Securing Democracy Dispatch

In Senate hearing, Twitter and Facebook executives admit to mistakes, while Google is conspicuously absent: Facebook COO Sharyl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) on September 5 to answer questions about how their companies are combatting disinformation and foreign influence operations on their platforms. Facebook COO Sharyl Sandberg highlighted changes the company has made, such as finding and removing fake accounts, increasing ad transparency, and working more closely with other technology companies – efforts CEO Mark Zuckerberg further detailed in a Washington Post op-ed published before the hearing. Also prior to the hearing, Facebook announced that it is creating a “war room” to more rapidly detect and eliminate foreign interference on its platforms in the run-up to the U.S. midterms. Dorsey, for his part, laid out plans that focused less on human efforts and more on the improvement of machine learning and AI in order to recognize inauthentic behavior. Both executives agreed on the need for greater cooperation with the government, implying that U.S. intelligence agencies should improve information sharing with the tech community to help companies better protect their platforms. In an interview with Bloomberg following the hearing, ASD Director Laura Rosenberger argued that Facebook and Twitter brought very little new information to the hearing, and were “extremely short on specifics” for how they would combat future interference operations on their platforms. According to Rosenberger, Twitter’s performance was especially disappointing, as “almost two years after the 2016 presidential election we’re still talking about needing to develop ways to tackle the problem, rather than actually doing that in a meaningful way.” Throughout the hearing, an empty chair was symbolically staged for Google, which declined to send one of its top executives to testify. Vice Chairman of SSCI Mark Warner (D-VA) expressed his frustration over Google’s absence, saying, “I think it speaks volumes that Google doesn’t want to be part of that discussion.” In June, ASD wrote about the prevalence of disinformation and Kremlin propaganda on Google’s search engine. (Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ZDNet, Tech Crunch, Wired, Alliance for Securing Democracy)

Google’s counter-interference efforts face criticism: Google’s absence from the SSCI hearing was all the more notable after Buzzfeed News reported this week that watchdog group “Campaign for Accountability” had posed as Russian actors using a Russian address, Russian currency, and “the name and identifying details of the Internet Research Agency,” to successfully purchase ads on Google. The group used replicas of Internet Research Agency content from 2016, in some cases using exact copies of ads purchased by the troll farm. Despite Google’s proclamation that it had developed procedures to thwart this activity, the ads appeared “on the YouTube channels and websites of media brands like CNN, CBS This Morning, HuffPost, and The Daily Beast.” On September 10, BBC News reported that Google also removed YouTube videos by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny after the Russian government claimed that the videos violated political campaigning laws. “We consider all justified appeals from state bodies,” Google said in a statement following the action. Speaking about the removal of the ads, one of Navalny’s aides accused Google of “political censorship.” (Buzzfeed News, BBC)

Cybersecurity professionals and government officials wary of hacks during the November midterms: In a recent survey by cybersecurity company Lastline, approximately 85 percent of security professionals predicted hacking during the upcoming midterm elections, with different percentages anticipating various types, targets, and goals of the potential attack. U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coates expressed similar concerns, stating, “Our interconnectedness makes it easier for our adversaries to use disruptive information operations to sow discord and to undermine our democracy and our values, as we have seen with foreign influence efforts by Russia and others.” In response to increasing anxiety regarding the potential for cyber-attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced plans to increase “coordination and information sharing efforts on election security threats” later this month. Despite these efforts, congressional candidates across the country are still struggling to institutionalize cybersecurity hygiene. (Lastline, Business Insider, Politico, The Intercept, Associated Press, The Washington Post)

Sweden’s elections, marred by disinformation, end with inconclusive results: In the lead up to elections on September 9, Sweden faced an information environment plagued by disinformation. According to an Oxford study, “the ratio of professional news to junk news shared on Swedish social media was 2:1” compared to British, French, and German election-time ratios which were 4:1, 5:1, and 7:1 respectively. As described by ASD Senior Fellow Kristine Berzina, disinformation campaigns sought to undermine confidence in the election and polarize public opinion by seizing on divisive issues, such as immigration. The Sweden Democrats, a far-right party formed in 1980 by neo-fascist extremists, took 18 percent of the vote, less than what was predicted but higher than the party earned in any previous election. The country’s ruling center-left coalition and center-right party each earned approximately 40 percent of the vote. Though neither of the country’s main blocs secured enough support to establish a government outright, both have publicly stated that they will refuse to form a coalition with the Sweden Democrats. According to Bloomberg, Sweden may now face “weeks or even months of political gridlock,” conditions that could be exploited by adversaries to continue disinformation campaigns. (EU Observer, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC)

Two suspects charged for Skripal poisoning: British authorities charged two Russian military intelligence officers Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov with the attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal using the powerful nerve agent Novichok. France, Germany, Canada, and the United States publicly supported the British allegations in a joint statement. And U.K. Security Minister Ben Wallace declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “ultimately responsible” for the attack due to his tight control over the activities of his government. The Russian government, on the other hand, dismissed the allegations as “unfounded” and called them attempts to “unleash a disgusting anti-Russian hysteria.” (Reuters, POLITICO EU, BBC, GOV.UK, The Guardian, AP News) 

ASD Director Laura Rosenberger and Co-Director Jamie Fly penned a blog post in which they argued that tech companies “must do more” to secure U.S. elections from foreign interference. They emphasized that social media platforms` “carelessness and unwillingness to address the inherent vulnerabilities created by their platforms helped to create a breeding ground for malicious activity in 2016 that continues to this day,” and urged Congress to “keep up the pressure on them, even as the companies begin to take steps to address the problem.”

Laura Rosenberger and Jamie Fly also appeared on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” to discuss foreign influence on social media platforms, with Rosenberger warning against losing sight of non-electoral interference: “This activity is not just about our elections … these are ongoing efforts in order to divide Americans, polarize us, create chaos … trying to pit Americans against each other every single day. It didn’t stop after November 2016 and it’s not about whether it’s going to start again. It’s happening.” Fly expanded on the low cost of deploying these tactics and cautioned, “The danger is others are seeing the success of these sorts of tactics … like China and Iran who are apparently starting to do similar things in American politics.”

ASD’s Laura Rosenberger and Clint Watts joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) hearing on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms. Rosenberger pointed out that while “We have seen some recent action from Facebook and Twitter to take down some coordinated inauthentic behavior … we don’t have a sense of whether or not they’re able to keep pace with the problem.” She suggests that social media companies “need to be more transparent about the full scope of things, they need to be better about sharing information with one another, and sharing information with law enforcement.”

ASD’s Kristine Berzina published a piece on the Swedish elections. She argued that, “Like other malign foreign influence campaigns that have targeted elections in Europe and the United States, the operations to undermine the Swedish elections aim to reduce public confidence in the outcome and the electoral process itself, while further dividing Swedes on the top social and political issues.” She suggested that, “Transparency and vigilance by the government should continue to guide Sweden’s responses to suspected foreign interference operations going forward, including during the critical period of government formation.”

Accounts tracked by the Hamilton 68 Dashboard last week seized on pro-Kremlin narratives surrounding both domestic and foreign developments. Early in the week, accounts on the dashboard focused on Nike’s new “Just Do It” campaign featuring former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the face of the NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. On September 4, “Nike” was among the top topics discussed on the dashboard and the hashtag “boycottnike” topped the dashboard’s trending list. In the past, Kremlin-linked accounts have seized on the controversy surrounding Kaepernick to promote divisive and inflammatory content. Later in the week, after U.K. authorities charged two Russian intelligence officers for the poisoning of Sergei and Yuliya Skripal, accounts on the dashboard shifted to pushing pro-Kremlin narratives regarding the incident, including various conspiracy theories stating that the U.K. faked evidence or was using the announcement to prepare for a false-flag chemical attack in Syria.

“We have learned how vulnerable social media is to misuse … Clearly this problem is not going away, and I am not sure it is trending in the right direction … What I have described as a national security vulnerability … remains unaddressed.”

-Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), September 5, 2018

“Russian disinformation has revealed a dark underbelly of the entire online ecosystem. And this threatens to cheapen American discourse; weaken privacy; erode truth; and undermine our democracy on a previously unimagined scale … this is only going to get harder as we move into artificial intelligence, use of deep fake technology.”

-Senator Mark Warner, (D-VA), September 5, 2018

After the charges levied against two Russian intelligence officers for the Skripal poisoning, the Russian Foreign Ministry promoted a debunked conspiracy theory to attempt to discredit the investigation. As part of the evidence released by the U.K., two CCTV pictures depict the suspects separately passing through a narrow gate at the Gatwick airport while entering the country. The pictures share the same timestamp and at first glance appear to show the exact same location. Pro-Kremlin conspiracy theorists seized on the pictures, claiming that the evidence must be fake given the identical timestamps and the fact that the suspects each appear to be alone in their respective pictures. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova even promoted a version of the theory in a live TV interview. However, as pointed out by open source investigative outlet Bellingcat and several other researchers, the two suspects are simply passing through separate parallel gates at the same time, as Gatwick airport has numerous side-by-side exit gates.

The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.