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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com.
- [00:25]
Gordon Carrera
Russian trolls are trying to influence the 2016 US election. So did Putin's keyboard warriors really propel Donald Trump into the White House? Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [00:38]
David McCloskey
And I'm David McCloskey.
- [00:39]
Gordon Carrera
And David, in our last few episodes, we've been looking at the Russian active measures, the influence campaign against the 2016 US presidential election, particularly, I guess, focusing on one aspect of it, the gru, Russian military intelligence, this hack of emails, and then their leak through the summer of 2016 onto the Internet and the questions about how the US was going to respond. But that wasn't all that was going on, was it?
- [01:09]
David McCloskey
No, there was another. Another plank, Gordon, in this active measure, another psyop that was focused on disinformation and in particular, spreading disinformation on social media. It was led by Gordon, by friend of the pod, Yevgeny Prigozhin, chef turned warlord. And we did a series on him last year in late 2025, and we made the comparison, Gordon, that Yevgeny Prigozhin is really what would have become of chef Gordon Ramsay Had Mr. Ramsay been brought up in sort of the twilight years of the Soviet Union and had been pulled into Vladimir Putin's orbit and
- [01:46]
Gordon Carrera
then gone to lead a mercenary group and lead a march against his own government with a bunch of mercenaries before being blown up in an airplane. So the analogy doesn't entirely work. I think there are points at which the chef analogy breaks down, but there are some relevant points to it, I think. But let's be honest, they're limited.
- [02:06]
David McCloskey
And we should note, just in case. And we did this at the time in case any of Gordon Ramsay's people are listening to this. Don't come after us legally, because we got to quote where Gordon Ramsay says that chefs are psychopaths. And we used that as the foundational sort of piece for the comparison between. Between the two, but. That's right, so. So Yevgeny Prigozhi.
- [02:26]
Gordon Carrera
Door quite flimsy.
- [02:27]
David McCloskey
He was Putin. He was Putin's caterer. Yeah, for a period. He ends up becoming a mercenary warlord running the Wagner group. And he bears a striking resemblance, we should say. A striking resemblance. Oh, I can't believe you're gonna go rest is politics. Co host Alastair Campbell offended Gordon Ramsay
- [02:47]
Gordon Carrera
and our co host Alastair Campbell, who. Who it's fair to say, did not react well. He reacted jokingly, but also slightly alarmingly to, to. To your. Your comparison, which was based on two pictures where you thought they did look alike. But let's, let's step away from the comparisons and get back to the story of who Evgeni Prigozhin really was, because I think to see how he fits into this story about 2016, it's worth, even for those who might have listened to that previous series, just recapping a little bit about why he ends up playing a role. He's this extraordinary figure who's on the criminal fringes in St. Petersburg in the 80s and then the 90s, opens up restaurants. Hence he's become known as a chef. He's more of a restaurateur, really. But restaurants where the St. Petersburg elite starts to move, including Vladimir Putin. And that moves him by the end of the 90s, into Putin's orbit, as Putin comes to power in Moscow and he starts catering to the guests of Vladimir Putin, including people like President Bush, Tony Blair. But what's interesting is he also starts to move into the edges of politics through the 2000s, and the transition was really interesting. I remember finding this fascinating look at his backstory, because he got really involved in social media initially because he was battling his critics when it came to restaurants and the restaurant world. And he was basically going after, you know, it's the equivalent of a restaurant critic hiring some trolls and private investigators to take down Giles Corin at the Times newspaper if he gives him a bad review. You know, it's not quite like that, but. But that was what kind of Evgeny Prigozhin was doing. He built up a network around him, investigating journalists, paying off journalists, and then increasingly moving on to social media. And that got noticed by the Kremlin around 2012, because, of course, the Kremlin, I think it's fair to say the old security kind of guard around Putin were not Internet natives.
- [04:52]
David McCloskey
They weren't so online.
- [04:53]
Gordon Carrera
They were not. They weren't so online. And, you know, you could see them going, what is this new world of social media? And Twitter at the time and Facebook, and they have no idea about it, but they can see that Prigozhin has built this PR machine to bolster his own reputation. And it looks like the Kremlin around 2012, says to him, we could use that. We could use your PR machine for the purposes of bolstering the Kremlin. And so that leads around 2013 to the creation of this thing called the Internet.
- [05:24]
David McCloskey
Research Agency, the ira.
- [05:27]
Gordon Carrera
The the IRA distinguished from the Irish Republican Army.
- [05:30]
David McCloskey
I was told in my notes to not to not use that abbreviation so regularly in this episode.
- [05:36]
Gordon Carrera
It'll get very confusing otherwise. But the ira, the Internet Research Agency, we should say is in St. Petersburg initially is a a domestic social media influence organization, you know, trying to influence and do campaigns within Russia to bolster support for Putin. Then by about 2014, it's going to start doing campaigns about Ukraine. But then interestingly enough, at this point, 2014 15, it's going to start to set its eyes on America, isn't it? This episode is sponsored by hp. Most people are not counterespionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cybercriminals seeking to extract their secrets.
- [06:21]
David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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- [06:55]
David McCloskey
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- [07:06]
Gordon Carrera
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- [07:25]
David McCloskey
This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Car shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork. That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy from start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time. And when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. Disney wants to know, are you ready? Yes. For Marvel Studios, the New Avengers, now streaming on Disney. Let's do this. One of the best Marvel movies of all time is now streaming on Disney plus. Hey, you weren't listening to me. I said Thunderbolts. The New Avengers is now streaming on Disney plus. Meet the new Avengers.
- [08:18]
Gordon Carrera
That's cool, man.
- [08:19]
David McCloskey
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers. Rated PG 13. Now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney Plus. And the Mechanism for that is going to be something that they call the Translator Project, which is gonna focus specifically on the US population and work across social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. This group will eventually have more than 80 employees assigned to it. So this is another. Another feature of the way Prigozh intervenes is this is. This is pretty labor intensive. I think in many ways this is kind of pre AI, so this is individual humans having to do a lot of this work. And interestingly, I mean, the month after the Translator Project is stood up back in 2014, the team is beginning discussions on how to interfere in the 2016 US election, which is still two and a half years away. So you get the sense, I mean, I go back to the first episode, Gordon, that we did in this series, which talked about the kind of early indications that appeared in diplomatic reporting. It's coming back to Washington about the Russians really launching a kind of broad based, active measure against the US and against the US Presidential election. You know, you can see some of the glimmers of that in what Yevgeny Prigozhin and his team are setting up all the way back in 2014. I guess you could say that one of the major advantages that Prigozhin has is, is that his team can create identities and just pose as Americans. So in a way, you know, if we talk about kind of old school active measures where you had to cede an idea, an argument, misinformation, whatever it is, to a journalist and get them to then promulgate that idea or inject it into the bloodstream of whatever your target country is. In this case, what Prigozhin and his team can actually do is just they can be the source themselves, posing as Americans and doing it digitally, online and at scale.
- [10:26]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, and that is the key difference, as the joke goes on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, no one knows you're a Russian. On the Internet, you can look like an American. And in the old days, with those active measures, they would have to work through multiple proxies and steps and chains to kind of launder the fact they were Russians. So maybe if you were the Russians, you'd approach an agent of yours who was an Italian, who had happen to be a communist, who you could use to push out some of the information and push it forward. Here, these people in St. Petersburg, which gets called a troll factory. You know, Internet trolls can just create in a few moments online, an American identity and look, to all intents and purposes, at least in the online space, as An American. You know, it's one of those areas where the Internet and modern technology transforms the potential of active measures.
- [11:14]
David McCloskey
We should say a little bit about the people who are staffing this, these trolls, because I think that they are not pop tart eating hackers like the GRU has. These are kind of professional staff that are being hired for what really feels, as we'll get into it, like terrible, terrible, terrible work to have. And yet they're paid pretty well. They are, you know, sort of young professionals, I guess you could say. It's, it's got an office set up, right? There's, there's several departments in the troll den. And apparently early on they printed the titles of the departments on A4 paper and taped them up on, on windowless offices. So there's, there's a creative department, a rapid response department, a department each for commentators, bloggers, social media specialists. There's also another office in Moscow. Now, morale is low early on, and I think continuing this will be a theme. Morale is low above the staff. A reporter who was able to infiltrate the Internet Research Agency and ask some of these employees questions. One of the employees said, you could go crazy. They had to write four posts on a large Russian blogging platform per day, along with comments on Internet forums, and to basically blast all these legitimate news stories with, you know, crazy comments. It's all really tedious, it's all labor intensive, and it's all happening in this kind of drab gray building in St. Petersburg. One of the other pieces of this that is interesting because you look at the kind of architecture of the active measure, I think that the GRU and the SVR kind of didn't want anything to do with this work. And a lot of this. I'd be curious for your thoughts on this one, Gordon. A lot of this feels like Prigozhin has this good idea and he just kind of starts doing it and it's happening really, truly in a very kind of siloed fashion. There's not a connection between what Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency are doing and what the GRU is doing.
- [13:23]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, And I think at the time or when some of this first started to come out, people thought there was some master plan in which every bit of the Russian state was coordinated and doing different elements of this in, in conjunction with each other. And I think that's not the reality. I think the reality of the way the Kremlin works is there will be a view from the top that Putin wants this. The order will be given. We want to interfere with the election in this way. And then lots of people will go out and to some extent do it separately in their own silo and even compete to do things. And we saw that in the previous episodes when we saw how the svr, the Foreign Intelligence Agency, and the gru, the military intelligence agency, were both inside the DNC emails to separately. And I think here you can see that the Internet Research Agency is also doing its own thing. I don't think there is a particularly coordinated campaign other than the sense that this comes from the top, that this is what the boss wants, the boss being Putin.
- [14:19]
David McCloskey
And the GRU did have some social media kind of trolling that they had attempted during the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 when Russia had annexed Crimea, and it hadn't gone that well. And so I think in part Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency, their work after Crimea and Ukraine in 2014 and in the run up to the US election, it reminds me of, you know, I think one of the aspects of Prigozhin's personality that really carried through in the series we did on him. He's always looking for an opportunity. He's entrepreneurial, he's very entrepreneurial, and he's looking for opportunities in some of the seams where the state agencies themselves are not effective or not working. And in this case, he may have taken up the kind of social media trolling piece of this kind of seeing a gap, frankly, in. In what the intelligence agencies were up to in a way to demonstrate his value to Putin and the Kremlin.
- [15:16]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, because I think. I think the reality is, as we'd said on the US side, I don't think intelligence agencies, particularly this time, are understood social media. I mean, I remember talking to people who work for intelligence agencies who were supposed to be thinking about information warfare, what the Russians were up to. And they didn't have social media, you know, because they. They were spies or they worked in the intelligence community. So particularly around this time, I think it was all quite alien to, to a lot of people in intelligence agencies, whether it's the GRU or whether it's the CIA or nsa, how social media worked. So you need someone like Prigozhin who can have people who can go out and understand social media or natives to it and also can go and learn about the US because that's one of the aspects about it. If you're going to craft messages that are going to work on social media, you need to understand the audience you're trying to reach. And those pop tart eating guys in the GRU don't understand that. But actually what's interesting is the Internet Research Agency people, precisely because they're not spies, they can, I mean they go and travel to the United States, which is so interesting to do the research, to work out how to have an impact.
- [16:23]
David McCloskey
So a team of four Internet Research Agency employees apply for visas to go to the US Only two visas are granted. I said two women working for Prigozhin travel for three weeks around, around the US And I bet they had a very lovely time. They went to Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas and New York in order to learn more about the US to take pictures that they could use in their social media reports. And then they file a briefing, an internal report up the chain of the Internet Research Agency after they return. And there's, there's, there's this great, great story on the heels of, of that trip, Gordon, where in the spring of 2015, one of one of the things the Internet Research Agency is trying to do is just figure out if they can actually arrange remotely via social media, can they arrange an actual gathering of physical humans in the United States. And so they, they put out a Facebook post announcing a hot dog giveaway in New York City. There's a webcam they've arranged to have there to, to record it. And the pitch is basically show up here and get free hot dogs. And the webcam records a few New Yorkers actually showing up, looking around, looking puzzled, looking at their phones. There's no hot dogs there, by the way.
- [17:42]
Gordon Carrera
We should say there's no hot dogs.
- [17:43]
David McCloskey
And they get, there's no hot dogs, they get nothing. And then everyone, everyone leaves. And you can just imagine this video of very confused looking New Yorkers who thought they were going to have hot dogs when it reverberates back in St. Petersburg. The Internet Research Agency trolls are like ecstatic, you know, hugging each other, crying because they've been able to demonstrate that they could get like seven New Yorkers to show up with the promise of free, of free hot dogs. And we should say, I think again, very much a theme of the Internet Research Agency effort. They are scoring themselves on inputs, not outcomes. Okay, that's going to be really important is, okay, we got a few people to show up thinking they were going to have a hot dog. That's a big wit. A lot of this stuff ends up getting packaged and sold up the chain in Moscow as great victories, when in fact it's sort of just activity.
- [18:42]
Gordon Carrera
But it is, and it is wild when you stand back and you think that getting people to turn up for a non existent hot dog giveaway is a Russian active measure. You know, that we are now putting that in the context of intelligence operations. It just gives you some idea that this is not spying as we used to know it or think about it, is it, it's something different. But that's the point of it, isn't it? I mean, that's the point of what they're trying to do.
- [19:05]
David McCloskey
They should have gotten one of those hot dog vending machines like we had at Langley. They would have, they would have been able to just have that, have that sweet hot dogs roll out for those New Yorkers. Now the staff who work in the American department. So the piece of the Internet Research Agency, this kind of translator project that's looking at the States again, just kind of a, you know, further portrait that these are not the pop tart eaters over at the gru. They're, they're pretty young. It's a great description of them as, you know, hipsters kind of taking smoking breaks, wearing stylish haircuts, having beards which are apparently, you know, part of his sort of hipster culture in Russia. The new employees, employees, the Internet Research Agency break in. There's an internal document that they see. And it's very clear though that the goal of this effort, hot dogs and all, is to spread distrust toward the candidates, the American presidential candidates and the political system in general. So the election really is a core focus area for Prigozhin and his trolls. Right away, the head of the America Department is a 27 year old named Zhakun Aslanov. And again we apologize, as we always do profusely on the Russians classified, that we cannot, our pronunciations leave much to be desired. He is an Azerbaijan born guy who's apparently nicknamed Jay Z, which I think is just wonderful. These great details come from a fantastic book called Russian Roulette written by Michael Isakoff and David Kor and all about sort of Russia's intervention in the election. They've got just some wonderful details here. According to one former coworker, Aslanov, Jay Z was, was more popular as a colleague than as a boss. He was, quote, a great guy, but frankly speaking, generally incompetent as a manager. So we've got a, we've got really the crack team here in St. Petersburg. Now. Jay Z has a budget of approximately $1 million a year. Cue the Dr. Evil $1 million. It's strikingly low.
- [21:20]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it does.
- [21:21]
David McCloskey
It doesn't seem like that much money but I guess the pay is, is pretty good. And yeah, the pay, I remember the
- [21:27]
Gordon Carrera
pay was above average for people. Yeah, that's why they wanted to work there.
- [21:31]
David McCloskey
Exactly. Now the, the trolls, which I also feel like this term is really, it's very derogatory towards pejorative. Yeah, Bearded, bearded hipsters in St. Petersburg who are attempting to sabotage our presidential election. They are paid bonuses on audience engagement and reactions in the US So I would argue that this creates massive incentives for bullshit. It is all. It's like a self licking ice cream cone Gordon is what this is. This is again a theme of the social media piece of the Active Measure. Lots of stuff going on but as we'll see, I think pretty minimal impact. Now the Internet research agency by 2016 had bought computing infrastructure and servers in the U.S. they, they purchased space on the service and set up dedicated VPNs to be able to route traffic into the US and make it look like it was coming from the US and that tactic made it harder for social media companies in the States to actually uncover what was Russian disinformation operations on their platforms, even long after it had become clear that this influence operation was underway. By the time we get into this kind of summer fall of 2016. So as the election is going, the troll Factory's audience online had grown to hundreds of thousands of direct followers. And I will note again we'll use some large numbers in this section, but we are not, we are not trying to claim here. I think just, we should probably say this right up front that these numbers are not going to end up becoming particularly impressive when we talk about what actually happened. But the point is, is that there were a lot of Americans who were exposed in some way, shape or form to what the Internet Research Agency was up to. I would say that the managers gorded inside Prigozhin's shop. Jay Z and his, his friends were operating even after that little trip that their friends took to the US they were operating with some pretty rough and bizarre assumptions about what was actually going on in the U.S. so for example, they decided that infographics worked better with liberals than with conservatives. They also decided that liberals were more active at night while conservatives got up earlier in the morning.
- [23:50]
Gordon Carrera
I'm not sure if that's sweeping statements. Yeah, I'm sweeping, just sweeping statements. But yes, doesn't seem like they'd done that much research, but there you go.
- [24:00]
David McCloskey
And the basic strategy was that they would create Personas that impersonated activists or sometimes organizations and then boost those through paid ads to grow their following. And as many potential sort of or aspiring influencers will discover, it can be kind of hard. It can be long, tedious work to build an audience for your social media account.
- [24:27]
Gordon Carrera
Tell me about it. David, have you seen my Instagram feed?
- [24:30]
David McCloskey
As evidenced by Gordon Carrera's Instagram feed, which actually we should see. How many Instagram followers do you have, Gordon?
- [24:37]
Gordon Carrera
Not that many. I only post when I'm told to post by. I shouldn't say this, but by colleagues at Gold Hanger and Emma and others from our social media team, it's like,
- [24:47]
David McCloskey
no, you shouldn't say on this. You shouldn't say that.
- [24:50]
Gordon Carrera
No, I shouldn't. It should sound much more organic. It's like an expression of my life and my real authentic self. Is that what it should be? 703 followers, I'm being told.
- [25:02]
David McCloskey
703. I just looked it up.
- [25:05]
Gordon Carrera
I am like that. I should take some lessons from these Internet research people. And some of them are probably bots. You're right. Thank you.
- [25:14]
David McCloskey
Some of them are probably bots. They're mostly. Gordon has bought nearly all of his 703 followers.
- [25:21]
Gordon Carrera
Exactly.
- [25:22]
David McCloskey
Yeah. Yeah. If Prigozhin were still around, you could hire him to kind of whip your social media profile.
- [25:28]
Gordon Carrera
Let's get back from my social media feed to the Internet Research Agency search social media feeds. I mean, it is interesting, isn't it? Because they're creating these Personas and I mean, they're quite targeted in what they're trying to do, which I think is interesting. And they try lots of different things. You know, some of them work, some don't. But you can see that one of the interesting areas is they. They. They, for instance, target certain communities. So we talked about liberals and conservatives, but they target black voters specifically, don't they? And they're essentially trying to send a message to them to say, don't bother voting. I mean, it's really interesting because they're not saying, vote for this candidate or vote for that candidate. But it's like, don't bother voting. It's not worth it. There's an element in which they're just trying to suppress the vote and make people disillusioned with politics. That was one of the tactics they used, wasn't it?
- [26:22]
David McCloskey
It was. And I think it's worth looking at. At potentially a particular Persona because the Internet Research Agency created someone named Crystal Johnson. They chose a picture of a young black woman who is. Appears to be in her early 20s. And by mid-2016, after some hard work by the bearded hipsters at the Internet Research Agency, the account had about 7,000 followers. So roughly 10 times the number of followers. As Gordon Carrera's Instagram account and Crystal's bio said, quote, it is our responsibility to promote the positive things that happen in our communities. She's supposedly from Richmond, Virginia. In one of her more popular posts In June of 2016, she puts up a picture of the boxer Muhammad Ali and his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And she jokes that Muhammad Ali's star is the only one hanging on a wall not for anyone to step on. Now, that post has more than 22,000 engagements, but as I just said, not political has no impact on the election. It is designed because the trolls understand this like they're trying to build an audience, building an audience for Crystal Johnson. Right? And it's designed to kind of attract people to her Persona. There's another example. In late September of 2016, a Twitter account @Black2Live. It was one of the Internet Research Agency's most important fake black activist accounts that had a follower count of 11,200, but kind of mediocre engagement figures. The account accumulated fewer than 190,000 social interactions in about a year. And only 16 of the accounts. More than 2, 600 posts during the run up mentioned Hillary Clinton. And most of those mentions were supportive. No, they didn't post at all in the weeks before the election about voter suppression. So you, you can. You kind of have like. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are kind of seeing this stuff, but
- [28:25]
Gordon Carrera
some of it's not political.
- [28:26]
David McCloskey
Most of what they're seeing is just not political at all.
- [28:29]
Gordon Carrera
It's audience building rather than political.
- [28:31]
David McCloskey
Yeah, that's right. Now they. The Internet Research agency, Jay Z and his and his crew in St. Petersburg were probably more successful with some of their conservative Personas. And their most successful English language social media account was trying to mimic the Tennessee gop, the Grand Old Party, the Tennessee Republican Party. And by the end of September 2016 at 10/ underscore, GOP had just under 36,000 followers.
- [29:06]
Gordon Carrera
That's more than me. I've got.
- [29:07]
David McCloskey
It's way more than you. It's way more than me. It's way more than. The rest is classified. So shame on, you know, shame on all of the tens of thousands of people who are listening to our podcast who haven't gone and checked us out on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, you know, or subscribed on YouTube or subscribed on YouTube. Where is our bot army, Gordon? It should be there. We. We want a bot army, Alistair. Becky is typing it in the chat. Alistair Campbell, Prigozhin lookalike has 195,000 followers on Instagram. Is that, is it on Instagram? I don't know how many of those are paid bots, how many inherited from
- [29:45]
Gordon Carrera
people thought they were following precaution and then actually got. Alistair Campbell.
- [29:49]
David McCloskey
If you're listening to this, go to rest is classified on Instagram and. And subscribe please, because these numbers sell. This is the worst sell. This is a pity. This is a pity sell because when we compare our followers to this troll farm, it's, it's terrible.
- [30:06]
Gordon Carrera
Back to 2016 at Tennessee GOP. Yeah, 36,000 followers.
- [30:11]
David McCloskey
And they get a lot of engagement, Lots of engagement. Now the account generates 3.2 million shares in the year before the election. It's unknown exactly how many of those interactions are with actual Americans, but it's probably the majority. And I think it's worth kind of zooming in on just a couple of the posts because among that account's top 10 pre election posts on Twitter, five attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the outcome and flagged like voter fraud. And one post, for example, published just the day before the election, earned more than 10,000 engagements and it said, wow, another proof of hashtag voter fraud machine refuses to allow vote for Trump retweet because media will never report this. That obviously is bad. Shame on the Russians.
- [31:02]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [31:03]
David McCloskey
But again, it is striking that there's just a bunch of, you know, because I tend to think, you know, we tell these stories and you think about Russian disinformation, you sort of think about some kind of evil mastermind sitting in a room somewhere puppeteering the election or kind of reprogramming American minds. And the reality is there is basically a kind of factory like vibe at the Internet Research Agency with all of our bearded hipster friends churning it out. Just churning it out. Right. One, one worker said they needed 135, 200 character tweets suites per shift. The workers on the different floors apparently don't talk much to each other. They only interact over smoke breaks and over lunch and coffee. So it's. They're kind of. They're very isolated. And in a. In a February 2018 interview with the Washington Post. So a couple years after the election, a former Internet Research Agency employee said, I immediately felt like a character in the book 1984. The agency was a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling when you ended up there was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths into an industrial assembly line. And I think maybe it's worth taking a break here. Gordon. It's worth coming back and discussing whether or not Yevgeny Prigozhin's troll empire accomplished anything. We'll see you after the break. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer. Thirty years ago, Blinds.com broke the mold and made custom window treatments easy for everyone. Over 25 million windows later, we're celebrating by giving our customers up to 50% off site wide during our anniversary sale. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, blinds.com has you covered. Shop online, access real design professionals and get free samples. Thank you for 30amazing years. Shop the anniversary sale now through March 11th and get up to 50% off site wide@blinds.com.
- [34:07]
Gordon Carrera
Welcome back. So Evge Prigozhin's bearded hipster trolls have been busy and they're busy right through the election, aren't they, David? Right until November and election day. But the question is, what impact did they really have? There's always a figure which is cited by, I think Facebook after the election says that the Internet research agency reached 126 million Americans. Now that sounds extraordinary and led people to go, wow, that's, you know, nearly half of all Americans were reached by these posts. But it's not quite the same as saying it had an impact, is it?
- [34:48]
David McCloskey
No. And I think the bottom line up front here is that these efforts didn't have much of an impact. And the first reason is that those numbers are the 126Americans. A lot of them are reached by really anodyne, benign posts made by these accounts that had nothing to do with politics or the election whatsoever. So that's one piece. Another piece is only 8.4% of the Internet Research Agency's activity was election related at all. And the pieces that were mostly stayed very much within echo chambers and did not cross over into networks of undecided voters. That's a really important point, is a lot of this was conservatives or Democrats amplifying stuff that they already heard and believed and saw elsewhere, which is unlikely
- [35:43]
Gordon Carrera
to change someone's vote. It might increase the intensity of their view and, you know, you could have some second order effects, but it's definitely different from actually persuading someone. It's very hard to measure what's reaching someone and what actually changes them. They managed to do a few things in the real world though, didn't they, where they managed to kind of create events. We talked about this earlier with the hot dogs. And they managed to do that during the election campaign, which again, is interesting, I think, but not necessarily impactful.
- [36:12]
David McCloskey
There does seem to be evidence that in at least two cases the Internet Research Agency was able to actually arrange in person kind of rallies or events. And in one case, they paid a Republican political activist in Florida. And I don't think she knew who was paying them, but they paid her to dress up as Hillary Clinton. And this woman, happily did. She had a blonde wig, she had an orange prison uniform that she bought at Goodwill, because you remember, of course, one of the kind of major MAGA chants during the election was to lock
- [36:42]
Gordon Carrera
her up, lock her up.
- [36:43]
David McCloskey
And this woman, when she's confronted with the fact that it's actually the Russians who had paid her and set this thing up, she said, well, I would have done it for Trump anyway. There was a lot of excitement around this. And Russians didn't have any part of that. This wasn't a trick for me. So I think again, it's this idea that if anyone else had reached out and said, go ahead and do this, she would have done it. And she was already voting. And everyone who's showing up at that rally, they're already voting for Trump, presumably. So that's another piece of it. I think another slice is that we talked, we joked about this a little bit with the. The way that the Internet Research Agency employees were getting to know the target. There wasn't a lot of regional or cultural Specialization. And it prevented, in other words, a lot of the trolls didn't know anything, much of anything about the communities, the states that their Personas were alleging to come from or out of, despite the road trip, despite this, but despite sending two people on a road trip across the United States, somehow they weren't able to pass themselves off as natives of, of many of these states and communities. Right. So one Internet Research Agency member says, he said, first you gotta be a redneck from Kentucky, then you need to be a white guy from Minnesota. That's I, that's actually me, Gordon. I'm a white guy from Minnesota. And then 50 minutes later you're from New York posting in some slang. That's what this guy said. So it's like, yeah, you probably are going to struggle as a Russian in St. Petersburg who's just on this assembly line to really kind of write copy for your accounts that's going to be credible and that other people are going to want to interact with. Right. The other piece of this is that there were about a billion tweets related to the campaigns and that were posted in the 15 months leading up to the election.
- [38:36]
Gordon Carrera
By everyone, you mean?
- [38:36]
David McCloskey
Yeah, by everybody. By everybody.
- [38:39]
Gordon Carrera
Everything. Election.
- [38:40]
David McCloskey
Yeah, everything. Election related Internet Research Agency generated less than 0.05% of all election related posts. Which when I read that, I'm kind of like, that's a small number. Then I thought, it's actually not a. In insignificant number for one operation in St. Petersburg, Russia. But the point is, is that it was absolutely drowned out by the organic tweets created by Americans during the election. And to just kind of seal the point, the most engaged content was designed not to polarize, but to build communities around these Personas so that more and more people would follow them. Now, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released about 2,300 of the Facebook ads that the trolls had placed over the two years preceding the election. And the top 10 most popular ads, which accounted for a quarter of all views, none of them had sharp or corrosive disinformation to them. So again, it's all kind of trying to drive people to these Personas to build their profile. Now, the best known, the most widely covered Facebook ad depicted Satan in an arm wrestling match with a white robed Jesus. And the caption says, satan is saying, if I win, Clinton wins. And Jesus says, not if I can help it. The New York Times reported on and reproduced that ad after the election, and which obviously is, it's, you know, it's,
- [40:07]
Gordon Carrera
it's famous it's iconic as one of the more famous ones.
- [40:10]
David McCloskey
The original ad was, was one of the Internet research agencies least successful. It displayed for one day, it cost them 64 rubles, which at that point was $1. And it had 71 impressions, which is probably about the same number of impressions that you're getting on some of your Instagram posts. Gordon.
- [40:32]
Gordon Carrera
I was going to say, I'd be, I'd be pretty happy with that.
- [40:35]
David McCloskey
14. 14Americans clicked on it in total.
- [40:40]
Gordon Carrera
And yet that becomes the iconic one which everyone points to. And it's on the New York Times and everywhere else. Things are really good example about how, how outsized the media reporting of it was compared to the potential actual impact of it. Which isn't to say that it's meaningless, but it's just. I think that perspective is important.
- [41:00]
David McCloskey
That's right. I mean, the median number of impressions for all of the pre election political ads thrown out there by the Internet Research Agency, the median number of impressions was 199. And impressions is literally. I looked at it, I scrolled past it. Right. I didn't actually read or engage with it. So.
- [41:20]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it doesn't mean it did anything.
- [41:21]
David McCloskey
Yeah, exactly.
- [41:22]
Gordon Carrera
But I do think what's interesting is the legacy of this operation will be enormous because particularly in the long term, the press coverage of it, the questions around was there targeting through kind of social media and remember the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, and the ability to manipulate people, it became a real thing and a real obsession. And that arguably overstates the impact of it and creates this sense that the Russians are there and almost all powerful and have the ability to manipulate American politics, when in this case I think the actual evidence is much weaker. So it's an active measure, which it doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on the election, on people's views, but it does have a much longer tail in terms of the kind of cultural, social and political impact after the election, which maybe we'll get to when we get to the end of the series in terms of what it means. So I think there's an interesting dichotomy there, isn't there?
- [42:22]
David McCloskey
And I think it's worth summing up that this piece of the Russian sort of disorganized active measure. Right, the siloed active measure, this was, I think, the least effective component of what the Russians did in 2016. But the hacking leak.
- [42:38]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it's much more significant.
- [42:40]
David McCloskey
Is much more significant. And By October of 2016, the Trump campaign is beginning to signal that another dump of information is coming. The hack and leak is really unlike the social media piece is going to be really integrated into the kind of the TikTok, the chronology of events in the run up to the election. And of course, once again, Gordon, it's Roger Stone, Trump sort of campaign adviser who is in the middle of the chaos. Because on Sunday, October 2nd at 12:52am I think in Trump world you have to tweet in the middle of the night. It's important that important tweets go out.
- [43:18]
Gordon Carrera
But I thought, I thought conservatives are up early, though.
- [43:20]
David McCloskey
Stone's up. He got up. He got up at mid. He got up at midnight. No, he's not. He didn't stay up late. He got up early. Gordon.
- [43:26]
Gordon Carrera
Oh, he got up really early.
- [43:27]
David McCloskey
He got up at 12:45. But he's tweeting.
- [43:30]
Gordon Carrera
That's the point.
- [43:31]
David McCloskey
He's tweeting and he tweets. Wednesday at Hillary Clinton is done. Hashtag WikiLeaks. So again, we have Roger Stone's got this weird foreknowledge of what Julian Assange is up to. Then later that day, Stone appears on the show of infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Did Alex Jones, did he ever break into the UK market? Gordon?
- [43:54]
Gordon Carrera
I think, I think we're, I'm aware of Alex Jones, but I think he was as big over here, I think it's fair to say. Okay.
- [44:00]
David McCloskey
And Stone says, you know, I'm assured the motherlode is coming on Wednesday. Says the release will be devastating. Also says that Assange was scared that the globalists and the Clintonites are trying to figure out how to kill him. And then he puts out More tweets on 3 October, saying that the payload is coming the following day. Stone is contacted by a senior Trump campaign official who wants to know what on earth WikiLeaks is planning. And Stone writes back that Julian Assange is going to release a load every week going forward. Donald Trump Jr. Had intermittently been in private contact with WikiLeaks. And we should say for those listeners who want to go deeper into some of the campaign connections with WikiLeaks and the Russians and the kind of whole Trump Russia nexus, what's fact and what's fiction do? Go and check out our miniseries for club members on this and you can join@the restisclassified.com But Donald Trump Jr. Who's kind of on again, off again in private contact with WikiLeaks, he wants to know more about what Stone knows now. A couple weeks earlier, on September 20, WikiLeaks Twitter account had actually sent Donald Trump Jr. A private message asking him about a new election blog called putin trump.org I wonder if that website is still up. That had been created by a political action committee that had been funded by an Internet entrepreneur. And Donald Trump Jr. Replies, he says, off the record, I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around. And then he emails Steve Bannon campaign advisor Jared Kushner, Killian Conway, who's another advisor, about his exchange with WikiLeaks. So on the 3rd of October, WikiLeaks reaches out to Donald Trump Jr again with a private request and says, hiya, it'd be great if you guys could comment on or push this story. And then WikiLeaks attached attaches an article alleging, I think, falsely, that Clinton had once suggested she wanted to, quote, just drone Assange. And then Donald Trump Jr says, already did that earlier today. It's amazing what she can get away with. And then a couple minutes Later, Donald Trump Jr. Is, you know, he's kind of trying to figure out what's going on with WikiLeaks. He messages WikiLeaks, referring to the Stone tweet, and says, what's behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about? And so basically, what we have is the Trump campaign realizing that a new and potentially very damaging leak is coming that could be fodder that they could use against the Clinton campaign.
- [46:41]
Gordon Carrera
So there, David, let's stop. As this dramatic election campaign in 2016 reaches its final stages, looking incredibly tight, Trump versus Clinton, with the Russians lurking in the background. And we'll see in the final stages what the Russians get up to and how the US national security community responds. And a reminder, of course, you can listen to that episode right now. If you're a club member, join@therealstisclassifier.com and you'll also get access to that bonus series. But otherwise, we'll see you next time.
- [47:13]
David McCloskey
See you next time.