The US Congress has published 3,500 Facebook ads that were created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency in an effort to divide Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election and beyond.
The ads cover a range of issues, including racial injustice, gun control, LGBT rights, immigration and patriotism. Included with each ad is information about how many people saw or engaged with the ad, the price paid in rubles and the target audience.
A sample of the ads bought by the notorious Russian troll factory between 2015 and 2017 for a total of about $100,000 was previously released by Democrats on the House intelligence committee last year. Facebook provided them to the panel last year as part of an investigation into Russian meddling in the election.
The collection doesn’t include the 80,000 posts that were shared by 120 fake Russian-backed pages, shared by 29 million Americans directly and viewed by as many as 126 million Americans.
Among the cache are sponsored posts describing police brutality against black people, including the killings of the 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the Ferguson teenager Michael Brown and the unarmed motorist Walter Scott. They link to the “Black Matters” page on Facebook.
One batch of advertisements promotes “Williams and Kalvin”, a pair of black YouTube vloggers who decried racism and police brutality in their advertisements. The Daily Beast previously reported on the pair’s YouTube videos, in which they railed against Clinton and supported Trump.
The documents show that Williams and Kalvin targeted their ads specifically toward African Americans: many of the ads instruct Facebook to exclude people who are designated as showing Hispanic or Asian American “behavior” but include people whose “behavior” is designated as “African American (US)”. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on how Facebook defines African American “behavior”.
Others call for action against rightwing “hate rallies” such as one in Texas organised by a group called “Back to the Blue”. “The modern government has brought racist America to the forefront, good or bad,” reads the text.
Some of the ads are written in broken English such one shown in June 2015 that reads: “Your life matter. My life matter. Black matters.”
The documents show how the operation played to both sides of various issues. In another ad, which ran on Instagram and targeted fans of Fox News and Ted Cruz, a photograph shows a black man holding a white police officer in a chokehold while another black man threatens to stab the police officer with the tip of a flagpole carrying the American flag, with the caption “#bluelivesmatter”. Other ads targeted those who expressed an interest in the Confederate flag with pro-Confederate messaging, including statements that the US civil war was not about slavery, that the Confederate army treated black soldiers better than the Union army, and that supporters should defend statues of confederate generals.
In one particularly brazen example, ads were run promoting both a “Pro-Beyonce Protest Rally” and an “Anti-Beyonce Protest Rally” scheduled for the same time time and place following the controversy over the artist’s performance at the 2016 Super Bowl. The pro-Beyoncé ad was targeted at users designated as having African American behaviors. The anti-Beyoncé ad was targeted narrowly at people who had studied to become a police officer or whose job title matched a list of law enforcement or military titles, including officer, colonel, major general (United States), master sergeant, commander (United States), sergeant, brigadier general, petty officer, chief petty officer, lieutenant commander, squadron leader, 911 dispatcher or rear admiral.
Another cluster of ads invite people to join the “Being Patriotic” Facebook group and feature images of eagles, American flags and revolutionary war soldiers brandishing muskets. They include posts about the removal of confederate statues and second amendment rights.
A page called LGBT United was promoted with ads such as one showing rainbow-dyed foods with the message: “Good morning, dear friends! Have a tasty and colorful morning! All you need is love, coffee and rainbow dishes!”
The campaign continued after the election to mid-2017. Some of the ads were damaging to Hillary Clinton, with some depicting her behind bars while others spread rumours about her husband or described her as a “liar” or “traitor”. Days after the election of Donald Trump one ad from the Being Patriotic page promoted a “Support Trump in NYC” event designed as a response to the “massive crowds of libtards” that marched in the city against Trump’s election.
Targeting varied from simple demographics, such as adults in Texas, to more granular segments, as with anti-immigration ads aimed at people who liked specific Fox News hosts and the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Several advertisements for the anti-immigrant group Stop AI (“Stop all invaders”) were targeted at people who were interested in Syria.
“In the run-up to the 2016 elections, we were focused on the kinds of cybersecurity attacks typically used by nation states, for example phishing and malware attacks,” said Facebook in a blogpost. “And we were too slow to spot this type of information operations interference.”
The company outlined several changes it had made to “prevent bad actors from using misinformation to undermine the democratic process”. These include an archive of political ads that will allow people to see which ads ran and how they were targeted; an identity verification process for political or issue-based advertisers; the removal of some demographic targeting options used by the Internet Research Agency; and the proactive tracking of activity around dozens of elections around the world, including the US midterms and elections in France, Kenya and Germany.
The company also created a tool to allow users to see if they had liked or followed Russian propaganda accounts on Facebook or Instagram.
