(2017-11-03) How Russia Pushed Our Buttons With Fake Online Ads

How Russia ‘Pushed Our Buttons’ With Fake Online Ads. Many Americans this week got their first looks at fake Facebook ads placed by Russian propagandists during the 2016 election campaign to sow discord in the US. The ads, made public during congressional hearings with social-media executives, targeted Americans on both sides of divisive issues such as Islam, gun rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Psychologists and students of advertising say the ads were cleverly designed to look like other internet memes, and to appeal to readers’ emotions. Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology at NYU, says he was surprised at the sophistication of the campaign. “It wasn’t transparent lies. It was just pushing our buttons,” says Van Bavel.

Facebook estimates that 10 million people saw the paid ads and up to 150 million people saw other content from the fake accounts, which Facebook has traced to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin-backed troll farm.

“The IRA are not amateurs, they're clearly familiarizing themselves with the kind of content that resonates with the target audiences,” says Renee DiResta, researcher with Data for Democracy, a nonprofit group that has been digging into the data on Russian-linked accounts.

Grygiel also noticed the use of iconography like cowboys, American flags, and women in burqas in that Heart of Texas ad. “It was almost distilled to the point of it being pop art,” she says. “Essentially what they’re doing with some of these memes is like a culture mash. It’s almost like re-mixing American culture and in this case some American fears.”

Van Bavel, the NYU professor, has studied a phenomenon he calls “moral contagion,” referring to the use of moral emotional language to help content go viral on social networks. He says tugging at those emotions tends to drive people deeper into ideological echo chambers, dynamics he saw at play in the Russian ads. “What you’re more likely to click on is stuff that triggers this part of the brain that is so primal,” he says. “Russians knows as much. They know how to pull us apart and agitate us.”

Bruce McClintock, an adjunct policy analyst at the Rand Corporation and a retired brigadier general who served as the senior defense official at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, says the ads resonate with Russian and Soviet tactics of other eras.