It’s widely understood that Russia meddled in the 2016 Presidential Election. Mueller’s probe has indicted 13 Russian Companies for their involvement in a troll campaign. Conservatives would have us focus on the Russia attempts to hack election infrastructure, and on the DNC hack — because they don’t show any real impact, so even “if Russia hacked us it doesn’t matter because they didn’t impact the election.”

http://fortune.com/2017/12/11/russian-hacking-election-confession/

The scarier component however is the troll campaign — which is still ongoing into the 2018 Mid-term election season. Russian intelligence has formulated a huge information campaign, which has included generating social media bots (accounts pretending to be real people that are controlled by automated computer systems), but also trolls or shills. These accounts are accounts pretending to be American, which are controlled by one or more person that promote propaganda with the intention of dividing, and influencing Western politics.

These programs have been well documented in the news media. Relevant sources can be read here:

https://www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-election-its-now-undeniable/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russia-mueller-election.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/16/us/politics/russia-propaganda-election-2016.html

https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/us/2016-presidential-campaign-hacking-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/russia-trump-and-2016-us-election

http://time.com/5155810/russian-meddling-2018-elections/

https://arcdigital.media/pro-trump-russian-linked-twitter-accounts-are-posing-as-ex-democrats-in-new-astroturfed-movement-20359c1906d3

What’s less recognized is that Russians tactics didn’t just promote “pro conservative” ideology. They also posed as progressives, aiming to split the Democratic Party, and democratic voters away from Hillary. Many of their targeted ads included #BernieOrBust ideology, but they also diverted attention from Hillary to Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Arguably, 3rd party votes or “protest votes” from the left wing of the political spectrum saw a massive increase in percentage points over the 2012 election cycle.

Sources on this here:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dear-bernie-or-busters-co_b_12892318

https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/gary-johnson-jill-stein-spoiler/index.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/17/indictment-russians-also-tried-help-bernie-sanders-jill-stein-presidential-campaigns/348051002/

https://qz.com/1210369/russia-donald-trump-2016-how-russian-trolls-support-of-us-third-parties-may-have-cost-hillary-clinton-the-election/

So as I’ve stated, there’s no question that Russia meddled in the election.

What I’m concerned about at this point, is not only the ongoing impact of Russia meddling by means of propaganda, and influencing voters’ decisions, but also their potential impact on candidates and elected representatives directly through Social Media.

As an “in your face” example of this concern, let’s take the big man himself, Donald Trump into account. At least 5 people involved in his campaign, or close to him at the time, interacted with accounts that have now been positively identified as members of the Russian Troll Farm. Kellyanne Conway and his own son both pushed campaign propaganda in the last few days prior to the election that originated from the Troll Farm as well. And Donald Trump himself publicly thanked one such troll account via twitter.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/02/at-least-five-people-close-to-trump-engaged-with-russian-twitter-trolls-from-2015-to-2017/?utm_term=.0a7a8ad1b072

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-campaign-staffers-pushed-russian-propaganda-days-before-the-election

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-retweet-a-fake-twitter-account-149f3f9c1360/

But we know Donald Trump is susceptible to flattery, and Russian influence already so this should really come as no surprise.

My concern — one that I’m not aware of being documented or expressed by anyone thus far — is that of the interactions on other elected officials and candidates social media profiles. Take for example, a recent request for comments by Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who is undecided on her stance on Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court. She is asking for input from her constituents.

I wrote a letter to both Missouri Senators (as that’s where I reside) asking that they not confirm Trump’s nominee. When I did this, I also published my letter, and copy and pasted it to their relevant social media pages. I personally do not interact with my representatives over Facebook a great deal other than during campaign seasons or when I’m expressing my views on a specific issue. So I had not noticed this prior to this week.

When I posted my letter to Senator McCaskill’s Facebook page, I was overwhelmed with a sea of posts from apparently conservative minded people posting simple “one-liners.”

It read like this:

“Please confirm Kavanaugh”

“Confirm Trumps pick”

“Confirm Kavanaugh or we will vote you out”

Post after post after post, read just like that. Due to the sea of posts I wondered if it wasn’t a number of bots. Upon analyzing the profiles of a few of these posters, I was convinced that about 60% of what I was looking at was coming from the Russian Troll Farm based on analysis of 10 profiles.

Now take into consideration again, that Senator McCaskill was requesting input from her constituents. If she, or members of her staff were to do a simple statistical analysis of “confirm” or “don’t confirm” posts, they would be overwhelmed by Russian Trolls saying to “confirm.”

Hopefully our elected representatives make their decisions based on more than stated desires, and using logic and reasoning and thorough research of an issue to formulate an educated decision. But if all of their research left them sitting on the fence, and they were really down to “what do the people who elected me want?” We could see a direct influence over our elected officials from Russia — not just by means of voter influence, but policy decisions as well.

Is this legitimately happening? I can’t say for sure. Without surveying every elected representative on every decision they’ve made politically in the last 2–5 years, we cannot reasonably quantify or determine whether this has happened or how often.

But it begs the question, are our elected officials, and our candidates for office educated on how to spot a Russian troll? Are their PR/Research staff? The general population is still not fully aware or educated, so how can we be confident that our representatives are taking matters like this seriously, and not “feeding the trolls” by being influenced by Russian propaganda themselves?

I believe the democratic community, and the nation, need to take the time to learn how to spot troll accounts (bots or shills either one), and massively report these profiles on their respective social media platforms.

We also need to make sure our candidates and representatives and their staff at all levels are briefed on the ongoing information warfare campaign being perpetuated by Russia, and shown how to differentiate between a real citizen and a Russian troll.

One thing to know is there’s no single tell-tale sign of a Russian Troll, and even with a combination of factors, there’s no formula for 100% accuracy in identification. However, here are some tips spotting trolls

· Poor grasp of the English language

o Particularly difficulty with “a” or “the” in sentences.

o Difficulty formulating questions — or phrasing questions as statements

· Pro-Russian or Pro-Kremlin narrative in their comments.

o Heated statements about, defending, or deflecting from the annexation of Crimea, Russia shoot-down of Malaysian airlines flight, Sarin attacks in Syria, likely assassinations of anti-Russian spies or public figures.

· Accounts that never make posts of their own and only ever retweet or re-share memes or ads from other accounts.

· Rapid response to “trigger” topics faster than humanly possible — eg. a 3 page statement on a post from less than a minute ago.

· Default profile pictures.

o Either the Twitter or Facebook defaults

o Stock photos that you can find used repeatedly across the internet with a reverse image search through Google’s reverse photo lookup https://reverse.photos/ or TinEye https://www.tineye.com/

· Low number of friends, with nobody in their friends list sharing a last name (ie. No family members)

· Large number of friends or followers, many of whom appear to be “radicalized” or centered around a specific issue or topic based on profile pictures.

· 24/7 Around-The-Clock posting patterns. Real people have to sleep some time. If they’re posting all hours of the day, every day, they’re likely a bot, or an account being used by multiple people.

· Profiles that are prolific around major events (elections, terrorist attacks, scandals etc) but dormant with absolutely no apparent posts during less eventful time frames.

For more relevant analysis and break down of how to spot troll profiles, you can find my sources at these two links here:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spot-russian-bot-social-media/

https://medium.com/dfrlab/trolltracker-how-to-spot-russian-trolls-2f6d3d287eaa