39 Marc Wortman, “The Fake British Radio Show That Helped Defeat the Nazis,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 28, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fake-british-radio-show-helped-defeat-nazis-180962320.
40 Ibid.
41 Rid, Active Measures, 12.
42 US Department of State, Active Measures: A Report on the Substance and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and Propaganda Campaigns, Institute of World Politics, August 1986, https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Soviet-Active-Measures-Substance-and-Process-of-Anti-US-Disinformation-August-1986.pdf.
43 Peter Steiner, “Nobody Knows You’re a Dog” [cartoon], New Yorker, July 1993.
44 The Senate Intelligence Committee bipartisan leadership jointly invited several researchers to pull together teams and examine the data sets. We were each unaware of the composition of other teams, to ensure that the work was done independently in light of the sensitive political nature of the election-related aspect of the material. The work was not a paid consulting engagement but rather a technical advisory relationship. The findings of the reports subsequently informed the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own four-part report investigating Russian interference into the 2016 election. The announcement of our work can be at “New Reports Shed Light on Internet Research Agency’s Social Media Tactics,” US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, December 17, 2018, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/new-reports-shed-light-internet-research-agency%E2%80%99s-social-media-tactics. For the second volume of the report, in which the majority of it appears, see “Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media with Additional Views,” US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf.
45 The cooking forum poster, “Alice Norton,” an “assistant cook” whose profile said she lived in New York, claimed her family had been poisoned by the turkey and her son was hospitalized. This message reached Twitter within a few hours, via nearly one hundred IRA-affiliated Twitter accounts that linked to the post and to a Wikipedia page that had just been created, called “2015 New York Poisoned Turkey Incident.” Wikipedia volunteers quickly took the page down for violating policies, but that same day a news story was posted on the domain ProudtobeBlack.com, a URL registered only a month prior, claiming that two hundred New Yorkers were hospitalized due to poisoned Walmart turkey supplied by Koch’s Farm and that their tip came through “our trusted sources in NYPD.” The claims were investigated by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which had no records of any food poisoning episodes, and an executive at Koch Turkey Farm explained that they don’t even sell turkeys to Walmart. Rob Barry, “Russian Trolls Tweeted Disinformation Long Before U.S. Election,” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/graphics/russian-trolls-tweeted-disinformation-long-before-u-s-election.
46 Darren L. Linvill and Patrick L. Warren, “Troll Factories: Manufacturing Specialized Disinformation on Twitter,” Political Communication 37, no. 4 (February 5, 2020): 447–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1718257.
47 Deen Freelon et al., “Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation,” Social Science Computer Review 40, no. 3 (April 7, 2020): 560–578, https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853.
48 Black women, frequent targets of online trolling, had begun to talk about accounts that attempted to manipulate the Black community, particularly around the time of Gamergate. They used the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to call attention to provocateurs that they suspected to be racist trolls from 4chan (later 8chan); subsequent research into IRA data suggested that some of the activity was additionally boosted, and joined, by Russian trolls who took advantage of real racial tension and shifting norms around online harassment. See, for example, comments by analyst Shireen Mitchell in this New York Times analysis of Russian troll messaging around the Women’s March: Ellen Berry, “How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step,” New York Times, September 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html; for coverage of online impersonation strategies targeting Black women, see Morgan Jerkins, “Black or Bot? The Long, Sordid History of Co-opting Blackness Online,” Mother Jones, September-October 2022, https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/09/disinformation-russia-trolls-bots-black-culture-blackness-ukraine-twitter.
49 Renée DiResta et al., “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” U.S. Senate Documents, October 2019, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/senatedocs/2.
