And yet more on the mechanics
Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters
www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russians-took-a-page-from-corporate-america-by-using-facebook-tool-to-id-and-influence-voters/2017/10/02/681e40d8-a7c5-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-low_facebookads-820pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d35b93890ced
excerpts:
The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.
In addition to Custom Audiences, Russian operatives used other Facebook tools to target groups by demographics, geography, gender and interests, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The Custom Audiences tool differs because it allows advertisers to feed into Facebook’s systems a specific list of users they want to target.
The conclusions of investigators fit those of several independent researchers, who say that the Russian disinformation campaign exploited the core advertising and tracking technologies that Silicon Valley has honed over a decade to serve corporate America — and that are widely available, with few if any restrictions, to political actors in the United States and abroad.
These are the same methods and sophisticated tools that the pharmaceutical companies were using, that big oil companies were using,” said Philip N. Howard of Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project. “This was regular ad technology that regular advertisers use.”
The revelation about the use of Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool, which has not been previously reported, adds to an emerging picture of a Russian effort to shape the U.S. election and sow division using tools built by American technology companies.
And it makes clear that Russians used Facebook to direct their influence campaigns to voters whom they had already tracked and to find new ones wherever they browsed the Internet — even if they used multiple devices such as a smartphone for work or a tablet at home.
Targeted people might also have directed that same disinformation — whether intentionally or not — to people linked to them on social networks, such as their friends on Facebook.
“This means that any American who knowingly or unknowingly clicked on a Russian news site may have been targeted through Facebook’s advertising systems to become an agent of influence — a potentially sympathetic American who could spread Russian propaganda with other Americans,” said Clinton Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Every successful click gives them more data that they can use to retarget. It feeds on itself and it speeds up the influence dramatically.”
Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who has studied the links among fake news, Russian propaganda sites and their relationship to Facebook and other social media platforms, said that hundreds of Russian sites were loaded up with ad tracking software, known as cookies, that would allow them to follow any visitor across the Web and onto Facebook.
The Custom Audiences tool enabled Russian advertisers to feed information from those cookies, which are long strings of numbers that advertisers collect, into Facebook’s systems, which could match them with the accounts of particular Facebook users.
The Facebook users were then shown ads featuring divisive topics that the Russians wanted to promote in their Facebook news feeds, which displayed the ads alongside messages from friends and family members.
As targeted users clicked on the Facebook ads, the system would eventually take them to Web pages outside Facebook, where they would be tracked with more-aggressive forms of tracking software, Albright said.
“A lot of this content is simply for tracking,” Albright said. “You need to get people out of the social networks, off the platforms, because that’s the place where you can attach the advanced ad technology.”