Russia Even Used Pokémon Go to Hack the 2016 Election. Here’s How

And so it begins. NewsGuard is rewriting what happened during the 2016 election and whoboy did they put a lot of work into this report. First off here is their article about how Pokémon was infiltrated by Russians to get people to vote for Trump instead of Hillary.

A Russian-operated disinformation group incorporated Pokémon Go into its extensive attacks targeting the 2016 presidential election, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Commission. The effort relied in part on an invented group that claimed to be affiliated with Black Lives Matters, and which targeted African-American voters.

CNN first reported the Pokémon Go connection in October 2017, and the Senate report, released today, provides significant confirmation.

Targeted users were encouraged to change their Pokémon Go names to that of victims of police brutality, according to researchers at New Knowledge, a company that more typically works to protected brands against disinformation campaigns. New Knowledge was given access to a large array of posts across Facebook, (FB, +0.96%) Twitter, (TWTR, +2.02%) and Alphabet (GOOG, -0.51%) properties and other platforms to examine Russia’s Internet Research Agency attempts to sway voters.

Pokémon Go is an augmented-reality game developed by Niantic Labs, in which players have to visit specific real-world locations to collect Pokémon characters or perform training actions. In a statement, Niantic noted in a statement that the disinformation effort asked those targeted to “take screenshots from their phone and share over the social networks, not within our game.” The company said that “our game assets were appropriated and misused in promotions by third parties without our permission” and “our platform was in no way being used.”

The Senate report stated that the Russian campaign used Pokémon Go as one piece of a larger campaign to recruit African-Americans via social media, games, and other methods through topics believed to generate interest, like police brutality. After gaining trust and interest, these accounts then encouraged potential black voters to stay away from the polls or vote for third-party candidates.

According to the report, Russian operatives created messages like “Black people don’t have to vote for Hillary because she is liar! Black people are smart enough to understand that Hillary doesn’t deserve our votes!” and “Stop being slave of Democrat plantation!” The messages and graphics created for the campaign appear to contain basic mistakes in English grammar uncommon to American speakers of any dialect, such as on one contest promotion: “We will send a $100 Amazon Gifting Card to the person who will capture most GYMS.”

With the data provided by social-media and other platforms, New Knowledge was able to connect directly email addresses and other accounts used to coordinate campaigns across the Internet, and more effectively identify state actors

This information is not on any of the reports that we have seen before, but according to New Knowledge that is what happened. How many people are going to believe this?

Here is who wrote the senate report:

ANALYSIS BY

Renee DiResta, Dr. Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan Fox (New Knowledge)

Nah. This isn't suspicious at all now is it? This report is 99 pages long and you have to see some of the graphics that were supposedly used by the Russian Internet Agency. Here are two of my favorites.

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You can't hold hands with gawd when you are masturbating

Here's a few excerpts from the report.

Broadly, Russian interference in the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016 took three distinct forms, one of which is within the scope of our analysis:

1. Attempts to hack online voting systems (as detailed by a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report) 

2. A cyber-attack targeting the Democratic National Committee, executed by the GRU, which led to a controlled leak via Wikileaks of email data related to the Clinton Presidential campaign team 

3. A sweeping and sustained social influence operation consisting of various coordinated disinformation tactics aimed directly at US citizens, designed to exert political influence and exacerbate social divisions in US culture




This last form of interference, a multi-year coordinated disinformation effort conducted by the Russian state-supported Internet Research Agency (IRA), is the topic of this analysis.

The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) began an investigation into the IRA’s social media activities following the 2016 election around the same time that investigative journalists and third-party researchers became aware that IRA’s campaign had touched all major platforms in the social network ecosystem. In March 2018, some of the social platform companies misused by the IRA (Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet) provided the SSCI with data related to IRA influence operations. Facebook’s data submission includes Facebook Page posts and Instagram account content. Alphabet’s data submission includes Google AdWords and YouTube video and channel data. The data set reveals that Alphabet’s subsidiaries YouTube, G+, Gmail, and Google Voice were each leveraged to support the creation and validation of false personas

In addition to FB, Twitter and Google, the IRA also used the following sites. Funny how we are just hearing about this now after the report was made up.

Evidence provided by these companies to SSCI ties the IRA operation to widespread activity on other popular social platforms including Vine, Gab, Meetup, VKontakte, and LiveJournal. Several complete websites were created to host original written content, and to provide source material for related social accounts and personas. The breadth of the attack included games, browser extensions, and music apps created by the IRA and pushed to targeted groups, including US teenagers. The popular game Pokémon Go was incorporated into the operation, illustrating the fluid, evolving, and innovative tactical approach the IRA leveraged to interfere in US politics and culture.

Several platforms that con rmed the presence of IRA interference operations (Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Medium) were not part of the formal SSCI investigation or data requests, and that content was not included in the SSCI data set. They have cooperated with law enforcement, and their information has been incorporated into a parallel Department of Justice investigation; the Mueller indictment of Russian nationals, Netyksho et al, dated 07/13/18, speci cally references Tumblr-based interference operations. In the interest of thorough analysis, New Knowledge took initiative to also analyze relevant data from Reddit, Tumblr, and Pinterest in addition to the data set provided by SSCI.

Weren't we told that the IRA spent $100,00 to place the ads and that 60% or so were placed after the election?

The IRA began its operations in mid-2013 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Run like a sophisticated marketing agency in a centralized of ce environment, the IRA employed and trained over a thousand people to engage in round-the-clock influence operations, rst targeting Ukrainian and Russian citizens, and then, well before the 2016 US election, Americans. The scale of their operation was unprecedented — they reached 126 million people on Facebook, at least 20 million users on Instagram, 1.4 million users on Twitter, and uploaded over 1,000 videos to YouTube. As Department of Justice indictments have recently revealed, this manipulation of American political discourse had a budget that exceeded $25 million USD and continued well into 2018. IRA documents indicate the 2017 operational budget alone was $12.2 million US dollars. Independent researchers and social platforms were aware of the IRA as early as 2015, and its activities on Facebook are well-documented and discussed in detail in Adrian Chen’s “The Agency”. Subsequent glimpses into the operational structure and strategy of the IRA can be found in the February 2018 indictment of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the September 28, 2018 criminal complaint of United States of America v. Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova

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No need to install: Microsoft has controversial fake news filter NewsGuard built into mobile browser

Corporate and neocon-backed startup NewsGuard is one step closer to its vision of bringing its “unreliable” news rater to every screen after Microsoft makes it an integral part of its Edge mobile browser.

Rather than having to download an app as before, Edge users on Android and Apple devices can now just click one button to enable its “green-red rating signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”