid and expansive content sharing. Achieving the "viral" spread of You Tube videos generally entails capit~l_i_zing on the reach and magnitude of Facebook and .'Twitter networks to spread links to the video hosted on Y ouTube. -(U) Data provided to the Committee by YouTube concerning-IRA-associated content and accounts indicates that IRA influence operatives began posting videos to Y ouTube as early -as September 2015. More than 1,100 videos, or 43 hours of content, were eventually posted on 17 YouTube channels the IRA established. Two of these channels were overtly political in character, and focused on the,2016 U.S. presidential election.230 (U) The overwhelming preponderance of the video content posted to.the IRA's YouTube channels was aimed directly at the African-American population. Most of the videos pertained tO police brutality and the activist efforts of the Black Lives Matter organization.…

January 4, 2025 at 3:19 PM

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This section lays out the different kind of trolls they use and how they target "both sides" of our political spectrum as well as other innocuous pages that aren't political in nature.

Facebook officials have corroborated. When asked by Senator SusaQ. Collins whether Facebook's recommendation engine ever suggested content created by IRA operatives to F~cebook users, Facebookpfficials admitted that "This happened in some cases," adding that. IRA content was "sometimes recommended when people followed similar pages." 193 (U) In order to maximize the speed and scale of Russia's information warfare campaign, IRA operatives utilized the Facebook platform, and almost the entirety of its suite of features and capabilities, exactly as it was engineered to be used. (Uj Instagram. The use of Instagram by the IRA, and Instagram' s centrality as a channel for disseminating disinformation and societally divisive content, has escaped much of the media and public attention that has focused on other social media platforms. (U) IRA influence op~ratives in St. Petersburg; Russia, first posted on Instagram in January 2015-at the same time as their first posts on Face book. Ultimately, IRA activity and engagemem with Americans through Instagram accounts dramatically eclipsed the comparable interaction achi~ved through Facebook pages.'194 (U) Data provided to the Committee indicates that the IRA used 133 Instagram accounts to publish over 116,000 posts. By comparison, the IRA used Facebook pages to publish over 60,000 posts. Engagement with fellow platform users was also significantly greater on Instagram, wher:~ IRA accounts accumulated 3.3 million followers and generated 187 million total engagements. By comparison, the IRA's Facebook page audience of 3.3 million produced 76 million virtual interactions ... As Renee DiResta assessed in testimony to the Committee,. "Instagrain dramatically outperformed Face book in terms of reach and in terms of likes and in . terms of engagement, on a per-post [basis]."195 (U) The tactics IRA operatives used on the Instagram platform were consistent with ·those employed on the Facebookplatform. The IRA's Instagram accounts focused o…

Twitter post volume is o~er fifty thousand tweets per month, while the average monthly volume of Facebook ads; Facebook posts, and Instagram posts is in the hundreds to low thousands, never exceeding the six thousand mark.204 (U) It appears from the data that the IRA, or a predecessor ofthe,organization, began posting on Twitter in 2009, mostly in the Russian language and with a focus on the domestic Russian audience. These accounts continued to target Russia-internal issues and audiences until they were dosed down in 2017. 205 It wasn't until 2013 that accounts tied to the IRA began to target a U.S. audience, with E;nglish language tweets. 206 (U) According to PhHHoward and John Kelly, the activity on Twitter constitutes the IRA' s first use of a social media platform to conduct inforn1ation warfare against the United States. The IRA effort shortly thereafter incorporated additional social media platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook: It appears that the IRA initially targeted the US public using Twitter, which it had used domestically in Russia/or several years. But as the IRA ramped up US 'operations toward the end of 2014, this dataset suggests that the IRA began leveraging other platforms in sequence: YouTube (here measured via Twitter citations o/YouTube content), Instagram, and lastly Facebook. 207 (U) Initially, the IRA's Twitter activity targeting a U.S. audience was constrained to a relatively low operational tempo, approximating an initial test phase. By 2014 and 2015, however, the IRA's U.S.-focused efforts had significantly intensified. The elevated level of activity was sustained all the way throligh the 2016 presidential election campaign period, and spiked with an anomalous peak in activity immediately following the election, in-November 2016. By mid-2017, U.S.-focused IRA activity on Twitter surpassed the IRA's domestic, Russia-focused information operations on the platform. 208 All Twitter accounts known to be associated with the IRA …

In addition to the Twitter accounts identified by the company as tied to the IRA, Twitter uncovered 50,258 automated accounts that they believe to be tied to Russia. These bot accounts were issuing tweets containing election-related content during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign period. 210 Although Twitter could not definitively link these bot accounts directly to the IRA, they illustrate the vulnerability of U.S. democratic processes to automated influence attacks, and the scale of the effort emanating from Russia to exploit that vulnerability. The coordinated activity of multiple bot accounts on social 'media represents an . additional element of the foreign influence threat. According to platform monitoring reports prepared for officials in the United Kingdom, an estimated 2,800 automated accounts believed linked td Russia posted content concerning the 2018 poison attack on Sergei Skripal 'and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in an effort to provoke uncertainty over culpability for the attack. 211 · (U) The IRA's influence operatives dedicated significant effort to repurposing existing fake Twitter accounts, and creating new ones, that appeared to be owned by Americans. These accounts were used to build American audiences, accrue account followers, and amplify and spread content produced by the IRA. An analysis of the IRA's Twitter accounts illuminates the strategy and objective&: behind its Twitter activity. Clemson researchers, led by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, collected all of the tweets from all the IRA-linked accounts between June 19, 2015, and December 31, 2017. 212 After removing from the·sample all non-English accounts and those that did not tweet at all, the team was left with 1.875 million tweets associated with 1,311 IRA usemames.' (U) After conducting an analysis of all the content that IRA influence operatives manufactured, the Clemson researchers separated the IRA-affiliated accounts into five categories of so~ial media plat…

January 4, 2025 at 2:48 PM

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Clinton and supporting the candidacy of either fellow Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders or Green Party candidate Jill Stein, at the expense of Hillary· Clinton. Posts from the IRA' s rightleaning accounts were unvaryingly opposed to Clinton's candidacy. I (U) In contrast to the consistent denigration of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's candidacy received mostly positive attention from the IRA' s influence operatives, though it is important to note that this assessment specifically applies to pre-election content. The Committee's analysis indicates that post-election IRA activity shifted to emphasize and provoke anti-Trump sentiment on the left. DiResta's team assesses that in relation to pre-election content: "The majority of the political content was anti-Hillary Clinton; there appeared to be a consistent preference for then-candidate Donald Trump, beginning in the early primaries .... There was no pro-Clinton content."137 ! (U) Evidence of an overarching pro-Trump and anti-Clinton bias leading up to Election Day 2016 is also fuund in information obtained by Special Counsel's Office. For instance, IRA employees were directed to focus on U.S. politics and to "use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump-we support"them)." 138 Another IRA employee was criticized internally for having a '"low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton' and was told 'it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton' in future posts." 139 Content and hashtags produced by IRA employees included "#Trump2016," "#TrumpTrain," "#MAGA," "#IW orttProtec~Hillary," and "#Hillary 4Prison."140 (U) One communication obtained by the Committee details an IRA employee's description of Election Day 2016, from the vantage of an information warfare operative: "On November 9, 2016, a sleepless night was ahead of us. And when around 8 a.m. the most ' important result of our work arrived, we uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne ... took one gulp each a…

$In addition to denigrating Hillary Clinton, voter suppression among left-leaning audiences appears to have been another political goal of the IRA's influence operatives. Young Mie Kim, a digital adyertisement research expert from the University of Wisconsin, has closely analyzed the IRA's Facebook ad:vertisements. On the basis of Kim's analysis, three types of voter suppression campaigns on Facebook and Instagram emerge, including: "a) turnout sµppression/election boycott; b) third-candidate promotion; and c) candidate attack, all targeting nonwhites or likely Clinton voters." 143 Kim found no evidence of a comparable voter suppression effort that targeted U.S. voters on the ideological right. 1 (U) Renee DiResta found similar evidence: \ Voter suppression narratives were in [the data], both, on Twitter (some of the textto-vote content) and within Facebook, where it was specifically targeting the Black audiences. So the groups that they made to reach out to Black people were specifically targeted with 'Don't Vote for Hillary Clinton,' 'Don't Vote At All,' 'Why Would We Be Voting, ' 'Our Votes Don't Matter, ' [and] 'A Vote for Jill Stein is Not a Wasted Vote. '144 · (U) TAG researcher Phil Howard's findings support DiResta's assessment. Howard found that while both the ideologieal right and left in America were targeted: The main difference is that where Conservative' and right-wing voters were actively encouraged to get behind Trump's campaign, other voters were encouraged to boycott the election, vote for someone other than Clinton, and become cynical of the pplitical process in general. 145 (U) Underscoring the insidiousness of the IRA's information warfare campaign, influence operations were conducted in cognizance of the U,S. political schedule and political events. Modifying their tactics and strategy to reflect real-life occurrences, the IRA's operatives would increase their activity around events relevant to the campaign schedule. This included pre-election …$ $activity (96 percent of the IRA's YouTube content was targeted at racial issues and police brutality). (U) The IRA's exploitation ofracial tensions in.an attempt to sow societal discord in the United States is not a new tactic for Russian influence operations. Rather, it is the latest incarnation of a long-standing Russian focus. Historically, the KGB 's active measures program also made race a central feature of its operational targeting. As KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin noted: "The attempt to stir up racial tensions in the United States remained part of Service A's stock-in-trade for the remainder of the Cold War." For example, before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, KGB officers mailed falsified communications from the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries. KGB officers also forged letters that were "sent to sixty black organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by the [Jewish Defense] League against blacks." 164 (U) As the TAG study l~d by Renee DiResta concluded: The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Jnstagram specifically targeted Black American· communities and appear to have been focused on developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets . .. '. While other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Face book Pages or lnstagram accounts, the Black community was targeted extensively with dozens; this is why we have elected to assess the messaging directed at Black Americans as a distinct and significant operation. 165 (U) In March 2018, the Wall Str~et Journal was among the first to report on a series of elaborate efforts by IRA operatives to target, coopt, and incite African-Americans to participate in real world activities the IRA promoted online. African-Americans targeted on social media were asked to deepen their engagement with IRA operatives-from signing petitions to teaching self-defense training courses. In one instance cited by the Wall Street J…$

(U) Disinformation experts agree with Prigozhin's assessment. Clint Watts, in March 201 7 testimony to the Committee: "Over the past three years, Russia has implemented and run the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history.'°'174 (U) Eugene Rumer elaborated onWatts' point in offering this summary in March 2017 testimony to the Committee: . Russian meddling in the 2016 U~. Presidential election is likely to be seen by the Kremlin as a major success regardless of whether its initi.al goal was to help advance the Trump candidacy. The payoff includes, but is not limited to a major political disruption in the United States, which has been distractedfrom many· strategic pursuits; the standing of the United States and its leadership in the world have been damaged; it has become a common theme in the narrative of many leading commentators that from the pillar of stability of the int~rnational liberal order the United States has been transformed into its biggest source of instability; US. commitments to key allies in Europe and Asia have· been questioned on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. And last, but not least, the Kremlin has demonstrated what it can do to the world's sole remaining global superpower. 175 · (U) Thomas Rid echoed this conclusion before the Committee: "The great Active Measures campaign of 2016 will be studied in intelligence schools for decades to come, not just in Russia of course but in other countries as well." 176 I .f· (U) Ongoing IRA Activities (U) IRA activity on social media did not cease, but rather increased after Election Day 2016. Evidence from well-known IRA accounts confirms that Russia-based operatives continued to be actively exploiting divisive social issues in the United States well after the 2016 election. After Election Day, Left-leaning IRA accounts were promoting hashtags such as "#Impeach45,'' "#Resist," and "#GunReformNow." Complementary right-leaning IRA accounts were focused on the NFL kneeling c…

January 4, 2025 at 2:28 PM

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@lightweaver369.bsky.social

These pages show how they grew the political divide using radicalizing language mixed in with innocuous posts to make themselves seem like a legitimate actor.

(U) Developing and applying a familiarity with the American political space was also a critical function of the IRA trolling operation. According to a former employee intervie~ed by the news outlet Dozhd, IRA personnel were required to study and monitor tens of thousands of comments in order to better understand the language and trends of internet users in the United States. The ex-troll indicated that they were taught to avoid crude and offensive language that would be off-putting to the typical online reader. 118 According to the former employee, the IRA office dedicated to inflaming sentiments in the United States was prohibited from promoting anything about Russia or President Putin-primarily because, in the IR.A's assessment, Americans do not normally talk about Russia. "Our goal wasn't to tum the Americans toward , Russia .... Our task was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent, and to lower Obama's support ratings." 119 IRA employees were trained to understand and exploit the nuances of politically sensitive issues in America, including taxes, LGBT rights, and the Second Amendment. Once IRA employees better understood the politic~l fault lines and how Americans naturally argued online, their job was to incite them further and try to "rock the boat." 120 (U) More recent open source reporting has provided fresh insight into the inner workings and goals of the IRA operation. Marat Mindiyarov, a former IRA troll,. outlined for the ·Washington Post in 2018 how important Facebook became to the IRA. Mindiyarov described how workers in the Facebook Department of the IRA were paid twice as much and included a younger, more pop culturally literate crowd. In order to graduate to the Facebook Department, these trolls had to take a 1test to prove their English language skills, their ability to comment on American political nuance, and to confirm they had the necessary opposition to the United States. 121 . ... VI. (U) IRA ACTIVITIE…

become the IRA's third-highest ranking employee by the spring of2014. Both secured visas to visit the United States in June 2014, and the two made stops in "Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois; Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, and New York," according to the IRA indictment. 123 " ' ... ', - . ·: ' - . .. ~· : -.: ,, - Operating as a reconnaissance team for the IRA, the two were sent to collect intelligence to be used in the organization's information warfare against the United States. Prior to the trip, they had worked with their colleagues to plan itineraries and purchase equipment, including "cameras, SIM cards, and drop phones." They also worked on various "evacuation scenarios" and other security measures for their trip. 124 Their visit likely helped the IRA refine tactics to be used on social media, but the trip represents only a small part of the wider operational effort to track and study Americans' online activities, understand U.S. political and social divisions, impersonate U.S. citizens online, and ultimately engage in information warfare against the United States. - -·-- -- - .. . ... - ~ . -~ - - - -- -··- -· .. -' - • ,,. , .J '. ' ' > , , • ..,_ • ., • - 1 r ,', ' •• - ..... •·: •• .: •• • • ~-·.:· • :· •• •,· •' .·- --T~',• (U) According to the Special Counsel's Office, by April 2014, the IRA had formed a new department inside the larger organization that was focused solely on the U.S. population. Referred to as the "translator project," and alternately as'the "Translator Department," the American department of the operation would grow to over$0 employees by July 2016. 126 By the summer of 2016, at the height of the U.S. campaign season,' the "translator project" employees were posting more than 1,000 pieces of content per week, reaching between 20 and 30 million people in the month of September alone. 127 In addition, the IRA employees began contacting unwitting U.S. persons to better refine their tactics and targets. In one communication,…

The IRA built a wide-ranging information operation designed to complement these other Russian influence activities directed toward interfering with and undermining U.S. democracy in 2016. The expanse and depth of this effort would only be understood in the aftermath of that campaign. B. (U) IRA Operations Explicitly Targeting the 2016 U.S. Election (U) At the direction of the Kremlin, the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by.harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald. Trump. 133 (U) The overwhelming majority of the content disseminated by the IRA did not express · clear support for one presidential candidate or another. Instead, and often within the context of the election or in reference to a candidate, most IRA content discreetly messaged. narratives of disunity, discontent, hopelessness, and contempt of others, all aimed at sowing societal division. Nevertheless, a significant body of IRA content dealt with the election, and specifically the Republican and Democrat candidates. The TAG study led by Renee DiResta concluded that for all data analyzed, which included data captured before and after the 2016 U.S. election, roughly 6 percent of tweets, 18 percent of Instagram posts, and 7 percent of Face book posts from IRA accounts mentioned Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton by name. On Facebook, that percentage translated to I, 777 posts that specifically mention Hillary Clinton (or a derivative moniker), which in turn generated over I. 7 million user interactions. or engagements. 134 I ' 1. (U) Numbers of posts are an imperfect and potentially misleading evidentiary base for drawing conclusions about motivations and objectives. The relatively low number of IRA · Facebook and Twitter account posts that specifically mention either candidate is not dispositive of the IRA's intent to influence voters. In practice, the IRA's influence operatives dedicated the balance of their effort to establishing the credibility of their o…

you're taken seriously," Graphika CEO and TAG researcher John Kelly described to the Commttee, "[T]hen you can slip in the wrong thing at exactly the right time." 135 (U) The tactic of using select payload messages among a large volume of innocuous content to attract and cultivate an online following is reflected in the posts made to the IRA's "Army of Jesus" Facebook page. The page, which had attracted over 216,000 followers by the time it was taken down by Facebook for violating the platform's terms of service, purported to be devoted to Christian themes and Bible passages. The page's content was largely consistent with this fa;ade. The following series of posts from the "Army of Jesus" page illustrates the use of this tactic, with the majority of posts largely consistent with the page's theme, excepting the November 1, 2016 post that represents the IRA's payload content: e October 26, 2016: "There has never been a day when people did not need to walk with Jesus." • October 29, 2016: "I've got Jesus in my soul. It's the only way I know .... Watching every move I make, guiding every step I take!" o October 31, 2016: "Rise and shine-realize His blessing!" ., October 31, 2016: "Jesus will always be by your side. Just reach out to Him and you'll see!" ~ November 1, 2016: "HILLARY APPROVES REMOVAL OF GOD FROM THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE." • November 2, 2016: "Never hold on anything [sic] tighter than you holding unto God!" (U) This pattern of character development, followed by confidence building and audience cultivation, punctuated by deployment of payload content is discemable throughout the IRA' s content history. (U) The IRA's ideologically left-leaning and right-leaning social media accounts posted content that was political in nature and made reference to specific candidates for President. Hillary Clinton, however, was the only candidate for President whose IRA-posted content references were uniformly negative. Clinton's candidacy was targeted by both the IRA's left…

January 4, 2025 at 2:19 PM

✨Light Weaver✨

@lightweaver369.bsky.social

society, the more vulnerable it is."83 Institutions and norms that define western liberal· democracies-open and competitive elections, free flow of information, vibrant press freedoms, freedom of speech, and diverse societies-are conducive to exploitation by anti-Western propagandists. · (U) Indirect Objectives. As western governments grapple with addressing an iry.ternet operating environment that at present favors Russia, democratic institutions and constituencies must also weigh the potential indirect objectives of Russian active measures. As the August 2018 French disinformation report points out, the desired objectives of disinformation on a population can be two-fold. The direct objective, discussed earlier in this Volume, uses information manipulation to push the target audience in a preferred direction. The indirect objective entices overreach by the targeted country's government-in essence, baiting governments to respond in a heavy-handed or improper fashion that is irreconcilable with the nation's principles and civil liberties. The indirect objective, is, according to the French report, "not so much to convince a population of this or that story as to lead governments to take measures that are contrary to their democratic, liberal values, which, in turn, will provoke a reaction. "84 (U) Similarly, even the fear of active measures being unleashed on a society risks societal damage, whether the foreign capability exists or not. Democratic governmedts and populations must balance the need for calling out and shining light on Russian activities with_ remaining realistic and sober about Moscow's actual capabilities and their effectiveness. (U) The public needs to be made aware ofthe tactics being directed at them, but there also needs to be appreciation for the limitations of those tactics. As Massimo Calabresi reports in his 2017 Time article on Russia's social media war on America, :'the fear of Russian influence operations can be more damaging than the oper…

posts, clicks, and traffic. One IRA employee, Ludmila Savchuk, described work shifts during which she was required to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts, and 150 to 200 comments on other trolls' postings. 104 (U) The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their J.P. addr:esses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible/or · · promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of 'technical tasks' · -point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. 105 (U) Savchuk's description largely matches similar depictions outlined in a series of leaked documents from an unidentified Rµssian hacker organization in June 2014. The leaked ' documents, purported to be attached to internal emails fr_om within the IRA, describe the responsibilities of the IRA teams. As reported by BuzzFeed at the time: I . On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts· a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and getat least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expectedto manage JO accounts with up to 2, 000 followers. and tweet 5 0 times a day. 106 . (U) As a member of the Special Projects depart,ment of the IRA, Savchuk was responsible for creating and maintaining believable, fake personas online that, would eventually seed pro-Kremlin narratives into their otherwise normal-looking online activities. One former employee said: "We had to write 'ordinary posts,' about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government …

were able to join the most prestigious wing of the IRA, the English-language trolls. Penalties were instituted for employees who failed to reach their quota or were caught copying previous posts as opposed to creating new content. The trolls worked "round the clock to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications with remarks praising the President, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the depravity and injustice of the west." 109 L (U) One former employee's description of his work at the IRA is notable: I arrived there, and I immediately felt like a character in the book '1984' by George Orwell-a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line. The volumes were colossal-there were huge numbers of people, 300 to 400, and they were all writing absolute untruths. It was like being in Orwell's world. 110 (U) The Special Counsel's Office description of the IRA's activities is consistent with much of the reporting derived from interviews of former employees. As an example, the IRA indictment alleges in detail how IRA employees, referred to as "specialists," were tasked with creating fake social media accounts that purported to be U.S. citizens engaged on social media: The specialists were divided into day-shift and night-shift hours and instructed to make posts in accordance with the appropriate US. time zone. The [IRA] also circulated lists of US. holidays so that specialists could develop and post appropriate account activity. Specialists were instructed to write about topics germane to the United States such as US. foreign policy and US. economic issues. Specialists were directed to create "political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation and oppositional social movements. "

U) The IR.A's trolls monitored societal divisions and were poised to pounce when new events provoked societal discord. For example, a former IRA troll interviewed by the Guardian in 2015 descriued his focus on race-related issues: "When there were black people rioting in the U.S. we had to write that U.S. policy on the black community had failed, Obama's administration couldn't cope with the problem, the situation is getting tenser. The negroes are rising up." 115 < • .-. ~: • - : ' • • •• ~ - • .~ - ~ ' • • ' • • • • • - ' • • - • ~ '• • • • • - • • ' ..,. ~ ' - •• ~ ' ' ' • :- - r I -: .,-:_--::· _-.-~ ... ·.. : __ - - . " -,.- ' - - - - .. . -_ . -: ·: .. -- :~ ... - - - .. - -- ' ' ' . - . ' -- -. . . . ' . - ::: - - ,. -,---~----· . ., - ---- - --- -~----- -·- ------ - _. . . ' - ·. . . " - ·- - - . -.- - - . - - - - -- --- - - - - - - - - .. -,-· ' - • ~ • • • • • • < c • <• - • < - • - - - - - - ~ - • ... - - ~ - - - - - - - - - • -- - •• • - ••• - -- -· • ....---- -j ' ~ ' I ' I ' , • , • • ' , ' ,- ' '"' d • • I • , ~ , (U) Leaked IRA documents from 2014 reveal a sophisticated approach to the various social media platforms aimed at ensuring trolls could evade online monitors. IRA employees were taught how to comment on each of the different websites so as to avoid being blocked or removed. As an example, one author outlined how to write for the fringe site WorldNetDaily: "Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published ('Your nation is a nation of complete idiots') ... nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama." 117

January 4, 2025 at 2:13 PM

✨Light Weaver✨

@lightweaver369.bsky.social

and at the populations of regional neighbors provided Moscow valuable insights into how information and social media could be most effectively used against the West. (U) Although the tactics employed by Russia vary from one campaign to the next, there are several consistent themes in the Russian disinformation playbook. (U) High Volume and Multiple Channels. Russian disinformation efforts tend to be wide-ranging in nature, in that they utilize any available vector for messaging, and'when they broadcast their messaging, they do so at an unremitting and constant tempo. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews from the RAND Corporation describe the Russian propaganda effort as a , "firehose of falsehood," because of its "incredibly large volumes," its "high numbers of channels and messages," and a "rapid, continuous, and repetitive" pace of activity. Russia disseminates -the disinformation calculated to achieve its objectives across a wide variety of online vehicles: "text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the internet, social media, satellite television and traditional radio and television broadcasting."62 One expert,Laura Rosenberger of the 1 German Marshall Fund, told the Committee that "[t]he Russian government and its proxies have infiltrated and utilized nearly every social media and online information platform-including Instagram, Reddit, Y ouTube, Tumblr, 4chan, 9GAG, and Pinterest."63 (U) The desired effect behind the high volume and repetition of messaging is a flooding of the information zone that leaves the targetaudience overwhelmed. Academic research _ suggests that an individual is more likely to recall and internalize the initial information they are exposed to on a divisive topic._ As RAND researchers have stated, "First impressions are very resilient."64 Because first imp~essions are so durable and resistant to replacement, being first to introduce narrative-shaping content into ~he information ecosystem is rewarded in the_ disinformation co…

$to formulate and execute information operations with a velocity that far outpaces the responsivity of a formal decision-making loop in NATO, the United States, or any other western democracy. For example, within hours of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukrain(;\ Russian media had introduced a menu of conspiracy theories and false narratives to account for the plane's destruction, including an alleged assassination attempt against President Putin, a CIA plot, an onboard explosive, and the presence of a Ukrainian fighter jet in the area. 67,68 Dutch investigators with the Joint Investigation Team determined later the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from a Russia-provided weapon system used in separatist-held territory in Ukraine. (Q) Use of Automated Accounts and Bots. The use of automated accounts on social media has allowed social media users to artificially amplify and increase the spread, or "virulence," of online content. Russia-backed operatives,exploited this automated accounts feature and worked to develop and refine their own bot capabilities for spreading disinformation faster and further across the social media landscape .. In January 2018, Twitter disclosed its security personnel assess that over 50,000 automated accounts linked to Russia were tweeting election-related content during the U.S. presidential campaign. 69 (U) Russian actors are prolific users of automated accounts and bots. Phil Howard, citing the findi~gs of a study dpne by the Oxford Interneflnsfitute, concluded that Russian Twitter networks "are almost completely bounded by highly automated accounts, with a high degree of overall automation." His study assessed that "some 45 percent of Twitter activity in Russia is managed by highly automated accounts," and that Ukraine remains "the frontline of experimentation in computational propaganda with active campaigns of engagement" between Russian and Ukrainian botnets. 70 Early automation was fairly primitiv…$

average media consumer says, 'There are too many versions of events, and I'll never know the truth. "'80 (U) Fluid Ideology. Because the Kremlin's information warfare objectives are not necessarily focused on any particular, objective truth, Russian disinformation is unconstrained by support for any specific political viewpoint and continually shifts to serve its own self-interest. Provided the information space is rendered confused and clouded, Russia's information operatives are unencumbered and can support any and all perspectives. (U) An August 2018 report on information manipulation commissi<med by the French government notes that the Kremlin "can simultaneously support far right and far left movements, so long as they are in competition with one another." As examples, the report cites the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, the chemical attacks in the Syrian town of Douma, and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, as instances in which Kremlinbacked disinformation amplified far-fetched and mutually exclusive conspiracy theories on both sides of the political spectrum.81 This key characteristic distinguishes modem day Russian operations from former Soviet Union-era active measures campaigns. Speaking to the resultant operational flexibility, Pomerantsev describes the transition: "Unlike in the Cold War, when Soviets largely supported leftist groups, a fluid approach to ideology now allows the Kremlin to simultaneously back far-left and far-right movements, greens, anti-globalists, and financial elites. The aim is to exacerbate divides and create an echo chamber of Kremlin support."82 (U) In sum, the modem-day Russian information warfare campaign combines the advantages of social media information delivery and the operational freedom of being . ideologically agnostic. · (U) Exploiting Existing Fissures. Successful Russian active measures' attempt to exploit societal divisions that already exist, rather than attempt to create new r…

January 4, 2025 at 2:05 PM

✨Light Weaver✨

@lightweaver369.bsky.social

The first part of the document lays out how long and far reaching their disinformation campaign has been and the effect it has had on the world. They especially targeted certain demographics in order to drive division amongst our citizens after having practiced it on their own.

necessarily malicious in nature. These researchers al~o concluded that "bots [were] pervasively present and active in the online political discussion about the 2016 U.S. presidential election," adding that "the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it."39 Arriving at a similar conclusion, an Oxford Internet Institute study-of 17 million tweets posted during the 2016 election found that bots "reached positions of measurable influence," and "did infiltrate the upper cores of influence and were thus jn a position to significantly influence digital communications during the 2016 U.S. election."40 (U) In testimony to the Committee, social 1nedia researcher John Kelly suggested that automated accounts focused on fringe political positions are far more active than the voices of actual people holding politically centrist views: "In our estimate, today the automated accounts at the far left and far right extremes of the American political spectrum produce as many as 25 to . 30 times the number of messages per day on average as genuine political accounts across the mainstream." In other words, "the extremes are screaming while the majority whispers."41 Taken as a whole, the attributes of social media platforms render them vulnerable for foreign influence operations intent on sowing discord throughout American society. IV. (U) RUSSIAN USE OF DISINFORMATION (U) Russia's attack on the 2016 election was a calculated and brazen assault on the United States and its democratic institutions, but this was not the Kremlin's first foray into · asymmetric warfare against Am_erica. Russian interference in 2016 represents the latest and most sophisticated example of Russia's effort to undermine the nation's democracy through targeted operations. As the January 6, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment states, Moscow's provocations "demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of…

testimony Roy Godson and Thomas Rid provided to the Committee, over 10,000 individual disinformation operations were carried out during the Cold War involving approximately 15,000 · personnel at its peak.46,47 A. (U) Russian Active Measures · (U) For decades, Soviet active measures pushed conspiratorial and disinformation narratives about the United States around the world. The KGB authored and published false stories and forged letters concerning the Kennedy assassination, including accounts suggesting CIA involvement in the killing. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of manufactured KGB narratives, as was Ronald Reagan. Russian intelligence officers planted anti-Reagan articles in Denmark, France, and India during his unsuccessful 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination. A declassified U.S. State.Department document from 1981 outlines a series of realized Russian active measures operations, including the spread of falsehoods concerning U.S. complicity in the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and responsibility for the 1981 death of Panamanian General Omar Torrijos, as well as an elaborate deception involving multiple forgeries and false stories designed to undermine the Camp David peace process and to exacerbate tensions between the United States and Egypt.48 Among the most widely known and successful active measures operations conducted during the Cold War centered on a conspiracy that the AIDS virus was manufactured by the United States at a military facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland. This fictional account of the virus' origin received considerable news coverage, both in the United States and in over forty non-Cold War aligned countries around the world.49 (U) In a 1998 CNN interview, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin described active measures as "the heart and soul o[ Soviet intelligence": Not intelligence collection, but subversion; active measures to weaken the West, td drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all so…

As Sergey Tretyakov, the former SVR (the foreign intelligence service of the Russian Federation, and a successor organization to the KGB) "rezident," or station chief for Russian intelligence in New York, wrote in 2008, "Nothing has changed .... Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U.S."51 B. (U) Russia's Military and Information Warfare (U) While active measures have long been a tool of the Russian intelligence services, a shift toward developing and honing the tools of information warfare represents a more recent , devel'opment for the Russian conventional military and larger national security establishment. (U) The embrace of asymmetric information operations resulted from a number of factors, but chiefly from the Russian national security establishment's belief that these operations are effective. Pavel Zolotarev, a retired major general in the Russian Army, explained, "We had come to the conclusion ... that manipulation in the information sphere is a very effective tool."52 That conclusion was reinforced by the perception that these operations are extremely difficult to defend against, particularly with multinational military alliances like NATO, which is built to deter and if necessary defeat a traditional, conventional military threat. Information warfare, in addition, is an extremely low-cost alternative to conventional military conflict. (U) A lack of alternatives also motivates Russia's reliance on asymmetric tactics. Russia's national security establishment may have had no choice but to increase its asymmetric capabilities given its inability to c~mpete with the West on a more traditional, military hard power basis. Former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia Eugene Rumer stated in 2017 testimony to the Committee that Russia's information warfare toolkit "performs the 'function of the equalizer that in the eyes of the Kremlin is intended to make up for Russia's weakness vis-a-vis the West."53

$the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare."57 Social media platforms enabled Russia's Ukraine campaign, and aided materially in the realization of its military' s adoption of information warfare doctrine. '-(U) Compared to more traditional methods for informatlon warfare used in the Cold War, Watts described social media as providing Russia a "cheap, efficient, and highly effective access to foreign audiences with plausible deniability of their influence." 58 (U) Russia's aptitude for weaponizing internet-based social media platforms against the United States resulted from Moscow's experience conducting online disinformation campaigns against its own citizens for over a decade. Russia's online disinformation efforts arernoted in the early and mid-2000~, when the Kremlin sought to suppress opposition in the face of rapidly expanding internet-based communications. 59 (U) Studying the technology used by its political opponents, the Kremlin hijacked the capabilities and weaponized their use against Russia's own people. Russia perfected the use of these tools and methods of information warfare over time, paving the way for its decision to similarly target the citizens of other countries. Russia has also continued its domestic deployment of these tools. -- - -- • ,, • - ,·-:·-- . -· - • r • - • - - -- - - . •' ' ---- • ' -.- - • • -· - ,.,· ,· --~-------- ' • • •'" - -- -- --·, f ,··,· - r ·.~ •• ~,, -- ' -..-· -- --- • ---· ~- ~-·-- -- t , - ---~----------' • , - D" (U) Russian Social Media Tactics \ (U) The Kremlin has honed and refined its social media disinformation tactics over the last decade. Lessons learned through information warfare campaigns directed both internally$

January 4, 2025 at 1:59 PM

✨Light Weaver✨

@lightweaver369.bsky.social

I've been reading the SSCI report on Russian interference in the US and there's a lot of interesting information that I think people need to know about. I'm going to post screenshots of the docs and highlight things I find interesting.