WASHINGTON _ Russian efforts to help elect President Donald Trump were intensely focused on exploiting racial tensions to suppress voter turnout among minorities, a campaign that proved more far-reaching and effective than previously understood, according to reports released Monday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
More than 30 million Facebook and Instagram users shared propaganda messages generated as part of a campaign by Russia's Internet Research Agency to polarize and misinform voters, according to the reports commissioned by the committee. The activities of Russian operatives and their crafting of messages in which they often posed as minority activists have been known for some time, but the new reports reveal extensive additional detail about how that operation spread such threads of misinformation far and wide.
"The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted Black American communities and appear to have been focused on developed Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets," said one of the reports, commissioned by the committee from the research firm New Knowledge. "The IRA exploited the trust of their page audiences to develop human assets, at least some of whom were not aware of the role they played. The tactic was substantially more pronounced on Black-targeted accounts."
The release of the reports opens a new chapter into the probe on Capitol Hill into Russian election interference, sparking anger among Democrats and civil rights activists who note the Russian focus on alienating black voters ran parallel to Trump campaign efforts to do the same. The reports, while offering no evidence of collusion, give Democrats and federal prosecutors fresh fodder for their investigations into the possibility that the Russians and people close to Trump cooperated.
But the tactics are also consistent with a historic pattern in which Russian propagandists have used racial tensions in America to further their goals. In Soviet times, Russian agents worked diligently to fan the flames of racial discord in America, as they became a potent argument against capitalism. The techniques have evolved, but the goals of disrupting the American political system remain the same.
News of the far reach of the Russian campaign to suppress the black vote alarmed voting rights activists, who say the Russian campaign should not be viewed in isolation from continuing efforts by Trump and other Republicans to limit minority turnout.
"These threats are not separate phenomena," said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "They are closely related attempts to use race and racism in America to divide the electorate and subjugate Americans of color."
The reports intensify pressure on social media platforms to do more to protect voters from misinformation, and raise fresh questions as to whether social media companies have been fully transparent with investigators about what is getting transmitted and shared through them.
"These attacks against our country were much more comprehensive, calculating and widespread than previously revealed," said committee Vice Chairman Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va. He called for legislation that creates "some much-needed and long overdue guardrails when it comes to social media."
Some key Republicans were also jolted by the report, including committee Chairman Sen. Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, who said the data revealed by New Knowledge and another report by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and a firm called Graphika demonstrate "how aggressively Russia sought to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology." He called on social media companies to share more of their data with analysts engaged in finding and confronting the campaigns.
