Impeachment is effectively over, and that means the Senate is not too worked up about the prospect of inviting foreign interference in American elections. Given that Monday marks the start of the Iowa caucuses and the official kickoff of election season, maybe now is a good time to start thinking through who might attempt a repeat of 2016. Which countries have the capability and willingness to run the troll playbook in 2020?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Russia: Given its history in the 2016 election, Russia is the most important question mark hanging over possible disinformation campaigns in the 2020 election.
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A string of announcements from Facebook about the suspension of Russia-linked fake news and troll accounts long after the 2016 election shows that Moscow’s troll farms haven’t folded since President Trump came to power. Quite the opposite.
One of those campaigns, an operation dubbed “Secondary Infektion” by researchers at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, was taken down by Facebook in May 2019. The effort, attributed to Russia, involved forged screenshots and documents that targeted politicians in the U.S. and U.K., among other countries, and sought to exacerbate tensions over hot button political issues like Brexit and the Mueller investigation of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In December, Russia appeared to demonstrate its willingness to meddle in a major Western country’s election, when leaked copies of a British trade agreement surfaced on Reddit in the run-up the British general election. The leak, researchers concluded, bore all the hallmarks of the Secondary Infektion campaign shut down six months prior, and Reddit subsequently suspended the account that posted the documents, saying, “We believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia.”
So will the Russians pull a repeat play in 2020? The Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in 2019 that American spies expect social media disinformation from any country may not look the same as the 2016 campaign. State-run trolls will likely “refine their capabilities” and the “threat landscape could look very different in 2020 and future elections,” it wrote.
The assessment didn’t say Russia necessarily would interfere in the 2020 election but left the door open. “Moscow may employ additional influence toolkits—such as spreading disinformation, conducting hack-and-leak operations, or manipulating data—in a more targeted fashion to influence U.S. policy, actions, and elections.”
China: While China’s hacking operations against Western targets are prolific, professional, and well-documented, its disinformation architecture, at least in the West, is less active. The world got its first look at China-backed social media trolling operations during the unrest in Hong Kong over mainland control of Hong Kong’s government and a controversial extradition bill. Twitter suspended what it said were roughly 200,000 fake accounts dedicated to attacking the protesters.
A number of the accounts, including the highly active @LibertyLionNews, commanded large audiences in part because hackers had pried them from legitimate owners with large, organically developed followings. The hackers then changed the name on the accounts in an attempt to make themselves appear like pro-Trump conservatives or poorly mimicked, boring, basic Americans.
Hackers from the People’s Liberation Army have grasped the American idiom enough to fool American defense contractors, federal officials, and corporate employees into clicking on phishing links and malware from phony authors, but their cousins in Beijing’s disinformation apparatus seem to have a looser grasp of American culture. Profile bios for a number of the Twitter accounts purporting to be Americans include seemingly copy-pasted results from parody online bio generators. Others fumbled in trying to reference popular culture. “It is unacceptable that Toby got a backstory before Beth. Beth backstory better be flames. I’m not playing with you”—one bio read, in a stilted reference to hit NBC show This Is Us.
Elise Thomas, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who has studied Twitter’s China disinformation datasets, cautioned against drawing too many conclusions about China’s social media capabilities, because the data available thus far is limited.
The data from the Hong Kong campaign we do know about probably isn’t the best example of China’s capabilities either. Thomas says the effort was “fairly slapdash.”
“The protesters shifted the battleground, and the [Chinese Communist Party] had to rush to keep up. The targeted audience was likely overseas Chinese populations, not international audiences more broadly,” Thomas told The Daily Beast.
China, however, doesn’t appear to have the same appetite for covertly influencing American politics through social media as Russia, and the appearance of a Chinese troll factory seems remote.
“I think it’s very unlikely, with the exception of maybe trying to shape the opinions of Chinese diaspora,” Thomas said. “But even there I think they would do it through Chinese language media, not through any kind of covert social media campaign.”
Saudi Arabia: Much of what we know about Saudi disinformation comes from the campaigns overseen by one man, Saud al-Qahtani. Qahtani served as an adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on intelligence and cybersecurity issues, and the chief of the Saudi government’s shadowy Center for Studies and Media Affairs, which housed his online troll farm and assorted cyber mischief.
Qahtani, nicknamed “Lord of the Flies” for his legions of social media bots and sock puppets, hired expensive lobbying shops like the now-defunct Podesta Group to polish the kingdom’s image for “relevant U.S. audiences.”
Saudi Arabia appears to have built much of its cyber capabilities through outsourcing. Its hackers have reportedly been able to target high-profile individuals like New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard by leasing malware services from the Israeli hacking mercenary firm NSO Group.
The Saudis have repeated that pattern of reliance on third-party contractors in the disinformation space. When Twitter suspended nearly 90,000 accounts connected to Saudi platform manipulation, it revealed that much of the activity was outsourced to Smaat, a Saudi marketing company that previously operated the Twitter accounts of Saudi government departments and high profile Saudi citizens. Smaat “appears to have created, purchased, and/or managed these accounts on behalf of—but not necessarily with the knowledge of—their clients,” Twitter said.
It’s not clear whether the Saudi government has kept up Qahtani’s disinformation efforts since his alleged involvement in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. Qahtani has been under house arrest in Saudi Arabia, under U.S. sanctions for allegedly masterminding the plot, and banned from Facebook and Twitter along with legions of accounts associated with him.
Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who tracks disinformation campaigns, says he’s found networks of coordinated pro-Saudi activity on Twitter. The content is pro-Saudi, but it’s hard definitively to attribute the campaigns to the Saudi government itself.
So are the Saudis likely to venture into election meddling come the 2020 election? “It’s true Bezos, Khashoggi and NSO Group stuff have had blowback, but none of this appears to have dampened the enthusiasm of the Saudi regime,” said Jones. “I am already aware of a potentially new tactic the Saudis are using to infiltrate Trump’s online support base.”
At least so far, Saudi trolls have been focused primarily on buttressing the opinion of Saudi government officials and attacking critics rather than wading into U.S. electoral politics. A New York Times profile based in part on interviews with former Saudi troll farm employees showed that Qahtani’s disinformation apparatus tasked employees with attacking pre-selected critics of Saudi Arabia and its policies, including Khashoggi.
Iran: Iran’s capabilities and intentions are easier to gauge. Since at least 2017, the Islamic Republic has operated a large network of fake news websites and social media trolls aimed at audiences in the U.S., Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.
Within that network were a large number of accounts focused on the U.S. and American politics in 2017 and 2018. Facebook and Twitter took down the accounts thanks to a tipoff from FireEye, which first discovered the trolling campaign. The offending accounts posed as primarily left-wing Americans and fans of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and offered opinions on subjects including the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The timing of the campaign, as the 2018 midterm elections dawned, gave the impression that Iran was trying to meddle in American elections. But FireEye stressed that if that was Tehran’s intention, it wasn’t the only intention. “The activity does not appear to have been specifically designed to influence the 2018 US midterm elections, as it extends well beyond US audiences and US politics,” the researchers wrote.
Whether Iran will try to meddle in the 2020 election seems like an easier question to answer: It was already wading into election politics two years ago and has little to fear in terms of additional sanctions or a worsening relationship with the U.S., given the tensions between the Trump administration and Tehran. Judging by the volume of activity, it appears that Iranian officials at least believe the work is valuable to their interests. In a threat briefing in 2019, the director of national intelligence wrote that Iran “will continue to use online influence operations to try to advance its interests.”
The bigger question about Iranian trolls seems to be whether they could actually matter. Unlike Russia, Iran doesn’t appear to have its own @TEN_GOP—a high profile troll account that racks up thousands of followers and millions of engagements. By contrast, Iranian social media troll accounts have been short lived, little followed, and fairly forgettable.
Americans: Foreign countries’ intelligence agencies aren’t the only ones spreading disinformation to interfere in American elections. We do it to ourselves, and no one trolls America quite like America.
