What We Found

On October 30, 2017, YouTube released a statement on their findings during the 2016 election:

"We found 18 channels likely associated with this campaign that made videos publicly available, in English and with content that appeared to be political...there were 1108 such videos uploaded, representing 43 hours of content...These videos generally had very low view counts; only around 3 percent had more than 5,000 views."

We have found evidence of a more significant campaign with accounts linked to the Russia and Ukraine region, much larger than the one previously found, driving higher engagement with users and thriving on YouTube. We show some of the data our intelligence tools collected below.

Fake YouTube News Channels

Doctored Video Thumbnails and Fake News Headlines

Video thumbnails are doctored to show Democratic and Republican leadership in outrageous and violent scenarios, such as being locked in a jail cell or hanged by a noose. The headlines are also edited to say things like "HANG HIM UP!", which a reputable news organization would never do.

Inflammatory Blog and Meme Content

Promotion by YouTube on YouTube Auto-generated Topic Channels

YouTube Auto-generated Topic Channels are channels that are automatically created by YouTube's algorithms to collect videos on certain topics (TV series, people, events, etc.).

For example, even though CNN posts videos of all of their anchors to a single YouTube channel, YouTube automatically creates separate, official-looking channels for each anchor's show like The Lead with Jake Tapper that aggregates videos of Jake Tapper.

According to YouTube, they help "boost your channel’s search and discovery potential on YouTube." We found videos from this campaign promoted on some of these YouTube topic channels. Anyone who subscribes to these YouTube topic channels will be pushed content from this campaign, effectively increasing their audience and reach.

Suspected Troll Commenter User Profiles

Credibility with YouTube Viewers

While this content might appear to be obviously edited to savvy viewers, there are still a proportion of users commenting on these videos that do not question the content's source and even believe they are being uploaded from sources like CNN:

"after I posted my comments I noticed the channel was not CNN and am now going to unsubscribe to the channel in question. Thanks for your eagle eye and back up. Much appreciated. It gives CNN a bad reputation. Wonder how to stop it?"

Source: YouTube comment by CaliforniaGirl

Attribution

While the content posted by this campaign is certainly troubling and the outrageous tone they strike seems to have malicious intent, due to the anonymous nature of the internet it is difficult to make a definitive statement about the actors behind this campaign without access to the private metadata behind these accounts.

It seems to be a "professional" operation given the number of hacked accounts they have access to, the amount of human effort involved in the campaign, the likely automated tools developed to help create the doctored images, and the frequency at which content is uploaded (every hour or few hours). Moreover, most channels don't seem to be monetized or have financial incentive to be driving views to their channels.

Regardless of the source, the content should be taken down as it is disinformation, and the campaign should be blocked from creating further accounts.