Tracking Russian Online Interference Teaches Valuable Lessons on Improving News Quality · Global Voices
Profile pictures from a large network of <PERSON> Twitter accounts. Image by <PERSON>.
With the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) indictment of 13 Russians for interfering in 2016 United States (U.S.) presidential elections, Global Voices (GV) revisited its extensive research into Russian online interference, underscoring the importance of open-source data and research to understand its impact.
RuNet Echo, a Global Voices initiative, began covering Russian automated bots, trolls and paid bloggers seeking to influence online news, conversations, and political campaigns as early as 2011. RuNet Echo's main purpose is to “expand and deepen understanding of the Russian Internet (RuNet) and related online communities.”
GV was the first to publish evidence of the existence of networked trolls and bot farms operating in a coordinated fashion to distort public discourse, setting the frame for much of the reporting that followed.
Through the research of <PERSON> , GV was the first to demonstrate, using open source tools like NodeXL and Gephi , that specific bot networks existed on Twitter linked to the Russian troll farm run by the Internet Research Agency (I.R.A.) operating in a coordinated fashion to and from a specific location, and tied to specific accounts to disrupt and influence online discourse.
This insight put the research data and tools into the public eye and gave other researchers a trail to pursue the story further.
A December 2017 Washington Post story revisited <PERSON>’s research and its impact on the U.S. State Department’s understanding of Russian activities:
Frustrated U.S. officials concluded that the best information on Russia’s social media campaign in Ukraine wasn’t coming from U.S. intelligence agencies, but from independent researchers [like <PERSON>].
Department of State Chief Digital Officer <PERSON> even visited <PERSON> in Brighton, United Kingdom (U.K.) in June 2015 to gain a full explanation of his methods.
Global Voices’ work occurred years before the story landed on the front page of the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets. Our reporting led to further research by many reporters and investigators, and eventually helped make the case about Russian activities around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. 384
We hope Silicon Valley companies also took advantage of this material to pursue their own investigations into the I.R.A’s manipulations on their platforms.
Tracking Russian interference on the internet from the beginning
In 2011, GV focused on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against LiveJournal. Stories such as <PERSON> “ Russia: Distributed Denial of LiveJournal ,” note that DDoS attacks against platforms used for political speech had been occurring since at least 2007.
The topic became an ongoing subject of research at GV, expanding from DDoS attacks to investigations into data-leak wars waged by the Kremlin, attacks on popular web forums, and the phenomenon of fake Twitter accounts in January 2012.
<PERSON> notes:
The first Russian fake Twitter users appeared long before other well known faux accounts…have developed their own particular ironic styles and have become integrated into the socio-political landscape of the Russian blogosphere.
While these fake accounts were a counter-attack by independent writers, they demonstrate the scale and impact of false identities in the Russian online space.
In February 2012, GV witnessed payoff schemes to popular bloggers to shape Russian public opinion. RuNet Echo continued to track and write about waves of DDoS attacks, spoofs, and the emerging world of fake Twitter accounts, coordinated false information campaigns, and the appearance of bot networks to influence public information at social scale.
GV tracked these attacks as they shifted targets, first against Russian opposition and activists, then against Ukrainians after the 2014 invasion, and then to attacks against Western and U.S. media, personalities, politicians, and systems, also in 2014.
By 2014, RuNet Echo editors <PERSON> and <PERSON> were reporting persistent attacks on Twitter of U.S. politicians and spokespeople, documenting collectives of leakers such as <PERSON> (Anonymous International). At the same time, we tracked Russia's ongoing efforts to restrict access to Twitter and other social media networks and to regulate bloggers.
Journalist <PERSON>'s June 2014 Buzzfeed story that discusses how a Russian troll army attacked America used Global Voices’ <PERSON> as a source.
In November 2014, GV contributor <PERSON> was the first to report in English about the existence, identity and physical location of the I.R.A. building at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg that became the focus of the 2018 FBI indictment. 384