What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?

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.

These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016 

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.”  Read more...

Is Facebook more harmful than helpful? Should we be afraid of what Facebook has become?