Did Russia interfere with the 2016 US presidential election?

The US intelligence community and independent researchers have uncovered multiple ways that the Russian state attempted to affect the result of the election. 

The three major areas of interference were (1) hack-and-leak operations to publish stolen data from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, (2) cyber attacks directly on the election systems and (3) a sustained information warfare campaign that was conducted by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). 

This influence campaign was a sophisticated and professional operation, designed to polarise public opinion and reduce trust in democratic institutions in the US and was ultimately funded by former Wagner leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

The IRA created tens of thousands of social media accounts to post and even advertise their content, targeting voters from both political camps but particularly the more disaffected elements of them.

The content often translated oversimplified or extremely exaggerated messages, but also included neutral or benign posts to promote the pages. 

Rather than focusing on specific voters or messages, the influence campaign sought to radicalise voters across the spectrum and erode trust in the election process, complemented by email leaks and cyberattacks on the voting systems. 

The IRA went as far as to organise a number of physical political rallies of the fake US groups it created. On at least one occasion two rallies of opposing political views were set up by the IRA within walking distance. 

An analysis by Twitter identified 3,841 IRA-linked accounts which posted 175,993 Tweets, as well as 50,258 automated accounts posting or retweeting election-related content in the same time period, totaling nearly 10 million IRA-linked Tweets.

The core accounts normally posed as news outlets or organised groups and produced original content for various audiences.

Secondary accounts, often automated, normally posed as individuals and focused on retweeting and spreading the core content, including by following many real user accounts. 

Data from Facebook showed that 120 Russian-backed pages built a network of over 3.3 million people. From these pages, 80,000 organic unpaid posts reached an estimated 126 million real people – more than a third of the US population. 

A study from Oxford University used data provided by social media firms to explore how the IRA used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to impact US users.

Over 30 million users, between 2015 and 2017, shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts with their friends and family, liking, reacting to and commenting on them along the way, according to the study. 

According to the report, Russia's IRA activities were designed to polarise the US public and interfere with the elections in a number of ways. 

These included campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016. 

The IRA also encouraged extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational and spread “sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum”.