Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
The infamous Russian troll factory that littered social media during the 2016 campaign with inflammatory memes never really went away. In fact, it might be back. Facebook announced on Thursday that it had suspended a handful of accounts, some of which shared “technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency.” So what’s the network of oddly similar trolls up to?
Who: It’s not just the undisclosed technical similarities Facebook saw that make the accounts shut down on Thursday seem eerily familiar to the IRA. A screenshot shown in the Facebook announcement shows one of the shut down Instagram accounts, ukrainarealiyi. It’s the social footprint of a propaganda outlet by the same name ukrainarealiyi or “Ukraine Realities.” That name ring any bells? It should. Remember that shortly after the 2016 election, a new website called “USAReally” popped up on servers linked to the IRA, which published some very IRA-like material. USAReally itself has tried to stress its connections to the IRA, if only in trolly gimmicks. After the U.S. indicted the IRA’s payroll chief, Elena Khusyaynova, USAReally rushed to claim that she was now the group’s chief financial officer.
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Troll so hard: If you pull up ukrainarealiyi’s website, the torch logo and website it uses are the spitting image of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFERL) logo and website—the U.S.-funded news outlet first started in the early Cold War to try and broadcast uncensored news into the Soviet Union. There are two possible interpretations. One, RFERL is a trustworthy enough brand that the folks behind ukrainarealiyi thought it would be good to rip off and piggyback on. Or two, this is a way for Russian trolls to flip the bird at the U.S. and RFERL.
RFERL has long been an object of minor irritation from the Russian government, which routinely harasses independent journalists of all nationalities. After the U.S. forced the Kremlin-backed outlet RT to register as a foreign agent, Putin responded in kind and made outlets like RFERL similarly declare themselves in Russia. In that light, this could be Moscow’s way of trying to claim there’s no difference between their sockpuppet trolls and RFERL’s reporters.
Not just us: So why is it plausible that the IRA would still be active and targeting Ukrainian audiences? It’s a return to form. The IRA is not just about the U.S. or the 2016 election, not by a long shot. A report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee crunched the numbers on the troll factory’s posts and found that the IRA’s “largest sustained Twitter campaign” focused on Ukraine shortly after Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine and dwarfed its Twitter activity during the 2016 election The Justice Department’s indictment of Khusyaynova, the woman in charge of accounting at the IRA, also noted that the company conducted a “political and electoral interference operation” in Russia, the European Union, and Ukraine, in addition to the U.S.
Not just Facebook: As is often the case, the troll campaign wasn’t just limited to Facebook. The company didn’t provide much by way of details about the individual accounts suspended but caches and third party sites indicated connections between the suspended accounts on Facebook’s platforms and other sites, like Twitter. One of those accounts, @ZhytomyrToday, went dark shortly after the Facebook announcement and changed its name. When asked if Facebook had shared any information about the campaign and if it suspended any accounts, a Twitter spokesperson said that "Facebook shared the information with us and we're investigating, but, at this time, we haven't found any activity that violates our policies."
Home field advantage: There is something different about the latest discovery of Russian troll mischief: They’ve got the home field advantage. After all the drama surrounding fake news and social media election meddling, tech companies are now more interested to find “coordinated inauthentic activity” and relatively quick on the draw at shutting them down. The campaigns that have targeted Ukrainian audiences are a little different. Some of the outlets suspended by Facebook have backup accounts on VK, Russia’s own version of a Facebook-like social media platform, hosting the same content. VK very much plays ball with the Russian government. At one point during the 2016 campaign, an executive from the company reached out to the Trump campaign and offered help with its social media. So it’s fair to say that it’s doubtful VK would feel the pressure to suspend the accounts taken down by Facebook.
Why does it matter? A good chunk of Ukraine’s population speaks Russian and a smaller subset use VK. The impact of a Facebook shutdown doesn’t have the same bite and cascading effects as it would for campaigns that target English-speaking and U.S. audiences.
Freshly laundered: So what kind of content were the fake news outlets pushing? Curiously enough, the network behind them went for a slightly softer touch than the hammer-over-the-head approach used by the IRA in 2016. Many of the accounts mimic small, local news outlets named after Ukrainian towns and cities like Poltava Today, Zhytomyr Today, Kropivnitsky Today and so forth. Facebook and Instagram deleted their accounts, but glimpses of their content pulled from caches and third-party sites show a large dose of normal, boring local news content mixed with criticism and doubts about Ukraine’s anti-Russian leadership and its prospects for integration into Europe—a far cry from the bomb-throwing racism and inflammatory content used to sow division in America.
Skimping on the provocative content may have helped the fake outlets find a wider audience. In some cases, legitimate news outlets like Russia’s Lenta newspaper aggregated tweets from accounts linked to the shut-down Facebook accounts. The outlets also appear to have ripped off the names of legitimate news organizations in order to throw off suspicions, adding to their credibility.
Tipoff: That surface plausibility may be why Facebook didn’t find these accounts organically on its own. According to its press release, Facebook first became aware of the accounts after a tip from U.S. law enforcement.
Under the wire: The backlash to Facebook’s apathy towards Russian disinformation on its platform in 2016 prompted the company to put some new obstacles in the way of would-be trolls. One of those was a transparency requirement that demanded political advertisers show government ID in order to purchase ads that target American audiences. That requirement, however, didn’t yet apply to Ukraine when the network behind the suspended accounts purchased Facebook ads up through Dec. 18. On Wednesday, the day before Facebook announced the suspension, the company announced that it planned to begin requiring political advertisers in Ukraine, Nigeria, India, and the EU to follow similar procedures.
Why should you care: A Russian fake news ring putting up plausible but phony news sites in a far-off country may seem like esoterica, but remember that it was Ukraine where Russia deployed its trolls on a massive scale before it waded into the 2016 election. The country is a top foreign policy priority for Moscow that often gets an early taste of the tactics used elsewhere.
