Media and Disinformation: What's At Stake for Democracy?

Overview

A comprehensive talk on Russian influence operations in the 2016 US election and implications for 2020. DiResta details her research with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), explaining the tactics, audience segmentation strategies, and systemic vulnerabilities that enabled disinformation to spread at scale across social platforms.

Key Topics

The Internet Research Agency (IRA)

The IRA is a state-sponsored Russian organization that operated as a sophisticated social media marketing agency. Beginning in 2014–2015, it created hundreds of Facebook pages and Instagram accounts targeting Americans across political and cultural fault lines. The operation wasn't crude propaganda but rather leveraged Western marketing and ad-targeting techniques to:

• Micro-segment audiences by identity (right-wing, left-wing, Black communities, secessionists, feminists, etc.)
• Build authentic-looking communities with memes, relatable content, and peer-to-peer engagement
• Generate real-world activism by organizing protests and turning followers into unwitting assets
• Adapt content dynamically based on engagement metrics, A/B testing memes the way any marketing agency would

2016 Election Strategy

Rather than uniformly pushing Trump, the IRA deployed differentiated messaging by audience:

• Conservative/right-wing pages: Early support for Rand Paul, then Trump; denigration of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio
• Black community pages: Suppression messaging ("don't vote") and promotion of Jill Stein
• Left-leaning pages: Boosting Bernie Sanders and undermining Hillary Clinton on feminist grounds
• Core strategy: Eroding support for Clinton across all segments

The organization pivoted seamlessly post-election, moving from anti-Hillary messaging to delegitimizing the legitimacy of the election itself.

How It Worked

• Pages began apolitical (e.g., Kermit memes, Simpsons content) to grow organic followings
• Content gradually inflected toward identity and grievance
• Real American grievances and conspiracies were amplified without creating entirely false narratives (propaganda typically inflects existing truths rather than inventing them)
• The IRA employed memes that were indistinguishable from American creator content, sometimes directly cribbing and rebranding memes from Turning Point USA and other sources
• Quota system kept operatives accountable for engagement and account growth

Scale and Impact

The Senate Intelligence Committee's 2018 investigation (led by teams including New Knowledge and Oxford Internet Institute) revealed:

• Hundreds of millions of engagements across Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms
• 81 distinct real-world events organized
• Coordination with the GRU's hack-and-leak operations (DNC/Clinton campaign emails)
• The hack-and-leak had greater documented impact on mainstream media coverage and election narratives than the IRA social operation alone

2020 Outlook

• Budgets increased into 2018, suggesting continuation rather than shutdown
• The IRA has diversified globally (Central African Republic, Syria, Ukraine, Estonia, Serbia)
• Pattern emerging of information warfare operating alongside kinetic operations (Wagner Group mercenaries in Central African Republic during simultaneous IRA disinformation campaigns)

Platform and Policy Challenges

Information Sharing

Effective response requires coordination between:

• Platforms (access to metadata, anomalous behavior, phone numbers, email addresses, IP data)
• Researchers (ability to track cross-platform information flows and emerging narratives)
• Government (visibility into money flows, domain registration, Bitcoin purchases)

Mark Zuckerberg's public acknowledgment of the need to work with intelligence agencies marked a significant shift after years of platforms resisting government collaboration.

Structural Vulnerabilities

• Platforms were designed to disseminate messages at scale, at low cost, with high targeting precision — exactly what they were doing
• The same architecture that enables grassroots advocacy (e.g., DiResta's own "Vaccinate California" campaign) enables hostile influence operations
• Emergent technologies (deepfakes, AI-generated content) are being considered only after becoming widespread rather than through proactive red-teaming
• Regulation lags far behind capability

The Polarization Problem

DiResta emphasizes that the deeper long-term threat is not just foreign influence but homegrown polarization:

• Internet discourse increasingly intolerant of nuance or bridge-building
• Twitter mobs and pile-ons over minor disagreements make it difficult to engage across tribal lines
• Lack of consensus-building institutions or unifying media
• People attribute any inflammatory content from ideological opponents to "trolls" or foreign agents, delegitimizing legitimate domestic disagreement and enabling the very doubt campaigns DiResta describes

The Covington Catholic incident exemplifies this: the same unedited video was interpreted contradictorily depending on which polarized media ecosystem you inhabited.

Individual Actions

DiResta recommends:

1. Think before sharing. Did you read the article or just the headline? Do you know where it came from? Why are you sharing it — emotional reaction or genuine information?
2. Reflect on corrections. When you discover you've shared something false, disclose it publicly rather than quietly deleting — it models intellectual humility.
3. Engage with kindness. When correcting someone in your circle, personal outreach framed with respect works better than public pile-ons.
4. Recognize cross-cutting manipulation. Understand that content designed to enrage you exists across the political spectrum and targets your identity and grievances.
5. Cultivate political grace. Recognize the humanity in people with whom you disagree, especially online where the human element is easy to lose.

Sources Cited

• Adrian Chen's 2015 New York Times Magazine article on the Internet Research Agency
• Ludmilla Savchuk's first-person account of working inside the IRA
• Senate Intelligence Committee indictments (Eastern District of Virginia)
• Destin Sandlin's YouTube series on social media manipulation (SmarterEveryDay)
• Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible

Notes

A landmark talk bridging academic research and public policy. DiResta's 2018 Senate report (co-authored with New Knowledge and Oxford Internet Institute) remains the definitive public account of Russian interference at scale. This talk contextualizes those findings and emphasizes the structural and political dimensions beyond the specific IRA operation. Notably prescient on platform vulnerabilities and the risk of eroded democratic legitimacy — the latter concern proved even more consequential in subsequent years.