While right-leaning political posts were often explicitly racist, and both types of political posts surely tried to stoke polarization, the posts that targeted black people were different. They promoted a generally Afrocentric worldview, celebrated the freedom of black people, and called for equality. Take the following image post, which New Knowledge said generated the most likes of any Instagram post in its data set. While it was posted by a Russian-linked account, it was originally created by a black-owned leather-goods company, Kahmune.

Is this really “exploiting” racial divides or “heightening tensions”? At most, this post points out something obvious about the nature of American popular culture (calling a certain shade of beige “nude” is dumb) that makes white people mildly uncomfortable.

In another case, an IRA-controlled Facebook page reposted video footage of police brutality, garnering more than half a million shares. If that heightens racial tensions in America, it seems hard to blame the Russians for that.

The IRA operatives were able to deeply interpenetrate real black media. They became part of the meme soup of online black life, sharing and being reshared by real people, as seen below. These posts, then, created the audience that they targeted with posts arguing “that Mrs. Clinton was hostile to African American interests, or that black voters should boycott the election,” as The New York Times put it.

These posts targeting black people provide the most intense examples of the problem that Facebook faces from foreign actors. Facebook has taken down these posts, but explicitly not because of their content. Instead, the company backed into a way of targeting behavior by foreign actors. According to Facebook, these posts are bad only because they are inauthentic.

Facebook has long promoted the idea that users and posts on the service should be “authentic.” “Representing yourself with your authentic identity online encourages you to behave with the same norms that foster trust and respect in your daily life offline,” the company wrote in a letter to shareholders ahead of its IPO in February 2012. “Authentic identity is core to the Facebook experience, and we believe that it is central to the future of the web.”

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For several years, the company emphasized the need to maintain “authentic relationships,” but primarily in the context of people and companies buying “fake likes” for their pages. Authenticity was a business principle, not a political one. “Businesses won’t achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they’re connected to aren’t real,” the company explained in 2014. “It’s in our best interest to make sure that interactions are authentic.”