The Mueller Report: What the Russians Did

If you've ever watched a Republican asked about the extent of the Russian interference in the 2016 election, you've probably heard them say some variants of the following:

• Sure, but they've been doing this for decades.
• Sure, but it was only a couple of Facebook ads. (Jared Kushner himself said this.)
• Sure, but no votes were changed and it didn't affect the outcome of the election.

I'm not sure why Republicans would want to minimize an attack on our democratic infrastructure. Oh wait, I actually do. They're afraid of angering Donald Trump.

One could possibly go the other way, and exaggerate the extent of the meddling. I don't know, why don't we see what the Mueller report says?

The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.

Hm. It doesn't say "unprecedented", but it doesn't sugarcoat or downplay it either. You could go too far in the other direction and exaggerate the impact. There's a lot we still don't know. A 9/11-style commission would actually be helpful here, because the tech companies have not told us the whole story, and the government has not legally compelled them to (more on that in a second).

Here are a few things that we do know:

• "First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton." (Vol. 1, p.1)
• "Two military units of the GRU carried out the computer intrusions into the Clinton Campaign, DNC, and DCCC: Military Units 26165 and 74455."  (Vol. 1, p.36)
• "[T]he Washington Post published an Access Hollywood video that captured comments by candidate Trump some years earlier and that was expected to adversely affect the Campaign. Less than an hour after the video's publication, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen by the GRU from the account of Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta." (Vol. 1, p.58)

Think about those three facts for a second. The Russians intervened, and the candidate they showed a strong preference for won. Two full GRU units worked full-time to interfere with our election. If the US had devoted two units of the FBI to work full time to get a foreign leader elected, should the people of that country just brush it off as routine? And in what was likely one of the most impactful aspects of the Russian influence campaign, through a cutout they released emails within an hour of the pussy-grabbing tape hitting the news. The exact influence that had is probably impossible to quantify with any precision. But to deny that it affected the news cycle and dampened the political harm to Trump while simultaneously harming Clinton...well, that's just a ridiculous assertion. So the next time someone tells you the Russians may have interfered but it didn't affect the outcome, please remind them of this.

Now, back to the tech companies...

"By the end of the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA had the ability to reach millions of U.S. persons through their social media accounts. Multiple IRA-controlled Facebook groups and Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of U.S. participants. IRA-controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers, including multiple U.S. political figures who retweeted IRA-created content. In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Face book accounts. In January 2018, Twitter announced that it had identified 3,814 IRA-controlled Twitter accounts and notified approximately 1.4 million people Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA-controlled account." (Vol. 1, p.14-15)

That may or may not sound bad, probably depending on your political persuasion. But here's the part that really stuck out to me while reading this: "a Facebook representative testified".

Wait, what?

Robert Mueller and the FBI seemed to rely primarily on the testimony of paid spokespeople for the tech companies in determining the scope of Russian influence on their platforms. Are you kidding me?

Here's a story where Zuckerberg said that "there may be" subpoenas that Mueller's team sent to the company or its employees. But based on the Mueller report, there is no mention of a subpoena to any tech company. The only sources cited for any of these figures come, as far as I can tell, exclusively from the companies themselves.

Forgive me for not trusting these companies to be completely forthright. What exactly is their incentive to do so? To have their platforms exploited in such a way cannot look good for them, and can only have a possible negative effect to their bottom line. But is this just paranoia? Do we have any concrete reason to believe they're not revealing the full extent of the problem?

Hey, turns out we do. The Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned two reports to analyze the extent of the Russian influence campaign. Here's one. Here's the other.

What do they each have to say about the data and cooperation they received from the tech companies?

From the first report, The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency:

None of the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet) appears to have turned over
complete sets of related data to SSCI. Some of what was turned over was in PDF form; other data sets contained extensive duplicates. Each lacked core components that would have provided a fuller and more actionable picture. For example:

• The platforms didn’t include methodology for identifying the accounts; we are assuming the provenance and attribution is sound for the purposes of this analysis.
• They didn’t include anonymized user comments, eliminating a key path to gauge impact.
• They didn’t include any conversion pathway data to elucidate how individuals came to follow the accounts, eliminating another key path to gauge impact.
• There was minimal metadata.
• One data set did not include any user engagement data at all.

Regrettably, it appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress; one platform claimed that no specific groups were targeted (this is only true if speaking strictly of ads), while another dissembled about whether or not the Internet Research Agency created content to discourage voting (it did). It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion.

Here's what the other report, The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018:

Facebook provided the US Senate with information on the organic post data of 81 Facebook pages, and the data on Facebook ads bought by 76 accounts. Twitter’s data contribution covered activity in multiple languages, but Facebook’s data contribution focuses on activity only in English. Facebook chose not to disclose data from IRA Profiles or Groups and only shared organic post data from a small number of Pages with the Committee. Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machinereadable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper. 

This should dispense with the idea that the tech companies are acting in good faith and are being transparent with regard to the extent of the problem. An easy solution to finding the truth would have been for the Senate Intelligence Committee or the FBI to subpoena these companies. As far as I can tell, this did not happen. If I'm misinformed about this, please let me know in the comments. If none of them actually were subpoenaed, even though they were obviously giving Congress badly-formatted and incomplete data, why? I mean, it's only the integrity of our elections and our national security, right?

Another interesting note before I wrap this up. Both of the independent reports spend a lot of time pointing out that specific minority groups were targeted by the Russians. The most aggressively-targeted group appears to have been African-Americans. The goal was to inflame racial animosity and suppress the black vote. According to the Pew Research Center:

The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.) 

Again, we're dealing with a complex system with a lot of variables, and assigning causality is very difficult. One could easily point to the presence of Obama on the ballot as a motivating factor in 2012, but this drop is still suggestive and worth noting. Except that the Mueller report didn't note it at all. Their team didn't appear to do much analysis of the interference campaign at all, and it certainly didn't highlight many of the points that independent researchers have.

Well, you might contend that wasn't their job. But how is the American public supposed to understand the problem if the investigators aren't either fully investigating or telling us the whole story? And how is the country supposed to defend from future attacks if it doesn't fully understand the problem?

I understood this to be one of the primary goals of the Mueller investigation, and it seems to me that on that score, it is wholly inadequate. Until we get whistleblowers from inside the tech companies or subpoenas from either Congress or the DoJ, we will not have even a relatively complete picture of what happened. That is, unless you trust that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have been as honest and open as possible. LOL.