Over the past year, President Donald Trump has denied any meddling by Russia in the 2016 presidential election.
“This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won,” Trump said to Lester Holt during an interview in May.
Yet, on Friday, Jan. 16, The United States Justice Department indicted 13 Russians from the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and three other organizations for shaping a devious hoax in attempt to assist Trump’s campaign. Countries have interfered with other countries’ elections before; as a matter of fact, even the U.S. has done so recently. However, this interference is unprecedented in that it displays the remarkable and dangerous role that social media can play in the government elections.
In 2013, Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, who works closely with Russian President Vladimir Putin and spent nine years in jail for attempted robbery and prostitution, founded the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The company employed hundreds of people, such as data analysts, graphic designers and information technologists, and had an annual budget equivalent to millions of U.S. dollars. To protect their true identities, all financials within the company were concealed under the title of “software development.” Additionally, the IRA purchased computer servers located inside the U.S. to set up virtual private networks, or VPN’s.
During the presidential election, employees at the IRA used platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to impersonate hundreds of U.S. citizens and companies to spread pro-Trump and anti-Clinton views. Employees unlawfully used the social security numbers of real American citizens without their consent to do everything from opening PayPal accounts to obtaining fake driver’s licenses. For example, the group created and ran the Twitter account “Tennessee GOP” (@TEN_GOP), falsely claiming to be part of Tennessee’s Republican Party, and attracted more than 100,000 followers. The employees, referred to by the company as “specialists,” were told to post according to U.S. time zones and were even given a list of U.S. holidays so they could maneuver posts in a realistic way.
The Internet Research Agency’s stated goals included administering “information warfare against the United States” and “spread distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.” The organization used divisive, charged topics, such as religion and immigration in their content. One post depicted a boxing match between Jesus and Hillary Clinton clad with devil horns, with the message “‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!” Later in the election, the IRA created propaganda to promote the idea that minorities, assumedly anti-Trump, should either vote for third party candidates or not vote at all. This included a false Instagram account titled “Woke Blacks” that wrote, “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL,” and the Russian-controlled accounts across various social media sites titled “United Muslims of America” that advertised boycotting the election.
According to Politifact, “Facebook estimated that 126 million people were served Russian-influenced content during the two-year period before the election.” The Internet Research Agency also orchestrated anti-Clinton rallies in Washington D.C. and elsewhere by recruiting help from allegedly unknowing American citizens and illegally sent its employees to the United States under false identities to gain information.
The question, though, is whether Trump was aware of the Internet Research Agency during his campaign. He has stated that there was “no collusion,” although in an op-ed for the New York Times, attorney Alan M. Dershowitz stated that “even if it were to turn out that the Trump campaign collaborated, colluded or cooperated with Russian agents, that alone would not be a crime, unless the campaign asked them or helped them to commit criminal acts such as hacking.” However, much of America is holding its breath, waiting for solid evidence of illegal behavior by Trump’s campaign.
Although Trump’s campaign has repeatedly denied any contact with Russia, it has been reported that Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., agreed to meet with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 after being promised classified information that could sabotage Clinton’s campaign.
Additionally, according to the New York Times, one adviser has admitted being “tipped off in advance to Russian hacking of Democratic emails” while “another was in contact with a Twitter account used by Russian hackers.” Investigators will continue to dig deeper into the matter in the coming weeks, but the indictment states that the members of the Trump campaign who colluded with the IRA were unaware of the latter’s hidden Russian identities. If you are wondering what may have happened without the interference of Prigozhin, the answer is that it’s impossible to know whether the $100,000 Russia spent on pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda truly made an impact on the outcome of the election, although Politifact writes that it’s unlikely that it did.
Regardless of any potential impacts on the presidential election of 2016, if this incident shows us anything, it is the daunting realization that we have no idea where our online information is coming from, or even where our own information is being sent. With the rise of social media and the dangerous capabilities of technology comes the unraveling of our trust in information, and each other.
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