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New discoveries on Russia and the tech giants

The Senate Intelligence Committee released two huge reports on Monday that it had commissioned on Russian use of social media to disrupt the 2016 election and more. One is by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company; the other by Oxford University researchers. Here are some highlights, both about the Russian campaign and about how tech companies have behaved toward the Senate:

African-Americans were targeted with relentless propaganda. We’ve heard plenty about Russian attempts to sway Facebook users who were on the political right, led by the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. But the effort directed at black Americans was actually larger.

Facebook and Twitter were just the tip of the iceberg. Russian operatives on Instagram may have been as effective, or more effective, than on Facebook. They were also on Reddit, Google+, Vine, Gab, Meetup, Pinterest, Tumblr and even SoundCloud.

Tech companies did not fully cooperate with Senate investigations. Facebook withheld its users’ responses to Russian-generated content; Twitter provided only scattered details about Russian-controlled accounts; and Google gave data in hard-to-analyze formats.

The disinformation campaign didn’t end with the election. Facebook’s ad volume from the Internet Research Agency peaked in April 2017; misleading Russian posts on Instagram in 2017 were double what they were in 2016. Renée DiResta, New Knowledge’s director of research, writes that interference is “a chronic, widespread and identifiable condition that we must now aggressively manage.”