The Social Media Operation That Divided Americans
The Russian social media disinformation campaign was particularly savvy in the lead-up to the 2016 election. But take a closer look and you might be surprised to learn that ads out of Russia only accounted for less than 1% of all political ads that year.
Segment – Episode 3 “Networld War”
Premieres Tuesday, March 17 from 8-11 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), pbs.org and the PBS Video app.
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- [Ferguson] In 2016, the modern incarnation of Aktivni Meri Priyatama became a sophisticated multimillion dollar social media operation, using hundreds of thousands of fake accounts with the goal of dividing Americans.
- What they were really doing over time, over about two and a half years, was facilitating tribalism.
So in this particular example, Back the Badge was an Instagram account that also had a Facebook page and what they were doing there is there's a page devoted to police officers and the narratives that they were putting out was essentially that here's a community of people, police officers, who are sacrificing so much, who are putting their lives on the line, and they're just being treated terribly by the rest of America.
(ominous music) - [Ferguson] The real trick of Russian media tactics is to take a divisive issue and play each side against the other.
- And then on the other side of the narrative, the other thing that you would see in that #police or #cop would be stories like this.
And in this particular image, you have a woman and the names of victims of officer-involved shootings are written or come across her hair.
And it says on the bottom 'we should know their names' and it's asking 'got justice?'. - Remember, both sides of this conflict were created not by Americans, but by Russians.
(eerie music) For the Russians, 2016 was just the beginning.
In network terms, what happened in the Presidential election was that a super-cluster of densely interlinked, closely followed accounts systematically disseminated fake news and extreme views on Facebook, Twitter, and the other network platforms.
Facebook has since admitted that the Russians used 470 false identities and took out around 3,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram.
According to Twitter, the Russians tweeted two million times in the run-up to the election.
Yet it's important not to exaggerate the role the Russians played.
In all, they probably accounted for less than 1% of all the political content online in the election year.
It would be more accurate to say that the network platforms, rather than the Russians, were the decisive factor.
They enabled Americans to wage information warfare on one another.
(ominous synth music)