There’s a meme on Instagram, circulated by a group called “Born Liberal.” A fist holds a cluster of strings, reaching down into people with television sets for heads. The text declares: “The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.” The quote is surely false, but it’s also perfect in a way. “Born Liberal” was a creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian propaganda wing that might as well be part of Oceania. In other words, we live in a time when American democratic debate is being influenced by liars spreading memes about our inability to understand the truth.

This particular meme is one of many revealed in a new report released on Monday, commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee and written by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm whose director of research, Renee DiResta, is a WIRED contributor. This report, along with a second one written by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University and Graphik, offers the most extensive look at the IRA’s attempts to divide Americans, suppress the vote, and boost then-candidate Donald Trump before and after the 2016 presidential election. The report sheds new light on the ways the IRA trolls targeted African Americans and the outsized role Instagram played in their work. It also calls into question statements tech executives have made under oath to Congress in the past 18 months.

The report by New Knowledge is based on a review of 10.4 million tweets, 1,100 YouTube videos, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 61,500 unique Facebook posts published from 2015 through 2017. This is not a complete data set of Russian influence operations, but it’s still the largest such analysis to take place outside of the companies themselves. And it shows that the Russians weren’t just running a bland content farm, churning out propaganda in broken English. The operation was deeply sophisticated, and at times, downright funny. As the report’s authors note: “The IRA was fluent in American trolling culture.”

The most explosive finding in the report may be the assertion that both Facebook and Google executives misled Congress in statements. The researchers suggest that Facebook “dissembled” about the IRA’s voter suppression efforts on the platform in written responses to Congress in October, following the testimony of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in October. At the time, the company was asked: “Does Facebook believe that any of the content created by the Russian Internet Research Agency was designed to discourage anyone from voting?” Facebook responded: “We believe this is an assessment that can be made only by investigators with access to classified intelligence and information from all relevant companies and industries.”

A Facebook spokesperson added on Monday morning: “We continue to fully cooperate with officials investigating the IRA’s activity on Facebook and Instagram around the 2016 election. We’ve provided thousands of ads and pieces of content to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for review and shared information with the public about what we found.”

Nevertheless, the report lays out ample obvious examples of how Facebook and Twitter were both used to discourage turnout. In some cases, the trolls tried to mislead people into texting their votes. In others, they encouraged Americans to vote for third-party candidates like Jill Stein or give up on voting all together, with messages that read “F*CK THE ELECTIONS.”

“The IRA was fluent in American trolling culture.” New Knowledge IRA Report

Meanwhile, the authors of the report question Google’s disclosures just before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in October 2017. At the time, the company put out a statement saying that none of the IRA-linked YouTube accounts was “targeted to the US or to any particular sector of the US population.” Yet the researchers found that, in fact, of the 1,100 total YouTube videos they discovered, 1,063 focused on police brutality and Black Lives Matter, 571 of which had keywords related to police and police brutality.1 While the statement was likely talking about advertising targeting, the report’s authors believe that it “appears disingenuous.” You can read the full report at the bottom of this story.