Information Warfare: Themes, Memes, and Methods

The content posted to Reddit by IRA-backed accounts can be broken down into two categories of themes: issue-related themes (i.e., talking points that promoted or opposed certain issues or viewpoints; narratives aimed at shaping perceptions of specific events and issues; etc.) as well as broader strategic and operational themes.

Issue-related themes included, but were not limited to:

Antisemitism; racism; anti-Americanism

Positive coverage of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

Negative coverage of Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz

Repetitive coverage framing Hillary Clinton as corrupt, evil, and malevolent

Framing the U.S. as the aggressor and Russia as the victim

Conspiracy theories about the “Deep State,” the Russia investigation (“Russiagate”), and the U.S. military

Fear-mongering about government surveillance

Fear-mongering about immigrants, refugees, and non-whites

Exploiting divisive issues surrounding race, guns, crime, and the economy (especially economic inequality and student loan debt)

Anti-mainstream media

Anti-law enforcement

Strategic and operational themes included, but were not limited to:

Use of visual imagery and memes

Toxic cynicism (i.e., both political parties are corrupt so why bother voting?)

Ad-hominem attacks (e.g., the U.S. government lied about weapons of mass destruction, therefore they can’t be trusted to tell the truth about Russia; the media got X story wrong, so therefore they can’t be trusted to report accurately on Y or Z)

Whataboutism and false equivalencies (e.g., justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by invoking U.S. military action in Iraq or Libya; implying that the U.S. is a hypocrite for criticizing human rights abuses in Syria or Russia because the U.S. once allowed slavery and still has problems with excessive use of force by police)

Cross-posting and repetition to amplify reach and resonance

Posting generic but popular content (e.g., pictures of cute animals) to foster friendly relationships with other users and improve “karma”

These themes are consistent with what we know about Russia’s influence operation. According to intelligence analysts and researchers who conducted a post-mortem of social media activity during the 2016 election, Russian active measures on social media aim to subvert Western democracies in five key ways: undermine public confidence in democratic government, exacerbate internal political divisions, erode trust in government, push the Russian agenda in foreign populations, and create confusion and distrust by blurring fact and fiction.

Russian propaganda on social media can be categorized into four broad themes: political messages intended to foster distrust in government (e.g. allegations of voter fraud, corruption, abuse of surveillance powers), financial propaganda (i.e. create distrust in Western financial institutions), social issues (e.g. race/racism, police brutality, guns), and doomsday-style conspiracy theories.

An overarching goal of modern information warfare is to plant seeds of doubt and distrust, and to confuse, distract, divide and demoralize the populace. Unlike traditional conflict, adversaries in the information space do not seek to attack their opponents from the outside, but rather to destabilize them from the inside. In the modern age of information warfare, battles are fought over the beliefs and values of a population — the very fabric of society — and one of the primary targets is the population’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Hence, while memes and gifs may seem innocuous on the surface, they take on a different meaning when they’re deployed as part of a strategic effort to demoralize, manipulate, deceive, and ultimately influence the perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors of the American public. This is exemplified by two prominent themes derived from the IRA content on Reddit: the use of chaos agents and conspiracy theories.

Chaos Agents

Like we’ve seen on other platforms, many of the IRA accounts on Reddit posted seemingly contradictory content in what appears to be an attempt to sow division by working both sides of a controversial issue. For example, one account (BeazerneMem) posted both pro- and anti-gun content.

Other users, like rubinjer, posted pro-Trump memes as well as content that would be more consistent with a supporter of Bernie Sanders.

A particularly noteworthy example comes from the IRA account LGBTUnited. Posing as a Democrat who formerly supported Bernie Sanders, the account posted a comment in the pro-Trump subforum /r/The_Donald claiming that they had “finally decided to join the Trump Train” after the Pulse nightclub shooting. The comment also linked to the LGBTUnited Facebook page, which has since been removed.

The purpose of such a post seems clear: to appeal to other Bernie Sanders supporters and convince them to throw their support behind Trump — or at least, not to throw their support behind Hillary Clinton. Social psychology research shows that people are more accepting of information when it comes from a familiar source or a member of our own social network, meaning that Bernie Sanders’ supporters and other left-leaning voters would be more likely be view this account and its posts as legitimate and trustworthy.

IRA account LGBTUnited claimed to be a Bernie Sanders supporter who “decided to join the Trump Train.”

Meanwhile, other IRA accounts posted content that seemed to be geared towards promoting apathy among voters by portraying both the Republican and Democratic parties as equally bad, or by framing the presidential election as a choice between two equally bad candidates. One such example, posted by ErivMalazilkree, can be seen below.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories were another common theme among the top IRA accounts on Reddit. This included memes and posts on topics ranging from 9/11 trutherism to anti-Semitic tropes about Jews secretly controlling the world’s banks (Kremlin propaganda is often littered with anti-Semitism). A few examples of these can be seen below.

A 9/11 conspiracy theory meme posted by IRA-backed account ErivMalazilkree.

An anti-Semitic conspiracy theory meme posted by IRA-backed account ErivMalazilkree.

A link to a JFK conspiracy theory posted by IRA-backed accounted shomyo.

A link to a Las Vegas shooting conspiracy theory posted by IRA-backed accounted shomyo.

The promulgation of conspiracy theories by IRA-backed accounts on Reddit is hardly surprising, given that conspiracy theories play a major role in Russian information warfare, as explained by Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University:

The brilliance of Putinism lies in the regime’s management of the public’s habitual cynicism by appropriating the tools of conspiracy-mongering. Putin’s team has co-opted the language of conspiracy and falsification so thoroughly that all attempts to ascertain any objective truth collapse into false equivalencies. As the 2012 protest movement captured video after video of suspicious election activity, police brutality, and corruption (i.e., uncovering a state conspiracy to claim power through unlawful means), state television responded with charges that the falsification itself had been falsified.

Conspiracy theories serve a number of key purposes, including undermining trust in government and institutions, and blurring the line between fact and fiction to the point that people give up on the idea that one objective truth even exists. The Kremlin also uses conspiracy theories to appeal to politically marginalized populations who are drawn to such content in the first place, exploiting the emotional and political tendencies of the audience to inject narratives that ultimately serve Russia’s goals.

By presenting competing narratives and offering multiple accounts of the same story, the strategic use of conspiracy theories creates an information environment in which the truth gets lost in a sea of half-truths, mistruths, and distortions. The end result is not only confusion, but a loss of trust in fact-producing institutions like journalism, as explained in the following passage from a working paper on Russia’s information war:

While more straightforward propaganda is content to bash the audience over the head with one version and one narrative of an event, the 21st century Russian approach was more subtle. Instead of a single voice and a single interpretation, it created several, if not dozens of competing theories. Instead of trying to discredit the version initially reported … it presented the many conspiracy theories as equally plausible in an attempt to sow confusion rather than certainty. By discrediting the institution of journalism, no theory was more credible than another. It didn’t matter who was right. In the minds of the ideal audience, no one was right and no one could be trusted.

Conclusions

The activity of the IRA accounts identified by Reddit was very similar to the activity of Russian-backed accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and the content closely aligns with Russian propaganda disseminated on covert and overt propaganda outlets (like RT and Sputnik). In some instances, there was direct crossover between the same IRA accounts posting on different platforms.

For example, Reddit users TEN_GOP and Jenn_Abrams are both linked to Twitter accounts of the same names that were removed from Twitter when they were exposed as IRA-backed accounts.

After the IRA-backed account TEN_GOP was suspended from Twitter this summer, it used Reddit to tell users about its Twitter new account (which has also been permanently banned).

The IRA-backed Reddit account jenn_abrams was created two months after Twitter suspended an IRA-backed account of the same name.

This also reveals a problem that often gets lost in the discussion of Russian activity on social media: Russia’s influence campaign is not a platform-based problem, and cannot be adequately addressed with platform-specific solutions. Cross-posting on different platforms can amplify Russian propaganda and keep it in circulation even after the content has been removed from the initial platform — a phenomenon Hoffman referred to in a previous post as “indirect propaganda”:

For example, the Twitter account @TEN_GOP is now known to be a Russian agent. @TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda. I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.

According to the latest estimates, Russian propaganda reached 126 million Facebook users, including 10 million users who were reached via paid ads. Twitter, which deleted more than 200,000 tweets linked to the IRA, has notified 1.4 million users that they may have engaged with Russian accounts. However, these figures don’t include users who were indirectly exposed to Russian propaganda via cross-posting on platforms like Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest.

According to Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright, Instagram may have actually reached far more users than previously estimated, in part because of the number of users — with 700 million monthly users, Instagram is larger than Twitter and Snapchat combined — but also because the visual-based platform is conducive to virality. Including Instagram in the calculation, an estimated 146 million Facebook users were reached by Russian propaganda.

And still, that figure doesn’t include people who were exposed to Russian propaganda through cross-posting on smaller websites and forums, or through content originating from Russian-backed websites that hide their ties to the Russian government.

The use of strategies such as cross-posting, along with features designed to maximize reach and resonance — like visual imagery and memes— and to appeal to specific voter groups (like Bernie Sanders’ supporters), suggests that Russian operatives strategically used Reddit to boost exposure to Russian propaganda, and to maintain established audiences when accounts on other platforms were banned. While many of the accounts identified by Reddit only used the platform sparingly, the small group of accounts that used it frequently and effectively managed to reach a relatively large audience on a regular basis. The popularity of the content posted by these accounts suggests that, when it was seen, it was often accepted as genuine and appraised in a positive manner.

Reddit took the unusual but very positive step of preserving the content posted by the IRA-backed accounts, which allows the public to see what it looks like and (hopefully) learn from it. As other online platforms inevitably discover evidence of Russian activity, they should take a cue from Reddit and do the same.