The Strange Case of #NeverHillary: Why Did Michael Flynn Push Russian Propaganda at the RNC?2/19/2018 OPINION  The Republican National Convention, held July 18 to 21, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio, was a spectacle. On display was over-the-top partisan behavior that was shocking in its brazenness and intensity. One thing stood out for me as I watched in horror 19 months ago: Michael Flynn, retired U.S. Army general criticized Hillary Clinton, suggested that she should resign from the campaign, accused her of unspecified crimes, and whipped the crowd into a frenzy chanting, “Lock Her Up.” That was all stunning to observe; the part that stood out for me, however, was this line: “I use hashtag Never Hillary,” Flynn, 58 years old at the time, said. Why would Trump supporters want to know what hashtag Flynn used? Why was Flynn using a hashtag? What did this mean? I know a lot more now than I knew at the time about how social media can be used to push propaganda. The indictment released Friday in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign may provide an answer to the questions that have haunted me since that disturbing day in 2016. On page 20 of the indictment, a table provides information about political advertising bought by the defendants, Russian nationals, who used “fictitious U.S. personas created and used by the ORGANIZATION on social media.” (from page 19) An advertisement was purchased June 30, 2016, with this content: "#NeverHillary #HillaryforPrison #Hillary4Prison #HillaryforPrison2016 #Trump2016 #Trump #Trump4President” An ad was purchased by at least one persona account created in Saint Petersburg, and three weeks later Michael Flynn pushed the hashtag out at the Republican National Convention. Why might he have done this? At the time I heard him say it, I wondered how many Trump supporters were following Flynn on Twitter or Facebook. Maybe, I thought, the Trump campaign and the GOP had harnessed the power of social media and turned angry white voters in the Midwest and coal country into tech-savvy influencers. Somehow, that did not seem reasonable to me. (That is the story Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner, self-styled data geniuses of the Trump campaign, told to numerous reporters in the months after their team's surprise win.) There is another reason to signal the use of a hashtag from the podium of a worldwide-televised event. When Flynn announced that hashtag, he may have been signalling cells of paid troll warriors, in Russia, the U.S., and other places, to head to that hashtag to connect with newly created propaganda - memes, ads, and talking points - to push in the coming days and weeks. I did a search to see what kind of content was attached to this hashtag when Flynn promoted it at the RNC. Any content that has since been deleted would not show up in an advanced search, but the content I did find was very interesting. I cannot definitively say that all the content was created by paid professionals working on the Russian operation, but it looks like much of it may have been. It is important to note that the memes created were designed to appeal to potential voters who did not want to vote Clinton. The Russian information war was “primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.” (from page 17 of the indictment). Alternatives to Clinton - Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, and Gary Johnson -were pushed hard in July of 2016, using hashtags #BernieorBust, #DemExit, and #NeverTrump. The #GameofThrones hashtag is used, possibly to bring in people who were fans of the television show who might not otherwise be interested. One post uses the hashtag #Milo in combination with #NeverHillary. Another post links to Prison Planet, sending interested content-pushers to wingnut conspiracists Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, and InfoWars. This would help the paid trolls, Russian and American, find the content Flynn (or those directing him) wanted them to push. Did Michael Flynn knowingly push a hashtag created under fraudulent circumstances in a U.S. election, which would be a violation of federal election law? I don’t know, but I would bet that the special counsel’s team does. Flynn referring to the Russian-created hashtag occurs 56 seconds into this video from the Republican National Convention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx94428MYcc A link to the 37-page indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies (with numerous shell companies created to hide fraudulent personas and ad buys) can be found here. https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download An article in USA Today from August 2016 highlighted some of the issues involved when retired military leaders speak out politically. In the article former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, a four-star Army general, explains that running for office, like Dwight Eisenhower did after a military career, is different from advocating for a particular side in a political contest: "'If they choose to run themselves, they become accountable to voters,' he wrote in Defense One, a website that focuses on defense and national security trends. 'In simply advocating — or giving speeches — they are not.'" Not accountable to American voters, but perhaps accountable to his handlers in the Kremlin? The USA Today article can be found here. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/08/04/retired-generals-partisan-politics/88009492/ Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on December 1, 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials. A detailed timeline of his actions related to his plea can be found here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/12/01/michael-flynns-guilty-plea-a-comprehensive-timeline/?utm_term=.f172c076717b A selection of available content from Twitter using the hashtag #NeverHillary during the period of the Republican National Convention is included below.   Note the nonstandard plural spelling - "commys" instead of "commies" - that may be a sign of foreign-created content. Also, this may be an early use of the word "libtard." which was popular among harassing trolls during and after the campaign.  This meme accuses Clinton of wanting to build a wall. This may be an example of a paid content creator who got the messages mixed up.   #FreeMilo - perhaps mixing up Julian Assange, currently hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid charges, with Milo Yiannopoulos, alt-right provocateur?  Criticism of Clinton's hair has been a theme of critics since the 1990s.  The anti-fracking message is designed to appeal to left-leaning voters and encourage them to vote against Clinton. They would never be swayed to vote for Trump, but convincing people to vote for Sanders, Johnson, or Stein, or to simply stay home, became a very common theme by November.
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 Twitter recently announced that they will let nearly 700,000 users that they interacted with accounts identified as part of a propaganda campaign financed by the Russian government in 2016. Unless you have seen the process taking place in real time, it is difficult to understand how bots (automated social media accounts), trolls (real individuals aggressively attempting to sow division or discredit experts), and sock puppets (persona accounts run by a real person who is not the person portrayed in the account profile) can spread divisive messages, silence debate, and use abuse and harassment to push political issues in a particular direction. Once you have seen it in real time, it is clear how influential Russian government-financed troll, bot, and sock puppet activity split American voters into angry, isolated camps with little inclination or ability to bridge divides and find consensus. A team of researchers at the University of Washington examined Twitter discourse related to #BlackLivesMatter and police-related shooting events in 2016, and their discoveries have broad and important implications for how Americans can combat the onslaught of divisive messaging and disinformation. One important discovery is that the groups on the two “sides” of the issue were quite separate, with almost no overlap in retweets or conversation. The researchers found that Russian accounts identified as originating at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg - a Russian government-financed troll farm - were clearly working in both pro-Black Lives Matter and anti-Black Lives Matter groups.   The diagrams tell the story. The first shows the isolation of the two groups - people in each group interact primarily with others who express the same views. The second diagram shows Russian-Internet Research Agency identified accounts in orange. It is clear that Russian paid accounts were very active in the separate groups, amplifying divisive messages and increasing division and disagreement. The researchers conclude: “In this paper, we have located RU-IRA-affiliated troll accounts in the retweet network of a politically polarized conversation surrounding race and shootings in the United States. Our findings suggest that troll accounts contributed content to polarized information networks, likely serving to accentuate disagreement and foster division. Furthermore, our findings imply that the troll accounts gained a platform in a domestic conversation, suggesting a calculated form of media manipulation that exploits on the crowd-sourced nature of social media.” Two articles from the University of Washington research group can be found here. Thanks to Kate Starbird of the University of Washington for sharing this research on Twitter. http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Stewart_Starbird_Drawing_the_Lines_of_Contention-final.pdf http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polarization.pdf An article about the announcement by Twitter about notifying users that they interacted with Russian-financed propaganda accounts can be found here. http://nationalpost.com/news/world/twitter-tells-677000-users-they-were-conned-by-russias-u-s-election-propaganda Angry Twitter bird image by Roweig at Deviant Art
 Both the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees held hearings November 1 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which may be continuing to this day. The House Democrats released a list of more than 2700 social media accounts that Twitter has identified as linked to Russian intelligence agencies.
any Twitter users believe that the influence of Russian intelligence on the Twitter platform is much more widespread than the company has admitted. Bots, which are computer-driven accounts used to boost popularity of content, and trolls, which have a real person behind them (although often not the person represented in the profile) and can criticize, mock, or report targeted accounts for suspension, are common. Bots, which are computer-generated accounts, can appear to be real on casual inspection. They can answer simple questions and give general support or criticism. The comments can be activated by certain words or hashtags. Trolls come in a variety of forms. Some of them pretend to be Americans, but are actually working from another country. They can have a profile describing a "Christian grandmother with fibromyalgia," but actually the account is a 20 year-old man working at a troll farm in Saint Petersburg. A false identity is called a persona. Bot and troll accounts, which can work in coordination to target an account, can foment discord in several ways. Here are a few examples:
My own experience is that turning in accounts that violated the Twitter terms of service got no response until November 3 - two days after the Intelligence Committee hearings. I got no responses to numerous reports of harassment I observed between November 2016 and November 2017. Then I received notice of 7 suspended accounts that had violated the terms of service in the week of November 1. Twitter deleted the accounts on the list they provided House Intelligence, so interested individuals cannot examine these accounts to see their characteristics. I ran the User ID numbers near in number to the Russia-linked accounts through tweeterid.com, a reverse look-up service. I then searched Twitter for the handles associated with those ID numbers. Most of the accounts were "blue eggs" - accounts with generic names, no photos and no profile. Most of the accounts had never Tweeted, or had Tweeted only a few times. Most of the accounts has been formed in 2009 or 2012. The collage of screen captures of some of the accounts are shown above. What does this show? These accounts appear to be dormant. They were created years ago, and nothing has been done with them yet. Are these nefarious, Russian intelligence accounts? There is no way for me to tell, but it seems that Twitter did not search very hard to identify accounts that are not "authentic" - their word for accounts associated with real people. These may be innocent accounts made by individuals who never used them. They may also be silent accounts, waiting for someone to activate them and adopt personas that boost content or bully real people. They may also be part of a botnet, a group of bots used to boost the popularity of troll accounts. More information is needed, and Twitter is likely not finished testifying to Congress. In the words of Representative Adam Schiff, ranking member on the House Intelligence Commitee: "Russia exploited real vulnerabilities that exist across online platforms and we must identify, expose, and defend ourselves against similar covert influence operations in the future. The companies here today must play a central role as we seek to better protect legitimate political expression, while preventing cyberspace from being misused by our adversaries. " The Russia-linked Twitter handles submitted to the House Intelligence Committee by Twitter can be found here. https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/hpsci-11-1/hpsci-minority-exhibit-b.htm Members of both committees, Republican, Democrat, and Independent, expressed disappointment that the social media companies represented (Twitter, Google, and Facebook) sent their attorneys, rather than the CEOs coming to the hearings. Politico reported that Senator Mark Warner said Twitter's "actions have not matched their words in terms of grasping the seriousness of the threat ... I'm more than a bit surprised, in light of all the public interest from the subject, that anyone from the Twitter team would think that the presentation made to Senate staff today even began to answer the kinds of questions that we'd asked," he told reporters after the staff briefing. "So there's a lot more work they have to do." The Politico article can be found here. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/28/twitter-russia-today-advertisements-243268 Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, said Thursday, November 9, that he is willing to testify to Congress, but that he had not been invited. This is inaccurate - according to Recode, "lawmakers previously and repeatedly called on Dorsey and other tech executives to make the trip to Capitol Hill — and they’ve apparently declined." The Recode article can be found here. https://www.recode.net/2017/11/9/16631230/twitter-jack-dorsey-congress-russia-testify-lawyers-new-york-times-dealbook |
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