Facebook and Twitter executives defended their efforts to prevent Russian meddling in U.S. midterm elections before congressional panels Wednesday. The social media companies’ efforts to provide assurances to lawmakers come amid warnings from internet researchers that Moscow still has active social media accounts aimed at influencing U.S. political discourse. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
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Josh Russell works as a systems analyst and programmer at Indiana University, has two daughters, and exposes Russian internet trolls in his spare time.

Russell first became interested in the phenomenon of Russian trolls during the 2016 presidential election, when he noticed a large amount of misinformation distributed about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. He noticed how many accounts spreading misinformation, ostensibly run by American activists, were, in fact, operating from abroad, and were linked up to now notorious Russian “troll farms.”

Today Russell collaborates with many American journalists in the fight against fake information on the internet.

Question: We recently learned that Russian hackers attacked some conservative U.S. organizations, the Hudson Institute, for example, and the International Republican Institute. What, in your opinion, is driving this?

Joshua Russell: Any organization that investigates Russian interference in U.S. politics is a potential target for these kinds of attacks.

Q: According to Microsoft, the attacks themselves failed.

JR: Yes. But the result is not what’s most important here. Hacker attacks and misinformation are being used to sow confusion and discord in our society.

Q: You noticed this all the way back in 2016, when the majority of Americans did not grasp this. How did you realize what was happening?

JR: I began to monitor the activity of fake activists online. For example, I found a group pretending to be a black activist group—but something was weird about it. If you track the activities of the individual members of such groups, you realize they are being coordinated. When you dig deeper, you understand that they are operated from abroad. Trolls often make mistakes—maybe their English will be suspect, or, for example, an Instagram tied to a particular account is filled with suspicious info. The whole tangle is unraveled when you tug at loose strings.

Q: How can an ordinary internet user spot a fake account?

JR: If you see dubious information being posted, look at where it may have originated. What’s the source, and who else is distributing this information? Follow the trail of clues these guys inevitably leave behind.

Q: It was reported that you’ve actually been threatened over your online activities before. Is this accurate?

JR: Yes. It got to the point that someone sent me pictures of mutilated corpses.

Q: Do you think it was Russian trolls or someone else?

JR: See, we have a lot of people right here in the States who do not want to believe that Kremlin interference is real. That’s where a lot of this aggression stems from.

Q: How do you respond to attempts at intimidation?

JR: I’m more of a liberal than a conservative, but I live in Indiana. This means that I have weapons at home. I have not been threatened for a while, but when it did happen, before I blocked someone, I’d send them a photo of my gun. It tends to have a sobering effect.

Q: So this is a case of you talking to these people in their own language?

JR: Yes, this is what you have to do. I used to be a bit of an internet troll myself, so I understand how trolling works, and the intended psychological effect. If you understand how it works, you know how to respond in an effective and yet tasteful way (laughs).

This interview originated in VOA’s Russian Service.
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Facebook and Twitter executives insisted at a Senate hearing Wednesday that they were aggressively trying to identify foreign actors who wanted to inflict damage on the U.S. before the November midterm elections.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told the Senate Intelligence Committee her company was “now blocking millions of attempts to register false accounts each and every day” and was “making progress on fake news.”

She said the company’s recent efforts were “starting to pay off” but added, “We cannot stop interference by ourselves.”

Sandberg said Facebook was “working with outside experts, industry partners and governments, including law enforcement, to share information about threats and prevent abuse” to avert further interference in American elections.

Social media companies are under pressure over foreign meddling in U.S. elections, the spread of disinformation, privacy and censorship. Congress has criticized social media companies during the past year as it became clear they were on the front lines during Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections and beyond.

Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russians earlier this year on charges stemming from plans to disrupt the 2016 election by creating bogus accounts that circulated divisive issues on social media. The indicted Russians are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency.

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said that his company was “unprepared and ill-equipped” for the foreign influence campaigns but that it had intensified its efforts to eliminate phony accounts to prevent “hostile foreign influence.”

“We’re identifying and challenging 8 million to 10 million suspicious accounts every week, and we’re thwarting over a half-million accounts from logging into Twitter every single day,” he said.

Dorsey also said Twitter was continuing to find accounts that might be linked to the Russians, noting that 3,843 accounts had been suspended and that the company had seen recent activity.

Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., refused to send its top executive to Wednesday’s hearing, prompting sharp words from some senators for Alphabet CEO Larry Page. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, suggested the company might have bailed because it was “arrogant,” while Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, expressed outrage about the absence.

Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner said at the hearing that social media giants “were caught flat-footed by the brazen attacks on our election” and expressed doubt that the companies were adequately confronting the problem.

“I’m skeptical that, ultimately, you’ll be able to truly address this challenge on your own,” Warner said. “Congress is going to have to take action here.”

Despite such skepticism from lawmakers, a key U.S. military official said Wednesday that he was encouraged by the actions companies like Facebook and Twitter had taken in advance of the midterm elections.

“This is where social media companies can impose a cost against our adversaries,” U.S. Cyber Command’s General Paul Nakasone told a security conference in Washington. “This is an ability that I think, uniquely, they are stepping up to.”

Nakasone, who also heads the National Security Agency, also said he was not prepared to give up on companies that have been hesitant to take action, calling continued engagement critical.

“We can’t run from it. We can’t hide from it,” he said, warning that adversaries like Russia and even nonstate actors “continue to have an ability to up their game.”

While Congress has forced social media companies during the past year to focus more on the Russian interference issue, it took several months last year for Facebook and Twitter to acknowledge they had been manipulated.

Many social media companies have made policy changes that caught and banned numerous malicious accounts during the past year. But free services that find out as much about users as possible remain unchanged, prompting critics to say social media companies will continue to contend with bad actors manipulating their systems unless they change.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday that his company found out too late in 2016 there were “foreign actors running coordinated campaigns to interfere with America’s democratic process.”

He said the company had since made improvements, such as “finding and removing fake accounts” and misinformation.

But Zuckerberg warned that Facebook and other social media companies faced “sophisticated, well-funded adversaries who are getting smarter over time, too. It’s an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America’s democracy from outside interference.”

Over the past year, three-fourths of all Facebook users have adjusted their privacy settings, taken weeks-long breaks from the platform or deleted Facebook apps from their cellphones, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

The survey was conducted May 19-June 11, after revelations that the former consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered data on tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

House hearing

Later Wednesday, Twitter’s Dorsey was headed to a House committee hearing focused on Republican complaints that social media companies have shown evidence of bias against conservatives. In testimony released before that hearing, Dorsey denied that Twitter uses political ideology to make decisions.

Some Republicans have contended that Twitter is “shadow banning” some in their party because of the ways search results have appeared. Twitter has rejected the assertions.

Dorsey was the lone invitee to the House hearing. While all three tech companies have been accused of being biased against conservatives, the more public-facing nature of Twitter has made it an easier  target.

VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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Ben Judah is the author of This Is London and Fragile Empire, a contributing writer at Politico, and an expert at the Hudson Institute. His think tank project on modern-day kleptocracy was recently targeted in a cyberattack that Microsoft has linked to the Fancy Bear (ATP28) hacking unit associated with Russian military intelligence.

Judah spoke the Voice of America about the attack on the various right-leaning think tanks, Senate groups, and the current similarities between Moscow and Washington’s political climates.

Question: What happened at the Hudson Institute? Why was your research targeted?

Ben Judah: There is a lot I can’t discuss due to security procedures in place. But what happened is that Microsoft revealed that a series of think tanks and conservative organizations had been targeted by Russian hackers, including, specifically, the program that I had been working on.

Prior to that my own computer had been attacked from a Russian-speaking country. I actually think this is more widespread than people realize. The computers with journalists and think-tankers, dealing not just with Russia, but with Iran, or Turkey, or China, are being targeted far more frequently than talked about.

Q: Should there be more awareness of this problem? Should news organizations, and journalists themselves, be establishing better security protocols?

BJ: When the Russian hackers targeted the think tank project, they created a clone website, so that people would sign up for it and give their details. People trying to read or engage with the work would have their information compromised in this manner. We didn’t know it was happening, so it wasn’t an issue of our security procedures.

And there was no way to find out, apart from frantically Googling yourself all of the time and name-searching yourself in different corners of the internet.

Q: What were the goals of the attack on the Hudson Institute?

BJ: I can’t be entirely sure, but I would assume that they wanted to know the identities of people interested in the work that the think tank was doing on anti-kleptocracy. They wanted to know who was subscribing to it, who was checking it, and who was collaborating with the project. And what the project has been doing is pushing reform on the U.S. legal and financial system—because it argues that the corruption cases that are linked to the administration of President Donald Trump and to Russia are rather a systemic problem in the U.S.

Q: Could intimidation be another factor? Particularly intimidation of researchers or journalists who rely on trips to Russia for their work? Visa issues, for example, can routinely come up for people like that.

BJ: What I’m doing at the moment doesn’t really involve travel to Russia. It’s more to do with the U.S. legal and financial systems, and how shell companies, for example, allow foreign kleptocrats, not only Russian kleptocrats, to abuse the U.S. system. But I also think that intimidation could be a part of the rationale here.

Q: You recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic talking about the similarities between the political climate in Moscow and in Washington. What has changed in D.C. to make such a comparison possible?

BJ: Since the election of Trump, a lot of things [in Washington] have started to remind me of how power behaves in Moscow: endless discussions of the Trump family, the blurring of business interests and executive power, the intensity of the propaganda, politics revolving around one man, increased paranoia amongst journalists and policy operatives—not groundless paranoia, I would say, about being potentially targeted or hacked—the hysteria about foreign influence and foreign interference in politics… All of that reminds of the atmosphere in Moscow.

Another aspect of this is that while working as a journalist in Moscow, I had to face the fact that even if I got an interview with lowly ministers or chairmen of committees or Federation Council senators, I wasn’t talking to people with power vested in their hands. Because it was far more a world of oligarchs and TV propaganda all linked to the Russian president, and there is something of that I’ve noticed developing in Washington.

Previously influential people, people linked into policymaking systems, just don’t have the influence [in Washington] right now, and people who are influencing the president are his family and his top propagandists, as well as other oligarchs.

Q: What is your advice for people in Washington who are dealing with this climate, a climate most Americans simply aren’t used to?

BJ: Be careful of what you keep on your computer and your phone. Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.

This report was produced in collaboration with VOA’s Russian Service.
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Many people enjoy playing video games but take for granted that they can hold and easily operate game controllers. Now Microsoft is making it possible for disabled gamers to join in the fun. Tina Trinh reports.
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Top Twitter and Facebook executives will defend their companies before U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, with Facebook insisting it takes election interference seriously and Twitter denying its operations are influenced by politics.

But no executive from Alphabet’s Google is expected to testify, after the company declined the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to send one of its most senior executives, frustrating lawmakers.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, appearing alongside Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, will say that her company’s efforts to combat foreign influence have improved since the 2016 U.S. election, according to written testimony released Tuesday.

“The actions we’ve taken in response … show our determination to do everything we can to stop this kind of interference from happening,” Sandberg said.

The company is getting better at finding and removing “inauthentic” content and now has more than 20,000 people working on safety and security, she said.

Technology executives have repeatedly testified in Congress over the past year, on the defensive over political influence activity on their sites as well as concerns about user privacy.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into efforts to influence U.S. public opinion for more than a year, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Kremlin-backed entities sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.

Moscow has denied involvement.

Google offered to send its chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to Wednesday’s hearing, but he was rejected by the committee, which said it wanted to hear from corporate decision-makers.

​’Don’t understand the problem’

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, said he expected the hearing would focus on solutions to the problem of foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections and sow political discord, with a jab at Google.

“You don’t understand the problem if you don’t see this as a large effort from whole of government and the private sector,” Burr told reporters at the Senate.

Google said Walker would be in Washington on Wednesday and be available to meet with lawmakers. On Tuesday it released written “testimony” describing the company’s efforts to combat influence operations.

Twitter’s Dorsey also will testify at a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday that the company “does not use political ideology to make any decisions,” according to written testimony also made public Tuesday.

Dorsey will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, addressing Republican concerns about how the social media platform polices content.

“From a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said.

Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they say are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have repeatedly rejected.

Trump faulted Twitter on July 26, without citing any evidence, for limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans through a practice known as shadow banning.

Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island blasted Wednesday’s hearing and his Republican colleagues, calling claims of political bias baseless.

“There is no evidence that the algorithms of social networks or search results are biased against conservatives. It is a made-up narrative pushed by the conservative propaganda machine to convince voters of a conspiracy that does not exist,” Cicilline said.
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As legislators prepare to grill Silicon Valley executives over Russian hacking ahead of midterm elections, some observers say the debate over expanded government oversight is far from over.

On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with legislators in Washington ahead of Wednesday morning’s hearing, where Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions about cybersecurity before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, told The Washington Post that the hearing aims to “to sound the alarm that what happened in 2016, as we’ve seen, was not a one-off.”

In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns, originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeting Americans. The office of Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.

Hacking attempts

Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. While observers say there is no clear evidence of Kremlin efforts to disrupt midterms, it nonetheless appears hackers outside the American political system are probing for a way in.

“What’s interesting about this is that the Russians have shown here that they are not at all partisan in this,” said David Sanger of The New York Times, who first reported on Microsoft’s account of the latest attacks, in which company officials seized website domains created by the Kremlin-linked hacker group known as Fancy Bear or APT28 — the same group that federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms blamed for the 2016 election hack.

The phony sites, designed to emulate the Hudson Institute and International Republican Institute, surreptitiously routed users to pages built by hackers to steal passwords and log-in credentials. The aim, Sanger said, is to disrupt institutions that challenge Moscow or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“They are pursuing their own national interests, going after think tanks that have taken positions that the Russians find uncomfortable or threatening, whether it’s the use of sanctions or promotion of democracy or pursuit of kleptocrats,” Sanger told VOA.

The extent to which Microsoft coordinated with federal investigators to thwart the latest attack wasn’t clear, he said.

“I’m not sure whether they gave the government an advance heads up, but the nature of cyber now is that you hear about these [attacks from the] companies before you hear about them from government,” Sanger added.

In recent months, legislators on both sides of the aisle have expressed willingness to regulate how U.S. tech companies safeguard themselves against intrusions. But analyst Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab says the Microsoft takedown bodes well for the tech sector’s independent ability to prevent attacks.

“This is something we’ve seen over the last couple of months — tech companies have been much more forward-leaning in their attempts to prevent this kind of interference,” Nimmo told VOA.

“We had Microsoft coming out up front and saying we’ve just stopped this attack, and they actually attributed it directly to Fancy Bear, which is very striking that they’re actually confident in making that direct attribution. A couple of weeks ago, we had Facebook coming out and exposing a number of inauthentic accounts, which had some connections with the troll farm in St. Petersburg,” he added, referring to the Internet Research Agency linked to the 2016 U.S. election hack. “About a month before that, we had Twitter coming out and releasing a list of handles that it had traced back to the troll farm.”

A troll farm is a group of people who attempt to create disruption in an online community by posting comments online that are deliberately inflammatory or provocative.

US, European action

With all of the recent activity on the platform side, Nimmo said the question is “what are we going to see on the government level?”

More specifically, what can the West can do in order to pressure the Russian government — and does the West have the political will to do it? If nothing else, the latest attacks are likely to embolden U.S. and European lawmakers to pass additional sanctions.

“Although I think we need to fully understand the scope of this activity that Microsoft has reported, it clearly demonstrates that Russia is not in any way pulling back from the techniques that it used in 2016,” said Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a former NATO deputy secretary general.

“If anything, it’s broadening its target to include conservative think tanks and organizations like the Hudson Institute, and so I think you can say right now, at a minimum, it would give momentum to congressional efforts to tighten the sanctions even further,” added Vershbow, who also has been a U.S. ambassador to Russia, South Korea and NATO. “It may also strengthen the hand of administration officials as they consult with Europe in trying to push the Europeans to tighten their sanctions as well.”

Retired Marine General Jim Jones, former national security adviser during the Obama administration, said although sanctions can be effective in the short term, long-term national security depends on safeguarding the cyber infrastructure itself.

“In a not so distant future, the country that first succeeds in reaching complete cybersecurity will be able to cause even more serious disorders,” Jones told VOA. “That’s the essence of cyberwar in our century.”

For individuals targeted by foreign hackers, such as the Hudson Institute’s Russian kleptocracy expert Ben Judah, no amount of new sanctions or malware detection will be enough.

“Be careful of what you keep on your computer and on your phone,” Judah told VOA. “Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.”

Following Wednesday morning’s Senate hearing, Twitter CEO Dorsey will appear solo before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he’ll be asked to address allegations of political censorship.

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Original reporting contributed by Natalia Antonova and Jela De Franceschi. Some information is from AP.
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