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By Dustin Volz 

WASHINGTON -- A Russian influence campaign ahead of the 2016 election used a range of social-media platforms to suppress African-American voter turnout and boost Donald Trump's presidential bid, while relying more on Instagram than previously known, according to two independent studies released on Monday.

The reports, commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, are the first to draw from a trove of data provided by Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Google's YouTube and other platforms exploited by Russian trolls during the 2016 campaign.

The new research offers granular detail of efforts by Russian actors, including the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg that is funded by a Kremlin-connected oligarch, to pose as Americans on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and other platforms and inject divisive content into America's political discourse.

Among other findings, the research highlighted efforts to liken Mr. Trump to Jesus in social-media posts and vilify his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as demonic. It found efforts to energize conservative voters over immigration and gun rights and to sow distrust in the electoral process to damp enthusiasm among demographic groups like African-Americans that tend to vote Democratic.

Instagram's use as a favored tool by the Russians to spread disinformation is likely underappreciated, one of the reports concluded, assessing that the Facebook-owned photo-sharing site became more popular in 2017 as public scrutiny focused largely on other platforms.

Russia-linked content was found to have a higher rate of specific mentions of Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton on Instagram than Facebook or Twitter and outperformed other sites in terms of overall engagement. There were 187 million interactions with deceptive content on Instagram compared with 76.5 million on Facebook, the research from New Knowledge, a Texas-based cybersecurity firm, found. That suggested Instagram may be more susceptible to viral influence operations than other social-media services, the researchers said.

While U.S. officials say Russian trolls and hackers seem mostly to have sat on the sidelines during this year's midterm elections, the researchers say the effort to meddle in U.S. politics continues.

"This newly released data demonstrates how aggressively Russia sought to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology, and how the [Internet Research Agency] actively worked to erode trust in our democratic institutions," Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "Most troublingly, it shows that these activities have not stopped."

Their conclusions broadly align with the January 2017 assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a multipronged cyber operation seeking to boost Mr. Trump and denigrate Mrs. Clinton, and with findings by the social-media companies and U.S. criminal indictments against Russian trolls and hackers.

Those indictments were brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating, among other things, links between Trump's campaign and Russian influence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied that while also casting doubt on the U.S. conclusion that Russian actors interfered in the election to his benefit.

The report by New Knowledge found that the Internet Research Agency was especially interested in targeting African-American voters and "focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets." Russians recruited apparently unwitting Americans of all backgrounds to attend rallies or help spread content online, but they spent the most time specifically aiming those efforts at African-Americans, the report concluded.

Those tactics included targeting those groups with content intended to stoke racial tensions with posts on police brutality, and dissuade them from going to the polls by casting doubt on the integrity of the electoral process. They sought to encourage voters to switch support from Mrs. Clinton to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who won more than 1% of the popular vote.

The New Knowledge study also traces a common tactic by Russian operatives: building massive followings with a Facebook or Instagram page on other topics, such as the television program "The Simpsons," before shifting to overtly political content. One of the most viral posts tracked on Facebook was a meme stating veterans -- another demographic audience often targeted by Russian operations -- deserved support before refugees. The post was shared in September 2016 and had more than 720,000 engagements.

The other report, produced by the University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network-analysis company, found origins of Russian online-influence operations targeting U.S. audiences as far back as 2009. Efforts to sway American political conversation began to emerge as early as 2013 on Twitter, the report found.

News of the reports' findings prompted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to announce it was returning a recent donation from Facebook. The group, one of the U.S.'s oldest civil-rights organizations, called for a one-week boycott of Facebook and additional congressional investigations into the company's role in spreading Russian disinformation. A spokeswoman for the NAACP declined to describe the size of the donation being returned.

Both reports faulted social-media companies for their responses to the Russian efforts and said they had been unwilling in some cases to share data with researchers. The New Knowledge report said the companies appeared to have "misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress," including suggesting that certain demographic groups weren't targeted and that there were no discernible efforts to suppress votes.

Representatives for Twitter and Facebook didn't comment specifically on the findings in the new research. Google, part of Alphabet Inc., declined to comment.

"As we've said all along, Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency," a Facebook spokeswoman said. "We continue to fully cooperate with officials investigating the IRA's activity on Facebook and Instagram around the 2016 election."

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company was focused on improving conversation on its service and that protecting the integrity of elections was a key aspect of that goal.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 17, 2018 17:54 ET (22:54 GMT)

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