Russian disinformation campaign to help Donald Trump bigger than thought, twin studies claim
- Studies claim to reveal how Russian agents sought to influence Americans by saturating their favourite online services and apps with hidden propaganda
- Robert Mueller, who heads the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, was a target of false claims online
Months after US President Donald Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sites on a new target: special counsel Robert Mueller.
Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralise the biggest threat to his staying there.
The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies.
One post on Instagram – which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal – claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups”.
Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters.
The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the reports caused “nothing but incomprehension”/
“It voices absolutely general charges and accusations and some of them are absolutely unclear to us,” Peskov told reporters on a conference call. “We are reproached that someone critically thinks of a situation in this or that social sphere in the United States but it is not explained what Russia has to do with it.”
