(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Yes, Russia likely stole the Election For Trump in 2016 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-06 This is an issue that a former (MAGA) friend of mine once called a “Conspiracy Theory”. The idea that Russia directly interfered with the 2016 election enough to change the results is something that MAGA refuses to believe. That is a “conspiracy.” However, the idea that nameless random Democrats and the mystical magical “Deep State” stole the election *away* from Donald Trump in 2020 is absolutely Gospel. It couldn’t have happened any other way, and no amount of facts, logic, evidence, court decisions, recounts or audits will prove anything different. You see it was the “Mail-in Ballots”, they were all “faked.” Ok, I used to be a poll worker and I know that mail-in ballots are generated based on a valid entry in the voter registration database. [They *do* check to see that someone is a citizen and valid voter before they are added to the database, so non-citizens don’t get a ballot] They are individually addressed and they have to be signed, and dated by the person they are addressed to — and that signature has to *match* the signature from their voter registration card. In some states, they have to also provide either a valid driver's license number or the last four digits of their social security number. So in order to fake all these ballots you have to have: A valid registration by a US citizen A valid signature The correct DL # (or) The correct SSN Last 4 digits And you have to do that — thousands and thousands of times. Who has time to do all that? Who has access to all that confidential data? How could someone do all that and not leave any trace at all? And yet it’s somehow easier for people to believe that happened millions of times than to believe that the Russians managed to reach and influence 44 Million Americans with their strategic social media disinformation campaign. Hmph. Well, to solve this conundrum we can reference the Bipartisan Senate Report on Russian Interference which has 5 Full Volumes of material. To start with, Russia has been using tactics like this for decades. COMMITTEE SENSITIVE - RUSSIA INVESTIGATION ONLY 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, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO; to sow discord among allies, to weaken the. United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs. 50 (U) While this history of discrediting the United States with spurious rumor$ and disinformation is well-chronicled, Russia has continued the practice today. And let’s all recall that the Russian Troll Farm — also known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — was at this time being run by Ygenvy Prigozhin, the same exact guy who also ran the Russian Militia Wagner Group and tried to stage a mini-coup against Putin before his airplane “mysteriously” crashed. Also, the plan to use social media for this goal was outlined before the election by a Putin-backed Think tank. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters. They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [en.riss.ru/], after the election. It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said. Now to start off there is no evidence that Russia changed any votes, or remotely accessed voting machines. I mean, since all approved voting machines are air-gapped and already have paper ballots believing that happened would simply be insane, amirite? [Dominion Lawsuit reaches $787.5 Million settlement.] No, they didn't hack the votes — they hacked the voters. For example, they used social media to stoke and foment anger and division in America [Volume 2, Page 6] COMMITTEE SENSITIVE - RUSSIA INVESTIGATION ONLY (U) Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes clear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on socially divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive,, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities. They also pushed their influence across a broad coalition of groups and subjects, including Republicans who were competing against Trump in the primaries. (U) The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush. As Clint Watts, a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee,"Russia's overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides .of the golitical spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin." IRA operators sought"to impact primaries for both major parties and "may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed." But their real targets were African Americans and the issue of police brutality. (U) The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016. Evidence of the IRA's overwhelming operational emphasis on race is 'evident in the IRA's Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to race ) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at African- Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Face book pages (one of the IRA's top-performing pages, "Blacktivist," generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook' users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hot-button issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests), and its YouTube activity (96 percent of the IRA's YouTube content was targeted at racial issues and police·brutality). As you do on social media, each of the Russia-created accounts first sought to build an audience that would appeal to their targeted groups of Americans. Now there’s the question of — did this have any impact? Did these Russian accounts have any real-world influence on those who followed them? Well, yeah. (U) The Committee found that the IRA coopted unwitting Americans to engage in offline activities in furtherance of their objectives. The IRA's online influence operations were not constrained to the unilateral dissemination of content in the virtual realm, And its operatives were not just focused on inciting anger and provoking division on the internet. Instead, the IRA also persuaded Americans to deepen their engagement with IRA operatives. For example, the IRA targeted African-Americans over social media and attempted and succeeded in some cases to influence their targets to sign petitions, share personal information, and teach self-defense training courses. In addition, posing as U.S. political activists, the IRA requested-and in some cases obtained-assistance from the Trump Campaign in procuring materials for rallies and in promoting and organizingthe rallies. What about how they influenced the campaign? Well, they were actually more subtle about that than it would seem. (U) 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 Facebook 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 (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 online personas, such as by posting innocuous content designed to appeal to like-minded users. This innocuous content allowed IRA influence operatives to build character details for their fake personas, such as a conservative Southerner or a liberal activist, until the opportune moment arrived when the account was used to deliver tailored "payload content" designed to influence the targeted user. By this concept of operations, the volume and content of posts can obscure the actual objective behind the influence operation. "If you're running a propaganda outfit, most of what you publish is factual so 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 Essentially the IRA sought to be a “trusted source” for their followers and didn’t usually bring up political issues — until the right time. [Volume 2, Page 36] (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 facade. 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: 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!" 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. When it came to their operations to influence the election, it was very clear who their target was and how they intended to push things. (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 and right personas, and both ideological representations were focused on denigrating her. As Renee DiResta notes, the political content of the IRA, "was unified on both sides in negativity towards Secretary Clinton." 136 The IRA's left-leaning accounts focused their efforts on denigrating 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 right-leaning accounts were unvaryingly opposed to Clinton's candidacy (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." 13 On the left, they push for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein and against Clinton. On the right, they pushed for Trump. They also tried to suppress votes on the left. (U) 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 advertisements. 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 text-to-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 The Trolls used Youtube videos in an attempt to influence the Black community. (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. (U) YouTube. Distinct from Facebook and Twitter, the YouTube platform is not independently conducive to rapid and expansive content sharing. Achieving the "viral" spread of YouTube 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 YouTube 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. Posted to 10 of the IRA's YouTube channels, were 1,063 videos-or roughly 96 percent of the IRA content— dedicated to issues ofrace and police brutality. The names of the IRA's YouTube channels were consistent with the posted video content and included "Black Matters," "BlackToLive," "Cop Block US," "Don't Shoot,." and "PoliceState." The content of the videos posted to those channels exploits issues of extraordinary sensitivity inside the African.,.American community. It is difficult to reconcile this fact with public testimony to the Committee by a Google representative that, "The videos were not targeted to any particular sector of the US population as that's not feasible on YouTube." (U) Only 25 videos posted to the IRA's YouTube channels featμred election-related keywords in the title. All of the IRA's politically-oriented videos were thematically opposed to the Democrat candidate for president, Hillary Clinton. Some of the videos featured expressly voter suppressive content intended to dissuade African-American voters from participating in the 2016 presidential election, while others encouraged African-Americans to vote for Jill Stein. Also, the Troll accounts were coordinated with the Wikileaks releases of emails stolen from the DNC and John Podesta. A particular spike in IRA activity on October 6, 2016, stands out as an anomaly deserving further scrutiny. As reported by the Washington Post and noted by the Clemson research team, IRA influence operatives posted, at a pace of about a dozen tweets per minute, nearly 18,000 messages from their Twitter accounts on October 6, 2016. This spike in activity came a day prior to WikiLeaks's publication of emails stolen by the Russian GRU from the account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. According to the researchers, on October 6 and 7, IRA Twitter accounts-particularly those accounts emulating ideologically left-leaning personas-significantly increased the volume of their content posting, with 93 of the "Left Troll" accounts posting content that could have directly reached other Twitter accounts 20 million times on those two days. 150 While a clear connection between the spike in IRA Twitter activity and WikiLeaks' release of the emails has been established, the Clemson researchers speculate that the timing was not coincidental: "We think that they [the IRA] were trying to activate and energize the left wing of the Democratic Party, the Bernie wing basically, before the WikiLeaks release that implicated Hillary in stealing the Democratic primary." 15 Let me also point out here the timing of the release of Podesta’s emails by Wikileaks was coordinated by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone who had reached out to Julian Assange through Jerome Corsi and a Russian contact who worked for RT to have those emails released on that exact day. In October 2016, during the fraught final weeks of the showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Roger Stone got word that a damning recording of his candidate was about to drop. That tape would become instantly infamous for Trump’s degrading remarks about women and his apparent boasts about committing sexual assault. “When you’re a star, they let you do it—you can do anything,” Trump told Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush in 2005, in audio published by the Washington Post. “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Apparently sensing the cataclysmic damage the comments would wreak, Stone—self-styled dirty trickster and unofficial Trump adviser—spoke by phone to the conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, directing him to get in touch with Julian Assange, whose organization, WikiLeaks, had obtained Russian-hacked emails from Democratic Party staffers, including Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. “Drop the Podesta emails immediately,” Stone instructed, seeking to “balance the news cycle” after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Thirty-two minutes later, WikiLeaks followed through. 32 Minutes after the Access Hollywood story came out in the WaPo, Wikileaks dropped the Podesta emails under the direction of Roger Stone on orders from Steve Bannon. Later they sent Stone a message, “Good job.” For the record; “Collusion” confirmed. So, how many people saw these posts and advertisements? (U) Facebook estimates that 11.4 million people in the United States saw at least one of the 3,393 advertisements ultimately determined to have been purchased by the IRA. Modelling conducted by Facebook indicates that 44 percent of the total user views of these advertisements("impressions") occurred before the election on November 8, 2016, with 56 percent of the impressions taking place after the election. Roughly 25 percent of the ads were never seen by anyone. (U) The IRA used Facebook's geographic targeting feature to channel advertisements to intended audiences in specific U.S. locations. About 25 percent of the advertisements purchased by the IRA were targeted down to the state, city, or in some instances, university level. Specific content narratives emerge in connection with targeted locations. For instance, Michigan and Wisconsin (32 and 55 pre-election advertisements, respectively) were targeted with advertisements overwhelmingly focused on the subject of police brutality. Facebook indicates that the IRA did not leverage the platform's Custom Audiences tool, which would have entailed uploading or importing an externally held list of advertisement targets or contact data, revealing the IRA's efforts were not as sophisticated or potentially effective as they could have been. And how many people, influenced by Facebook, actually reacted to some of the posts and events that the Russian trolls generated? (U) The IRA's Facebook pages were not just channels for disseminating content across the social media platform. The IRA also used its Facebook presence to provoke real world events, including protests, rallies, and spontaneous public gatherings or "flashmobs." Facebook identified at least 130 events that were promoted on its platform as a result of IRA activity. These events were promoted by, and attributed to, 13 of the IRA's Facebook pages, Approximately 338,300 genuine Facebook user accounts engaged with content promoting these events. 62,500 Facebook users indicated their intention to attend the event, while another 25,800 users evinced interest in the event. 338,300 Facebook users saw live real-life events posted by Russian trolls and 62,500 of those users actually attended those events. That’s a conversion rate of 18.4%. As well as they did on Facebook, they did better on Instagram. (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, where 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,. "Instagram dramatically outperformed Face book in terms of reach and in terms of likes and in terms of engagement, on a per-post [basis]." 195 And their reach on that platform was in the tens of millions. (U) In total, over the course of more than two years spent as an instrument for foreign influence operations, 12 of the IR.A's Instagram accounts amassed over 100,000 followers, and nearly half of the IRA's 133 Instagram accounts each had more than 10,000 followers. On the basis of engagement and audience following measures, the Instagram social media platform was the most effective tool used by the IRA to conduct its information operations campaign. 197 (U). Despite the high Instagram engagement numbers reported to the Committee through the TAG social media research effort, in testimony to the Committee, Facebook representatives indicated that Instagram content reached just 20 million users. In relation to the Facebook estimate, the published findings of the working group led by TAG researcher Renee DiResta contest that "the Instagram number is likely lower than it should be" and advocate for additional Just 20 Million people? And then there’s Twitter. (U) Twitter. Though Twitter has fewer U.S. users than Facebook (68 million monthly activ~users on Twitter in the United States compared to 214 million Facebook users), Twitter is an extremely attractive platform for malicious influence operations· like those carried out by the IRA due to its speed and reach. In 2017 testimony to the Committee; disinformation expert Thomas Rid identified Twitter as one of the more influential "unwitting agents" of Russian active measures. Available data on the IRA's activity on the Twitter platform reinforces this assessment. As of September 2018, Twitter had uncovered over 3,800 accounts tied to the IRA. According to qata provided to the Committee by Twitter, those accounts generated nearly 8.5 million tweets, resulting in 72 million engagements on the basis of that original content. More than half (57 percent) of the IRA's posts on Twitter were in Russian, while over one-third (36 percent) were in English. 203 Twitter estimates that in total, 1.4 million users engaged with tweets originating with the IRA. And Reddit. (U) According to Reddit, the 944 evaluated accounts were responsible for around 14,000 posts. Of those posts that contained socially or politically divisive content, most were thematically focused on police brutality, issues of race, and the disparagement of Hillary Clinton. A Reddit account with the username Rubinjer, the most popular of the accounts Reddit investigators assessed as probably linked to the IRA, posted a video that falsely claimed to depict Hillary Clinton engaged iri a sex act. The video, which was ultimately posted on a separate website dedicated to pornographic content and viewed more than 250,000 times, was created by the IRA's influence operatives. The same Reddit account was used to promote a videogame titled Hilltendo, in which players maneuver an animated Hillary Clinton as the avatar deletes emails and evades FBI agents. IRA influence operatives attempted to achieve viral dissemination of the video game across social media, weeks prior to the 2016 election. IRA influence operatives also used Reddit as a platform for Russia-friendly narratives. And Tumblr. (U) Tumblr. Following Facebook's September 2017 disclosures about IRA activity on the platform, Tumblr conducted an internal investigation to determine whether Russia-based operatives had also been active on Tumblr. The ensuing investigation uncovered 84 accounts determined to be associated with the IRA. Most of the accounts were created in 2014 or 2015,) and did not exhibit indications of automation. The IRA-associated Tumblr accounts generated about 100,000 posts, and were engaged significantly with authentic (non-IRA) usef accounts on Tumblr. Tumblr estimates that IRA influence operatives used the platform to interact with 11.7 million unique U.S. users, and nearly 30 million unique users globally. Tumblr did not find any indication that IRA operatives purchased advertisements through the platform's advertising feature. So in summary, on Facebook the Russians reached 11.4 Million people with 60,000 posts and 3,393 advertisements generating 76 million engagements, 44% of which was before the election, and many of whom were geographically targeted to specific states including Michigan and Wisconsin. On Instagram, they reached 20 Million people using 133 accounts which generated 116,000 posts and 187 million engagements. On Twitter, they reached 1.4 million users with 3,800 accounts creating 8.5 million tweets and 72 million engagements. On Tumblr, they reached 11.7 million unique US users with 100,000 posts. The report doesn’t provide user counts for Youtube or Reddit. Now we can assume some of the people were repeat customers, but with that as a given even if we take that each of these users were unique the troll farm‘s total theoretical reach would have been 44.3 million Americans. Let’s say roughly half of that were Democrats and half were Republicans so a maximum of about 22.15 Million Democrats could have been receiving messages from the Russian Troll farm, which to them would have been Don't Vote for Hillary — don’t vote at all, vote for Trump, vote for Bernie in protest or else vote for Jill Stein. (And there’s an outside longshot chance that some Dems voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson) Now, since we do know that at least in one case they had an impact rate of 18% that would mean that probably about 3.987 million Democrats were likely to follow their advice and either didn’t vote in protest for Sanders or else voted for Jill Stein or Trump. Is that enough to flip the election? Well, if you spread that difference across all 50 states you get a drop of about 79,740 votes being suppressed against Clinton per state. [Ed. I had to do an edit to include Tumblr, Youtube and Reddit. 79,740 is the theoretical maximum number who could have been influenced in each state by Russian Trolls. That number doesn’t account for users who may have interacted with IRA accounts on multiple platforms, but it also doesn’t include many additional users from Youtube and Reddit who weren’t specified in the report.] We do, of course, know that this number wouldn’t be even across every state — because we also know that the Russians targeted their influence to specific swing states — using either the polling data they were provided by Paul Manafort, or possibly the Cambridge Analytics data that mined 50 million profiles from Facebook while Steve Bannon was a Vice President of that company as they were funded by a Russian oil firm, and were based in a university in St. Petersburg. So it could be as much as 50% higher (120k) in one state that had been targeted specifically and then much 50% lower (60k) elsewhere. And, oh by the way, the chief architect of that data grab was potentially hacked in Russia in his St Petersburg office. Kogan denies handing over the Facebook data he gathered for Cambridge Analytica to any Russian entity, saying it is possible that someone in Russia could have accessed data from his computer without his knowledge. "On my side, I am not aware of any Russian entity with access to my data," he added. He didn't rule out that he may have inadvertently exposed the data while in Russia. Kogan said he would need to see more information before commenting further, adding, "This could be really innocuous, it could be as simple as an SCL (Cambridge Analytica's British parent company) representative was in Russia and they remotely access the server to see some of the files." "It could have nothing to do with the Russian authorities, it could just be someone checking their mailbox." Collins couldn't say specifically how the data was accessed, what was in it, and how it may have been used, if at all, saying, "...there will be a lot of interest now to see to what extent were people in Russia benefiting from the work Kogan was doing with his colleagues in Cambridge in the U.K.," Collins said. Adding, "So is it possible, indirectly, that the Russians learned from Cambridge Analytica, and used that knowledge to run ads in America during the presidential election as well." Probably not as a coincidence, both CA and the Troll farm specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin during the election even though Trump was 7 points behind there. The main locations identified by the CA team were Grand Rapids and Warren, Michigan, as well as Green Bay, Wisconsin. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, The New Yorker featured a story on October 31, 2016 asking why Trump was spending all of his time in those two states specifically. "According to the polls, Donald Trump [had] been trailing Hillary Clinton badly in Michigan and Wisconsin for months," reporter John Cassidy wrote at the time, citing two polls that showed Clinton in the lead by seven percentage points. He cited a third poll where the margin was six points. "It's a similar story in Wisconsin, where the past three polls have shown Clinton ahead by four points, six points, and seven points." [...] Bunch also referred to a McClatchy report that explained that investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are looking into if Kushner helped guide "Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016." They're specifically "focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states—areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.” Green Bay and Grand Rapids would be Democratic strongholds, Trump’s goal would be to depress turnout there. Then there’s this: For actual data from the Guide to the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, 16% of those who voted for Sanders in the PA primary voted for Trump in the general. In WI and MI, it was 9% and 8% respectively. To put this into raw numbers, Sanders-to-Trump voters ultimately gave Trump the margin he needed to win in each of those states: In Wisconsin, roughly 51K Sanders voters backed Trump in a state he won by just 22K votes. in a state he won by just 22K votes. In Michigan, roughly 47K Sanders voters backed Trump in a state he won by just 10K votes. in a state he won by just 10K votes. In Pennsylvania, roughly 116K Sanders voters backed Trump in a state he won by just 44K votes. Keep in mind that a Sanders-to-Trump vote is doubly painful because it likely represents a net +2 for Trump (absolute +1 vote for Trump and likely -1 vote for Clinton). Also, the above analysis in these three states is before you even get to Sanders voters who protest voted for Stein/other or didn't vote at all. And these folks were not Rs. They were generally ideologically progressive and voted for Dems in the past. This outcome is exactly what the Troll farm was trying to do. Here's another way to look at it, the Troll farm was — as noted above — targeting Michigan and Wisconsin with ads related to “police violence.” In relation they could have been linking that to Clinton's “Super Predators" statement from the mid-90s which would be targeted at Black Voters- their primary target — to either not vote or vote for Jill Stein or potentially Gary Johnson. Here’s how the final totals broke down for Jill Stein of the Green Party and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in both 2016 and 2012 compared to the difference between Trump and Clinton's vote. 2016 Election Swing State Election Results Wisconsin Michigan Pennsylvania TRUMP 1,405,284 2,279,543 2,970,733 CLINTON 1,382,536 2,268,839 2,926,441 (Difference) 22,748 10,704 44,292 Stein (2016) 31,072 51,463 49,941 Stein (2012) 7,665 21,897 21,341 Johnson (2016) 106,674 172,136 146,715 Johnson (2012) 20,439 7,774 (Write in) 49,991 A suppression of about 79,740 votes per state would easily account for this. That much of a change would be more than double the difference in almost all these states. In all three critical swing states where Clinton was projected to win, but didn’t, Jill Stein received more votes than the gap between Clinton and Trump. To be totally fair, Gary Johnson also received more votes than the gap and he also significantly outperformed his results from 2012 as did Stein. The difference between Stein and Johnson’s performance in 2012 to 2016 is — in most cases — also larger than the gap between Trump and Clinton. You could argue that this was merely a natural progression for the Green and Libertarian parties — but the results for Green & Libertarian in 2020 for Michigan (13,718 / 60,381) and Libertarian in Pennsylvania (79,380) — neither party competed in Wisconsin in 2020 — show that during the following cycle, they both returned back to their normal level. So even while the total number of voters increased in 2020, the amount of voters who continued voting for Green and Libertarian candidates that year didn't increase. 2016 is a total outlier for those parties. Again, for comparison, Jill Stein received 278,657 votes (1.96%) and Johnson received 478,500 votes (3.38%) in California for 2016 — which wasn't a swing state, but it is close to the percentage they received in those swing states. New York also had similar results. The amount of drag on Clinton from the protest voters seemed to be fairly uniform from State to State give or take a half percent, but the resulting impact that it had, basically losing about 3.5% of the vote in those swing states, was devastating. There’s a reason this didn’t happen again in 2020 — all those fake accounts had been taken down. Now all they have is RT, Sputnik, 8Chan, Fox News, OAN and Newsmax to spread their BS. Now this isn’t anything strange, putting forth an argument or a meme — even if it is based on rumors and lies — to get voters to go one way or another is just basic politics. It’s exactly what the DNC and RNC do all the time, as do Superpacs. The only real difference is the fact that THESE WERE RUSSIANS. They don't get to do politics in our nation. They don’t get to lobby Congress or our voters. They don't get to LIE and pretend they're Americans who can be involved in U.S. elections. They created thousands of fake online accounts on social media to worm their way into the good graces of Americans and then *TRICK* them into not voting or voting for someone different than they probably would have normally. Neither Stein nor Johnson would normally get those kinds of numbers. Did they suddenly become fantastic campaigners during that one year, but not in the race before or after? What else was happening that could have boosted them so much? Something made a difference that year. Something moved the needle. Something suppressed and moved the Democratic vote in exactly the way that the Russians were trying to move it. It didn’t affect everyone, it only affected some people — but it was just enough in just the right places to make exactly the difference that was needed. Did Clinton herself make mistakes? Oh, certainly. Did she cause many of her own problems? Absolutely. Did Comey’s release of the memo that he was re-opening the email investigation make a difference? You bet it did. Bernie fans were already pissed off at the DNC before the GRU dumped their emails criticizing him through Wikileaks. Black voters were already wary of Clinton because of the “Super Predators” thing. All these elements were already in place, but the GRU and Troll Farms did their best to capitalize on all this and — where they could — make it all seem that much worse. There was an illegal speed brake placed on her campaign by a foreign nation. And, based on the math, they had a massive reach and absolutely had a likely impact that the results show may have been far more than enough to put Trump over the top in the 3 critical swing states he won when all the polls said he would lose. That’s not a “conspiracy theory” — based on the Senate report — it’s a documented fact. And frankly, I don’t think the influence of Russian Trolls and propaganda is over. It definitely has had a direct impact, on the “Deep State” hoax, the “Stolen Election Hoax”, this QAnon nonsense, Trump-the-Holy-Savior complex, the Great Replacement Theory, the Great Reset theory, the push to drop support for Ukraine, and the Hunter Biden hoax (particularly since FSB and Russian Secret Police surreptitiously copied his laptop hard drive years ago, and the main person pushing the Ukraine-Bribery conspiracy to Rudy Giuliani was a documented Russian Spy.). We’re not done with this BS — not yet. 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