Russia Influences People Over Social Media
WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks more has come to light about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. These days most people get their news, gossip, and political validation through social media. Russian agents appear to be using that to spread general incitement. Facebook and Google appear to be the two most used sites for Russian ads and accounts, but they also have spread information on twitter and YouTube and other social media sites.
Google says that it found $4,700 in search and display ads on its sites that can be connected to Russia. Plus, $53,000 worth of political ads, which can also be connected to Russia. This is a fairly small amount of money to spend on this type of thing. The heaviest amount of spending was on Facebook ads. Facebook found 3,000 ads, about $100,000 worth, connected to Russia. So little money spent on trying to sway or enhance people’s views, however as the Russian agents know, with social media you can get that done for free.
Facebook accounts are free and easy to create. In this new age of technology, most people get their news from Facebook. If you see a post that validates your views you may like it or share it and then it gets spread to other people. You probably wont even check if its reliable information. Facebook found a total of 470 accounts connected to Russia. Six of these were public. You may have heard of Heart of Texas, Blacktivists, Secured Borders, LGBT United, Being Patriotic or United Muslims of America. These are all Russian Facebook pages. These six pages got 340 million shares. The 470 accounts amounted to a total of 2.5 billion shares on Facebook. Russia seems to have utilized Facebook’s ability to get lots of information to lots of people in fairly little time.
One of the things that you notice is that these pages and accounts are not all pro-Trump as one would assume. Russia seems to care less about influencing people’s opinions, as sowing discord. In fact very few of the posts had anything to do with the 2016 election. They post inciting things from both political sides. We don’t know yet just how far the Russian influence or hacking goes, and even though this didn’t directly affect the election, it is clear that Russian agents are influencing us through social media, and maybe in other ways as well.
