A pair of new reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed new details of Russia’s online disinformation efforts — as well as how paltry the response from companies like Facebook actually was.

The two reports compile much of what journalists and academics elsewhere have already uncovered about Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), ranging from how much the fake Russian social media pages targeted certain populations — Trump supporters and African-Americans, especially — to the breadth of the operations, which reached millions upon millions of users.

However, the reports also offer fresh information on another trend: just how meager the response from social media giants was in the face of the disinformation campaign.

As The Washington Post reported, one of the reports, written by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and network analysis firm Graphika, highlights how Facebook didn’t even both to turn over information from all of the fake Russian accounts.


The revelation fits with Facebook’s overall approach to the Russian disinformation effort, which has been wrapped in secrecy. Unlike Twitter, which recently revealed the entirety of the Russian accounts identified — both content and handles — Facebook has still never bothered to release the content it uncovered, or even the names of all of the accounts.

The report also slams Google for failing to turn over data relating to fake Russian YouTube videos. As the researchers noted, the data Google turned over was especially difficult to study, forcing researchers to study the YouTube interference efforts via third-party sites.

As CNN reported, social media companies provided the “bare minimum” amount of data to investigators. The joint Oxford and Graphika report is set to be released later Monday.

The second report, written by research firm New Knowledge, went live on Monday morning, and focuses on the breadth of the fake Russian operations. The data set examined by New Knowledge comprises over 10 million tweets, over 1,000 YouTube videos, over 110,000 Instagram posts, and over 60,000 Facebook posts. The Russian campaign led to nearly 340 million combined engagements on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.


Researchers discovered that the “greatest effort on Facebook and Instagram” was devoted toward African-American audiences, and “substantial portions of the political content was anti-Hillary Clinton on both the right and left-leaning pages,” as the report’s slide deck read.

One of the most popular fake Russian accounts discussed in the report, “Black Matters US,” was first covered by ThinkProgress. And another fake Facebook page, “Blacktivist,” ended up with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter page.

While much of the details in the New Knowledge report is granular — which specific posts gained the greatest engagement, which specific topics were popular among certain audiences — the report also calls out Facebook for downplaying the depth of Russian disinformation on Instagram, which Facebook owns.

As the report reads, “Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony.”

Likewise, Instagram engagement “outperformed” Facebook in Russia’s operations, with Instagram “likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.”

Perhaps most importantly, the report calls into question Facebook’s claims that only 126 million Facebook users, plus an additional 20 million Instagram users, were exposed to the fake Russian material. As the report notes, the number may be much larger on Instagram, given that “Instagram does not have a native sharing feature” and that the estimate from Facebook did not account for users simply re-posting the material to their own Instagram accounts.


Even worse, as the report notes, Russia “ramped up activity on Instagram in 2017.” And as ThinkProgress first reported last month, dozens and dozens of fake Russian Instagram accounts remained up on Election Day, with one amassing over 100,000 followers before it was removed. (Facebook recently unceremoniously shuttered the “war room” it set up in 2018 to try to combat Russian disinformation efforts.)

And it’s clear that it’s not over. As the report concludes, “With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future[.]”