You Will Anyway: Ukrainian Russian-type election interference

Monday, September 23, 2019

Ukrainian Russian-type election interference

The "I Love America" Facebook page boasts 1.1 million fans, with viral content that reaches more Facebook users than some of the largest media outlets in the United States.

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There are lots of references to "our country" and "our military." Not mentioned is that the page is managed by ten people based in Ukraine. (There is also one manager from Kazakhstan, one from France, and one from the United States.)

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The "I Love America" page regularly recycles memes used by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian entity that set up phony Facebook pages to benefit Trump in advance of the 2016 election.

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[I]n recent weeks it has used its extraordinary reach to push pro-Trump propaganda.

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All of these pages, which were created in the last few months, are managed exclusively by people based out of Ukraine.

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There is a complex network of Facebook pages, all managed by people in Ukraine, that collect large audiences by posting memes about patriotism, Jesus, and cute dogs. These pages are now being used to funnel large audiences to pro-Trump propaganda. The pages have also joined political Facebook groups and are active on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Facebook promised this would not happen again. “In 2016, we were not prepared for the coordinated information operations we now regularly face. But we have learned a lot since then and have developed sophisticated systems that combine technology and people to prevent election interference on our services,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2018.

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While the "I Love America" page was created in 2017, in recent weeks it has cross-posted content from explicitly pro-Trump pages, including "Click Like, if you love Donald Trump as much as we do. TRUMP 2020," "God bless Donald Trump and God bless America," and "God bless Donald and Melania Trump and God bless America." All of these pages, which were created in the last few months, are managed exclusively by people based in Ukraine.

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According to Crowdtangle, a social analytics company owned by Facebook, "I Love America" has more engagement -- likes, shares, and comments -- over the last 90 days than USA Today, one of the largest media organizations in the country with 8 million Facebook followers. Over the same period, the engagement of "I Love America" dwarfs major publications like the LA Times and digitally native outlets like BuzzFeed News.

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Ukrainians also operate a page called "I Love Jesus Forever." Most of the posts, as you might expect, are about God and Jesus.

[That] page has also started cross-posting pro-Trump memes from "God bless Donald Trump and God bless America."

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Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Grafika, believes that the Ukrainian network of Facebook pages lacks the sophistication to be a government-backed effort. "We're seeing state-linked operators trying harder to hide, reducing their linguistic footprint, masking their technical signals and covering up the identities of the people behind them," Nimmo told Popular Information.

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Nimmo believes this operation "looks more like a clickbait group trying to build followers by posting cat photos, horses, and patriotic memes."

Still, the impact on American voters could be the same, especially if the tactics include bombarding Americans with false and divisive political material.

Popular Information

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.