this article is CHILLING...…...Senate Intel committee released the second part of their investigation...…….St Petersburg troll factory exposed, Russian JUBILATION after highly successful operation to install Trump.....read only if you can handle the truth this early on a Sunday morning
btw the Senate chairman is a
Republican
II. (U) FINDINGS
1. (U), The Committee found, that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.
(U) The Committee found that the IRA' s :lnformation warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton's campaign
(U) The Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA' s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. This finding is consistent with the Committee's understanding of the relationship between IRA ownerYevgeniy Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the aim and scope of the interference by the IRA, and the correlation between the IRA's actions and electoral interference by the Russian government in other contexts and by other means.7 Despite Moscow's denials, the direction and financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as well as his close ties to high-level Russian government officials including President Vladimir Putin, point to significant Kremlin support, authorization, and direction of the IRA' s operations and goals.
(U) Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes dear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on sociapy divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive,, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities.
3. (U) The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush.14 As Clint Watts, a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee, "Russia's o~ert media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides . of the golitical spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin." IRA operators sought"to impact primaries for both major parties and "may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed."15
4. (U) The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016. Evidence of the IRA's overwhelming operational ei;nphasis on race is' evident in the IRA's Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to rac~ ) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at AfricanAmericans in key metropolitan areas with), its Face book pages (one of the IRA's topperforming pages, "Blacktivist," generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook ' users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hotbutton issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests), and its YouTube
much more
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/...rt_Volume2.pdf
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