“The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket shows how the Western left plays into the game of right-wing populism”, or “Donald Trump's policy allows the American extreme right to gain ground”.

These eye-catching headlines from the Peace Data site will surely delight supporters of the left wing of the American Democratic Party.

But the latter will probably be less happy to learn that these articles are the result of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the famous Russian propaganda factory which, from its premises in Saint Petersburg, had distinguished itself during the 2016 US election.

Peace Data is at the heart of a Russian propaganda operation unveiled on Tuesday, September 1, by Facebook and Twitter, which were alerted to the existence of this threat by the FBI.

This is the first confirmed case of the IRA's involvement in an effort to influence the 2020 US presidential campaign.

Discourage voters on the far left

Facebook has blocked thirteen accounts and two pages that appear to be linked to Peace Data, while Twitter has suspended five accounts associated with the operation.

The FBI and the two social media giants seem to have pulled the rug out from under Russian propagandists before the operation really took off. 

Established in December 2019, Peace Data only started publishing its own articles in the spring of 2020. The IRA “has yet to generate as much engagement [through retweet, or of “Like”, Editor's note] than in 2016 ”, notes Graphika, an American agency for analyzing social networks which worked with Facebook to dissect the Russian operation.

But this confirmed return of the big bad of the American campaign of 2016, accused of having done everything to promote the election of Donald Trump, remains nonetheless worrying for the integrity of the upcoming election in the United States. .

“They use the same strategy as in 2016, but have improved their techniques to go more unnoticed,” said Bharath Ganesh, an online propaganda specialist at the University of Groningen, who worked on the modus operandi of the IRA, contacted by France 24.

The Russian propagandists continue, on their momentum of 2016, to try to “build an alternative ecosystem of media capable of amplifying the conflicting themes in order to accentuate the political polarization of the American population”, summarizes Bharath Ganesh. 

This time around, they seem to have set their sights on the left-wing electorate to divide it, while in 2016, the IRA mainly focused on motivating the Conservatives to vote Donald Trump.

“The fact that the Democratic Party has opted for a moderate candidate with Joe Biden opens up an avenue for the Internet Research Agency, which may seek to discredit him in the eyes of the most left-wing voters in the hope of discouraging the latter from going. vote in November ”, analyzes Friedolin Merhout, a researcher in sociology of the media at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of a study on the impact of IRA propaganda on political behavior in the United States. 

Fake profile photo, but real journalists

To achieve their goals, Russian agents have updated their tools.

In particular, they took advantage of the latest advances in artificial intelligence to create from scratch photos of the alleged editorial team of Peace Data.

This use of profile photos generated by AI, instead of digging into royalty-free image banks, “complicates the work of identifying fake accounts”, recognizes Friedolin Merhout. 

Most of the articles on the site were also written by actual North American journalists, who believed they had been recruited by a new left-wing online publication when they actually worked for the IRA.

“We were free to choose our subjects, as long as they coincided with the general editorial line, and the text was rarely edited,” one of the freelancers told the New York Times.

This use of local labor has already been used during the IRA's propaganda efforts in Africa in April 2020. “This avoids the grammatical or syntax errors that made it possible in 2016 to identify Russian agents' publications ”, underlines Martin Linnes, director of the Security Research Institute of Cardiff University, contacted by France 24.

It may seem surprising that the IRA thinks it can repeat its 2016 success by simply improving its methods a little.

The Russian propaganda agency is particularly in the sights of the American authorities eager to prevent the shadow of Moscow once again hovering over the presidential election.

Playing on emotions rather than inventing false information

But for online propaganda specialist Bhareth Garesh, the Internet Research Agency has no reason to fundamentally change its approach because it has understood that “the response from internet platforms, like Facebook, has been very unsatisfactory”.

Social networks have, in fact, focused on tracking down false information while “Russian agents have less recourse than one might think to disinformation to achieve their objectives,” he underlines.

Indeed, this expert explains that the IRA “plays above all on the emotions” in order to create anger, fear and sow division in the population.

She doesn't have to invent information from scratch to make it happen.

It suffices, as Peace Data does, to choose your subjects well, and to use a title and an alarmist tone.

The fact that the IRA can afford to rely on the work of real local journalists, oblivious to participating in a propaganda operation, proves that disinformation is not or no longer the only weapon in this agency's arsenal. Russian. 

In reality, this dispensary has even less effort to deploy in 2020 to achieve the same results as in 2016, fear the experts interviewed by France 24. The rise of conspiracyists and the climate of social violence in the United States are that the Russians “don't have to be as good as they were in 2016, because others are doing the undermining work for them,” said Martin Linnes, the research director at Cardiff University.

No need to set up networks of false activists on the Internet who would amplify inflammatory articles when "US President Donald Trump does it very well himself", confirms Bhareth Garesh.

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