- [Ferguson] In 2016,
the modern incarnation
of Aktivni Meri Priyatama
became a sophisticated
multimillion dollar
social media operation,
using hundreds of
thousands of fake accounts
with the goal of dividing Americans.
- What they were really doing over time,
over about two and a half years,
was facilitating tribalism.
So in this particular example,
Back the Badge was an Instagram account
that also had a Facebook page
and what they were doing there
is there's a page devoted
to police officers
and the narratives that
they were putting out
was essentially that here's
a community of people,
police officers, who
are sacrificing so much,
who are putting their lives on the line,
and they're just being treated terribly
by the rest of America.
(ominous music)
- [Ferguson] The real trick
of Russian media tactics
is to take a divisive issue
and play each side against the other.
- And then on the other
side of the narrative,
the other thing that you would see
in that #police or #cop
would be stories like this.
And in this particular image,
you have a woman and the names of victims
of officer-involved shootings are written
or come across her hair.
And it says on the bottom
"we should know their names"
and it's asking "got justice?".
- Remember, both sides of this conflict
were created not by
Americans, but by Russians.
(eerie music)
For the Russians, 2016
was just the beginning.
In network terms, what happened
in the Presidential election
was that a super-cluster
of densely interlinked,
closely followed accounts
systematically disseminated
fake news and extreme views
on Facebook, Twitter, and
the other network platforms.
Facebook has since admitted
that the Russians used
470 false identities
and took out around 3,000 ads
on Facebook and Instagram.
According to Twitter, the
Russians tweeted two million times
in the run-up to the election.
Yet it's important not to exaggerate
the role the Russians played.
In all, they probably
accounted for less than 1%
of all the political content
online in the election year.
It would be more accurate to
say that the network platforms,
rather than the Russians,
were the decisive factor.
They enabled Americans to
wage information warfare
on one another.
(ominous synth music)
