Two reports about Russian cyber-campaigns on social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. election find that Kremlin-linked trolls relentlessly targeted the African-American community to boycott the election. The reports, by teams led by experts at the cybersecurity company New Knowledge and Oxford University, analyze operations by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a secretive businessman known as Vladimir Putin’s “chef” for his Kremlin catering work. The New Knowledge report finds that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens”.
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Of 81 Facebook pages created by IRA, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, 25 pages focused on the political right with 1.4 million followers. On YouTube, the IRA played on police shootings of unarmed black men with channels with names like “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.” The Oxford report says one clear Russian goal was to suppress Democratic turnout in 2016, pushing the message that the “best way to advance the cause of the African-American community was to boycott the election.” One bogus post declared that Hillary Clinton received a donation of $20,000 from the Ku Klux Klan.
