Hacking Culture Not Code: How American Racism Fuels Russia's Century-Long Memetic Disinformation Campaign

Abstract

This study develops upon recent scholarship about the Russian government's digital influence campaign to cultivate Black Americans during the 2016 election by rooting their efforts within a century-long strategy to exploit racial inequality to discredit and damage American democracy. Guided by Shifman’s (2013) construct of memetics, we employed a novel methodology that combined journalistic fact-checking and critical, qualitative analysis to study 164 Facebook advertisements targeted at Black Americans. These advertisements closely resembled Soviet-era propaganda and new disinformation strategies facilitated by the affordances of Facebook. Our findings reveal the advertisements exploited Facebook's interactive design and used an insider's voice to share real news about racial inequality, celebrate Black culture, and coordinate civic action. This study's methodological approach provides a meaningful framework for understanding how actors hack and deploy cultural knowledge to spread disinformation through social media platforms.

Keywords

critical and cultural studies visual and digital communication racism critical discourse analysis propaganda

In December 2018, the United States Senate released two reports, produced by scholars, that provided deep insight into Russia's digital campaign to influence American democracy during the 2016 presidential election. The reports came to the same conclusion that the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) had leveraged popular social platforms to garner the trust of specific social groups to exacerbate existing social divisions amongst Americans (DiResta et al., 2018; Howard et al., 2018). By sowing divisions amongst different targeted groups that included “information warfare” (Oates, 2020), the Russians wanted to create a media ecology that was favorable to Donald Trump's chances in the 2016 presidential election (DiResta et al., 2018; Howard et al., 2018). The IRA's campaign, which began as early as 2012, was tailored to exploit the designed affordances of different social platforms evidenced by how they deployed “real-time chatter” (Diresta et al., 2018, p. 20) on Twitter and sought to develop user communities built on deeper ties through Facebook pages (Freelon & Lokot, 2020; Howard et al., 2018; Oates, 2020). Amongst the primary target for the IRA's cross-platform influence campaign, which is estimated to have reached 126 million people across the political spectrum, were Black Americans (DiResta et al., 2018).

The Russians attempted to influence Black Americans by amplifying news stories about racial injustice combined with tweets, Facebook, and Instagram posts that celebrated Black histories, beauty, and achievement (Freelon & Lokot, 2020; Howard et al., 2018). As historian and journalist Cobb (2018) wrote in the New Yorker, Russia has an “enduring interest in matters relating to African-Americans.” Throughout the 20^th century, the former Soviet Union targeted African Americans and its citizens with visceral, visual propaganda that revealed the brutality of American racism through image and text to thwart capitalism in the US and abroad (Cobb, 2018; Hathcock, 2003; Rose, 2016). Given this background, Russia's efforts to influence Black Americans are not new but were practiced for nearly a century. This necessitates scholars examine the IRA's social media campaign through a broader framework that relates how the IRA's representations of racial identity and systematic racism are illustrative of longstanding propaganda tactics.

This paper critically examines the discourses embedded within a subset of 164 Facebook ads released by the U.S. House of Representatives in May 2018 designed to influence Black Americans during the 2016 election. Our analysis, which reveals three major findings, is guided by how Bakir and McStay (2018) describe Facebook as a site that traffics in “empathic media,” and Shifman’s (2013) study of memetics that allows for the simultaneous examination of form, content, and stance of multimodal media. By focusing on Facebook as a platform, and the memification of cultural signifiers, this study takes a novel approach comparative to previous research that focused primarily on Twitter or the use of news framing and agenda-setting to understand the IRA's influence in 2016 (Farkas & Bastos, 2018; Linvill et al., 2019; Golovchenko et al., 2020).

First, closely resembling Soviet-era propaganda, the IRA published advertisements containing real news about police brutality, the mistreatment of Black children, and mass incarceration, all from an insider's vantage point. Many of the ads we examined contained partial truths, misleading details, and in a few cases, the decontextualized representations of Black Americans were used as affective currency that we describe as memetic racism. A second finding was that the IRA's advertising campaign promoted stories about Black histories, aesthetics, and achievement in ways that mimicked discourses explored by legitimate Black digital media. Developing on the findings of DiResta et al. (2018), we also found that in the days before and after election day, the IRA encouraged Black civic participation by publishing depictions of iconic Black leaders and connecting the 2016 election to periods of racial struggle in U.S. history. Based on these findings, we conclude this study by articulating that racism is exploited by foreign actors to threaten American democracy. Our findings come at a critical moment in U.S. history when state legislatures are launching an assault on the use of Critical-Race theory in education (Camera, 2021; Ray & Gibbons, 2021).

Social Platforms, Affective Media, and the Spread of Propaganda

Social platforms such as Facebook privilege the sharing of videos, images, and text that will optimize user engagement in the form of likes, reactions, shares, and comments (Turow & Couldry, 2018; Vasudevan, 2020). Ultimately, this economy of affect is commodified by backend algorithms for the purpose of selling microtargeted audience information to advertisers and developers (Oates, 2020; Walker et al., 2019). The mediating factor between audiences and advertisers is what Bakir and McStay (2018) described as (p. 171) “empathic media,” which is designed to trigger an emotional response from audiences and compel them to engage with content by sharing or reacting. Facebook also nudges individuals toward like-minded groups based on race, political affiliation, and interests which exacerbates the potential echo chambers in which people rarely encounter beliefs different from their own (Mihailidis & Viotty, 2017). It is within these digital environments that Americans increasingly receive and engage with news (Shearer & Grieco, 2019).

In the years since the 2016 election, several scholars have concluded that Facebook's business model was easily exploited for the spread of misinformation and disinformation (Mihailidis & Viotty, 2017; Oates, 2020; Sano-Franchini, 2018; Vaidhyanathan, 2018; Walker et al., 2019). Facebook's visual design draws attention away from the sources of information, making it difficult to determine between advertising, original reporting, and propaganda (Oates, 2017; Sano-Franchini, 2018). While source credibility on Facebook is diminished, the social platform encourages short, sensational headlines and eye-catching visuals that allow users to engage with posts regardless of if they have viewed the content (Sano-Franchini, 2018). Additionally, as Vaidhyanathan (2018) explained, in an increasingly polarized political climate, misinformation and disinformation flow more freely when members of micro-targeted groups are willing participants sharing videos and memes that convey existing beliefs. Private firms such as Cambridge Analytica and the Russian government-funded IRA took advantage of this media ecology to influence voter behavior (DiResta et al., 2018; Linvill and Warren, 2020; Walker et al., 2019).

As the two reports commissioned by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, in the lead-up and in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the IRA targeted members of several different social groups on Facebook: conservatives, liberals, and Black Americans (DiResta et al., 2018; Howard et al., 2018). According to Diresta et al. (2018), the IRA's efforts to “develop human assets” was “substantially more pronounced on Black-targeted accounts” (p. 8). Similar to how the Soviets eluded detection and infiltered the Black press in their initial appeals to Black Americans, the IRA dawned “digital Blackface” (Freelon et al., 2020, p. 4) and presented themselves as insiders to garner trust within the Black social media ecosystem. Using Facebook's designed capacity for creating communities of mutual interest, the IRA created 30 pages for their accounts that garnered nearly 1.9 million followers (Diresta et al., 2018; Lukito, 2020). Within these pages, the IRA operatives published advertisements that adhered to topics already being discussed by Black Americans, such as police brutality, mass incarceration, Black aesthetics, and hidden Black histories (Howard et al., 2018). The IRA garnered attention for their Facebook pages by microtargeting advertisements to Black Americans based on their interest in “Martin Luther King,” “African American Civil Rights Movement (1954-68),” “African-American history,” “Black power” amongst several other microtargeted group interests created by Facebook's algorithm (Diresta et al., 2018; Howard et al., 2018).

Facebook, according to Oates (2020), provided a fitting vehicle for Russian propaganda as it allows “foreign influence operations” the capacity to “identify key groups, infiltrate them, and manipulate them” (p. 4). In addition to sharing news stories and calls to action, the IRA trafficked heavily in digital memes, a form of immutable content that can be used as “a powerful tool for cultural influence” and can be used to change “values and behavior” (Diresta et al., 2018, p. 50). Although Diresta et al.’s (2018) definition of memes is used to describe a certain type of digital content that “takes the form of pictures, icons, lyrics” and turns “big ideas into emotionally-resonant snippets,” Shifman’s (2013) construct of memetics allows for the understanding of how the examination of a message's design and content is necessary to study its meaning. Digital memes, according to Shifman (2013), are “units of imitation” (p. 367) that contain three mutable features: form, content, and stance. Within this framework, content refers to the “ideas and ideologies” within a “specific text,” the form represents how humans use their senses to understand the message, and the stance refers to how a message sender “positions themselves in relation to a text, its linguistic codes, the addressees, and other potential speakers” (Shifman, 2013, p. 367). Shifman’s (2013) theorization of memes provides a meaningful way to understand how Facebook ads designed with a defined stance are enveloped within an interactive form and share information through empathic storytelling.

Soviet Propaganda, Anti-Racism, and Black America

In the early 20^th century, Jim Crow laws were passed to preserve White supremacy in the Southern United States (Alexander, 2011). These laws that eroded Black Americans’ right to vote and own property were brutally enforced with impunity by the Klu Klux Klan and law enforcement (Alexander, 2011). Additionally, practices such as convict leasing were designed to strip Black men of their freedom in service of providing cheap labor to White landowners (Oshinsky, 1997; Pope, 2019). In other words, American capitalism and the creation of White wealth continued to rely on the disenfranchisement and exploitation of Black Americans well after the U.S. civil war (Du Bois, 2014).

Beginning in the late 1920s, the newly formed Soviet Union sought to exploit the mistreatment of Black Americans through its “anti-racism” propaganda to expose the cruelty of American capitalism and thwart its global spread (Berland, 1999). In contrast to the brutal treatment of Black Americans in the United States, Soviet propaganda presented Russia as a haven for workers where Blacks and Whites lived in racial harmony (Goff & Fiks, 2016). The early Soviet anti-racism propaganda efforts, which took the form of newspapers, films, and art, were in service of three goals: creating a Black communist state in the U.S., courting Black workers to build Russia's growing agricultural sector, and convincing people living under Soviet rule of its superiority over American capitalism (Ioffe, 2017). Furthermore, Black Americans were reconstructed in Soviet propaganda as Black male workers, who were presented as heroes when represented on American soil and victims when depicted on Russian soil to convey Russia's paternalistic role in race relations (Roman, 2012). A key component of early Soviet propaganda was depicting the lynching of Black Americans through photographs and illustrations (Roman, 2012). As Roman (2012) explained, Soviet-sponsored newspapers in Russia and the United States made the lynching of Black Americans’ front-page news and often included images of victim's lifeless bodies. Roman (2012) also found that Soviet newspapers printed decontextualized images of lynching victims alongside news stories and altered facts about lynching victims to serve the pro-Soviet agenda. For example, in one story, a Black lynching victim from Marion, Indiana, was reported to have been killed by a mob for participating in labor strikes (Roman, 2012). However, the only reported lynching victims during the same period were Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, neither of whom had participated in organizing activities, and whose lifeless bodies hanging from a tree in front of a group of White onlookers became an enduring image of the horrors of White supremacy (Roman, 2012). Roman (2012) concluded that the altered facts surrounding the story were intended to portray Black Americans “as members of the revolutionary vanguard whose efforts at mobilizing were met with barbaric violence by the same white landowners, who ultimately sought to destroy the first workers’ state” (p. 64).

After World War II, the struggles of Black Americans again became central to the ideological battle between the U.S. and Russia as both countries jockeyed for global dominance during the Cold War (Dudziak, 1996). As the United States positioned itself as the global leader and champion of human rights, the Soviet Union's propaganda drew attention to how Black Americans continued to be treated as second-class citizens (Ioffe, 2017; Patel & Koreh, 2018). For example, the Soviet Union's news outlets around the globe provided sensational nonstop coverage of the Little Rock crisis of 1957 (Ioffe, 2017). In the 1980s, the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret police force, launched a disinformation campaign spread through tabloid news publications, that HIV/AIDs had been created by the CIA as an “ethnic weapon,” designed to kill ethnic minorities (Boghardt, 2009; Soviet Active Measures in the Era of Glasnot, 1988). More recently, as described by a journalist (Quinn, 2014) in The Moscow Times, the killings of Black teenagers such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown that catalyzed nationwide protests for racial justice were front-page news and given “hour-long segments” by Russian state media. Consistent with Soviet-era propaganda, Russian coverage of American racism was used to not only discredit U.S. democracy but to deflect attention from problems at home, such as the continued Ukrainian crisis. In short, Russia's strategy to exploit American race relations to spread propaganda has been crafted and iterated upon for a century.

Methodology

To understand how the Internet Research Agency aimed to influence Black Americans, we downloaded a publicly available dataset of 3,519 Facebook ads released by the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 2018). Each advertisement contained metadata such as the intended Facebook users targeted, and the date published. Using the metadata, we narrowed the dataset to ads that targeted Black Americans. We then focused on ads published in September, October, and November 2016, when the IRA amplified its influence efforts (DiResta et al., 2018). Duplicates were deleted to focus the analysis on specific discourse. After cleaning the dataset, 164 advertisements remained, published by nine Facebook accounts: Black Matters (83 ads), Blacktivist (33 ads), Williams and Kalvin (20 ads), Woke Blacks (13 ads), Pan-African roots MOVE (6 ads), Nefertiti's Community (5 ads), Black4Black (2 ads), Black_Baptist_Church (1 ad), Watch the Police (1 ad).

Shifman’s (2013) framework for studying digital memes guided the analysis, as it allows for the examination of content, form, and stance within the same context. Resonant with the existing scholarship of the IRA's influence campaign and after an initial round of qualitative coding, our team of three researchers concluded that the advertisements were created from the “digital Blackface” stance, and the form of the advertisements was designed to elicit online and offline action (Freelon et al., 2020). To understand the underlying ideas and ideologies within the content of the ads, we conducted a fact check of the information, including names, quotes, images, historical facts, and locations. Next, an open thematic coding strategy (Nowell et al., 2017) using NVivo analysis software allowed us to highlight discourses within the ads such as police brutality and Black empowerment. Using NVivo software also allowed our team of three researchers the ability to quantify our qualitative codes, which allowed us to understand the most prevalent strategies used by the Russians, such as the passage of real news stories. After several rounds of coding, we distilled 45 codes into three major themes, then cross-referenced them with existing scholarship about Soviet-era and Russian propaganda.

Findings

Facebook, as DiResta et al. (2018) argued, was used as a digital laboratory to study, target, and cultivate Black Americans “as human assets” (p. 8). The Russian-backed groups evaded detection by wearing “digital Blackface” (Freelon et al., 2020, p. 4) and becoming part of the Black digital ecosystem (DiResta et al., 2018). Developing upon this existing knowledge, our critical and qualitative analysis of the IRA's Facebook ads reveal three ways that the influence campaign hacked Black culture. First, the IRA's content used visceral images and an insider's voice to share real news stories about police brutality and other forms of racial injustice. These ads, echoing early Soviet-era strategies, blended facts with myth and used decontextualized representations of Black people. The advertisements we examined were developed with an awareness of contemporary conversations about Black aesthetics, histories, and achievement. The IRA used this knowledge to mimic the cultural vernaculars and visual representations used by Black Americans within digital spaces. Finally, the advertisements employed knowledge of police brutality, stereotyped representations, and the historical disenfranchisement of Black Americans to encourage offline civic action before and after the election.

Real News, Altered Facts, and Disinformation

In our analysis of 164 Facebook advertisements, 63 were based on real news stories. The most prevalent theme was police brutality, followed by stories about the mistreatment of Black children and Black excellence. This strategy echoes Jim Crow and early Cold War-era propaganda that often trafficked in news stories about state and mob violence against Black Americans to draw attention to the failures of American democracy (Dudziak, 1996; Roman, 2012). In contrast to the horrific imagery of Black people hanging from trees, the IRA's Facebook ads represented state violence with photographic portraits of the victims, images of police vehicles as stand-ins for law enforcement, and smartphone footage that captured the victims’ last moments. The accompanying text of the IRA's advertisements revealed story information, condemned police violence, and in many cases sought to humanize Black victims of police brutality. Furthermore, the empathic visual design of the IRA's ads that shared real news stories largely mirrored how activists, citizen journalists, and digital news outlets share information (Allan & Peters, 2020; Freelon et al., 2016). In other words, the empathic voice of the IRA's advertisements was consistent with the digital ecosystem it penetrated. For example, in an advertisement published on November 3, 2016, through the Blacktivist account, the accompanying text states in all capital letters, “CHARLESTON COP WHO FATALLY SHOT BLACK MAN ASKS JUDGE TO DROP CHARGES, CITING DOUBLE RISK.” The capitalized text is repeated in white bolded text, resembling the visual aesthetic of Internet memes over a mosaic image. The image includes two screenshots of citizen video that captured the 2015 police killing of Walter Scott in North Carolina and a mugshot photo of former police officer Michael Slager who was later found guilty of second-degree murder for killing Scott. The advertisement includes several verifiable facts about the events that led to Slager killing Scott and Slager's legal battle to get his murder charges dismissed. In the last paragraph of the advertisement, the authors wrote, “we’ve seen what happened in different parts of America: unarmed dead black bodies lying across the streets at the hands of police officers, and none of them found guilty. That's why today, it's important to send a message to other police officers that if they do this, it's a harsh penalty to pay.”

Taken together, the screengrabs of Walter Scott's killing, the mugshot of Michael Slager, and the advertisement are written from an insider's stance that depicts a dire situation for Black Americans unless action is taken to hold police accountable. The advertisement's stance and content highlight the reality that Black Americans are disproportionately killed by police in the U.S. (DeGue et al., 2016). As a Facebook post, the advertisement's form is designed to manifest a reader's anger or disgust into digital action such as sharing or commenting.

The IRA's distribution of real news through advertisements often blended verifiable facts with incorrect assertions, again resembling early Soviet propaganda. By “distorting or fabricating information” (p. 64) about the lynching of Black Americans, according to Roman (2012), the Soviets could more easily craft narratives to fit their messaging needs. We observed this strategy in another advertisement published by the Blacktivist account on November 3, 2016. The advertisement details the police killing of Michelle Lee Shirley, a thirty-nine-year-old Black woman in California, and the accompanying text claimed that half of the police shootings in the U.S. involve a person with a mental illness. This is an inaccurate interpretation of a statistic from a 2016 report by the Ruderman Family Foundation, which claimed that “roughly a third to a half of all people killed by police are disabled” (p. 4). Though we cannot say definitely the IRA based their statistic on the Ruderman Family Foundation report, several other legitimate news sources such as The Guardian, NBC News, and Teen Vogue had cited the study in original reporting. It should be noted, however, that other facts about Shirley's life and death, such as her struggle with bipolarity and pursuit of a law degree at the University of Chicago, were factually accurate. Additionally, two advertisements that featured Shirley included photos of her smiling and in her graduation regalia. When taken together, the image and text humanize Michelle Lee Shirley and draw attention to the struggles people with mental health face.

While during the Jim Crow era, there were countless acts of racial violence against Black Americans, as Roman explained (2012), Soviet-backed newspapers would repurpose and repackage old stories as breaking news. We evidenced a version of this tactic in an advertisement posted on October 14, 2016, by the Black Matters account that detailed the death of Dante Parker, a Black man who had died in police custody in 2014. The accompanying image is a collage of Parker and his wife on the left and members of his grieving family following his death on the right. The advertisement's text message accurately described Parker as a husband and father of five children and draws attention to the fact that he was tasered twenty-five times in police custody before dying. Displayed prominently over the image in bolded, all-capitalized white text is a quote attributed to Parker's wife Bianca that states, “POLICE CAN JUST WALK AROUND FREELY AND KILL AND NOTHING IS BEING DONE ABOUT IT.” We meticulously searched for a public record of Bianca Parker's quote, but in our examination of nineteen local, national, and digital news stories, we found no evidence that she ever said those words. We conclude that two years after his death, Parker's story provided a vehicle to attach a fabricated quote that would garner the attention of readers.

As Diresta et al. (2018) argued, the IRA's influence campaign was designed to sow distrust in American news media, and our findings present how this manifested through the passage of real news that used decontextualized images of Black people as emotional currency. An advertisement published on November 1, 2016, by the Blacktivist account showed a smiling white mother with her newborn in a hospital bed and a Black doctor gently caressing the child's head. The advertisement offers partially accurate information by conveying that a “Nigerian doctor” removed a baby from the mother's uterus to remove a tumor and successfully returned the baby to the womb. Above this factual information, in red bolded text, is the assertation that, “The media did not report this story. But we will.” Together, the image and text convey achievements by Black Americans are not recognized by mainstream media. The story was, in fact, widely covered by news media in October 2016 by local and national news organizations, including CNN and the Washington Post. The accompanying image was not taken in 2016 but eleven years earlier in 2005 by an Associated Press photographer. The image featured a woman named Ellen Jorgensen and her son Garrett Jorgensen, not the patients of the 2016 surgery, Margaret Boemer, and her daughter LynLee Hope Boemer. It should also be noted that the surgery was conducted by the team of U.S.-based medical professionals Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye, and Dr. Darrell Cass, respectively Black and White. By referring to Dr. Olutoye simply as a “Nigerian doctor” and repurposing an old image as multimodal evidence that Black achievement goes unnoticed, the Blacktivist account used the story as emotional currency to cultivate trust with Black audiences while sowing doubt in mainstream news media.

A second way the IRA's advertisements trafficked decontextualized images as emotional currency was by sharing stories of police brutality about unnamed victims, which we observed in five instances. This is resonant with how photographs of lynching during the Jim Crow era were often repurposed and used in multiple Soviet-backed newspaper stories to draw continual attention to state violence (Roman, 2012). Three of the five advertisements depicted grainy, mobile phone footage of police officers either surrounding or violently restraining a Black person on the ground. While we were able to verify one of the stories was real, the death of Tawon Boyd in 2016 at the hands of Baltimore police and emergency personnel, we could not find any publicly available information about the remaining four stories. While we were limited to examining the advertisement, it is important to note Facebook engenders a form of engagement designed for readers to react with the least amount of friction and information (Sano-Franchini, 2018). While we cannot conclude with certainty these stories were not real, we do argue that the tactic used by the IRA is a form of representational racism that views images and stories about state violence against Black Americans as inventory for information warfare.

While we observed the IRA's advertisements used real news stories to share misleading, unverified, or untrue information, six of the advertisements were based upon existing conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated rumors. For example, an advertisement published on October 20, 2016, by the Black Matters accounts circulated the “Willie Lynch Letter” conspiracy theory. The theory, debunked by historians (Cobb, 2004; Rosenzweig, 2001), purports that in 1712 a slave owner named Willie Lynch gave a speech that provided a framework to control Black people by keeping them at odds with one another (Cobb, 2004). The conspiracy theory that surfaced online in the 1990s (Rosenzweig, 2001) is designed to provide a “quick-and-easy explanation” of Black “disunity,” according to Cobb (2004). However, the conspiracy theory has become an albatross amongst some Black Americans to rally against, providing the Russians a durable existing trope to recirculate. In another advertisement published on November 1, 2016, the Williams and Kalvin account recirculated a debunked news story that police officers in Dothan, Alabama, had “for years […] allegedly planted drugs and guns on black people.” The advertisement also includes a video that we could not watch because it was no longer publicly available. However, we were able to view three video excerpts from the Williams and Kalvin videos published by the Daily Beast, in which the character described as Kalvin speaks confidently to the camera and offers additional context to the advertisement text and image (Collins, 2017). The allegations in the advertisement about Dothan County police officers planting drugs on Black people were likely based on a 2015 article published in the Henry County Report by independent journalist Jon Carroll in which he reported several whistleblowers had given him documents that offered hard evidence of the drug planting allegations (Neyfakh, 2015). However, the allegations were brought into question because of a lack of evidence to corroborate Carroll's claims (Balko, 2015). After a two-year investigation, according to Jay Hare (2019) writing in the Dothan Eagle, the FBI concluded there was no conspiracy within the Dothan County Police Department to plant drugs on Black residents. Additionally, Jon Carroll's article has since been removed from the Henry County Report.

In addition to recirculating an unsubstantiated news story, the advertisement used the decontextualized representation of Black people to prove the story's validity. The background image used to show visual evidence of wrongdoing by Dothan County police officers depicts an unarmed Black man with his hands above his head, police officers in tactical gear pointing long guns at him. A fact-check of the background photo revealed that it was taken in 2014 by photojournalist Whitney Curtis, during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown. While the advertisement purports to support racial justice, the result is another usage of representational, memetic racism by the IRA, designed to exploit the real struggles Black Americans face.

Cultural Literacy of Black Histories, Activism, and Aesthetics

While the IRA's publication of real news stories blended facts and myth to draw attention to racial injustice, a large subset of advertisements celebrated Black histories, activism, aesthetics, and achievement. These advertisements, designed to evoke nostalgia and pride, were created with an awareness of historical and contemporary conversations about race taking place online amongst Black Americans. In the years leading up to the election, the Black Lives Matter movement had engendered a new wave of Black activism calling for racial justice both on and offline (Carney, 2016). Films produced by Black Americans such as Barry Jenkins's “Moonlight” explored Black identities and narratives that had been absent from mainstream media. The viral #Oscarssowhite hashtag, created by April Reign in 2015, also drew attention to the lack of opportunities for Black filmmakers and actors (Ugwu, 2020). Additionally, social networking sites and digital publications provided crucial spaces to discuss the politics of beauty in the context of skin color and natural hair (Gill, 2015; Hassan, 2018). Examination of the IRA's efforts to attend to these conversations offers additional context to DiResta et al.’s (2018) finding that they “extensively studied” (p. 50) how Black Americans use social media.

Rooting Black Americans in a broader temporal history before the Atlantic slave trade was a prevalent strategy in the advertisements we examined. For example, one of the Facebook accounts created by the IRA was called “Nefertiti's Community,” which appropriates Queen Nefertiti of Ancient Egypt. The accompanying image for the account features a sculpture bust of Queen Nefertiti over the Pan-African flag, which features red, black, and green horizontal stripes. The bust and flag are surrounded by pyramids of gold bars, two cheetahs (one wearing sunglasses), and the background of the collage image appears to ancient Egyptian columns. In an advertisement published on October 18, 2016, to the Nefertiti's Community account, the accompanying text reads, “Join us to study your blackness and get the power from your roots. Stay woke and natural.” In another advertisement with the same image, the text reads, “We focus on Pan-African art and design. Welcome, kings and queens!” The usage of Queen Nefertiti's image evokes the writings of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who advocated that Black Americans root themselves in history before the slave trade, in which their ancestors had been African royalty (Clarke, 1974; Hill & Garvey, 1983). Describing one another as “kings” and “queens” has endured and evolved amongst Black Americans. As Malcolm-Aimé Musoni (2018) wrote in the Washington Post, calling his friends king is a way to show “love and appreciation.”

An advertisement published by the “Woke Blacks” account on November 3, 2016, celebrating the birthday of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick features a photograph of him with his natural hair. A blockquote embedded in the image that we verified Kaepernick said in a speech to the youth-empowerment organization Know Your Rights Camp states, “I took an Ancestry DNA test and discovered that my ancestors are from Ghana and Nigeria. It changed everything for me. It helped me know that my history did not begin with being adopted. It did not begin with slavery. It's even part of why I wear this Afro now.” Kaepernick is celebrated for exploring his “roots,” in the ad text above the image, and working “in the power of his ancestors.” The advertisement text also includes a wide array of hashtags such as #melanin, #blackisbeautiful, #blacklivesmatter, #blackgirlmagic, #USA, #blackisproud, #icantbreathe, #Africanamerican, and #uniteforjustice. By including these hashtags that index social media posts and create ad-hoc communities, the advertisement draws a connection between Kaepernick's genealogical exploration to conversations about racial justice, Black aesthetics, and Black achievement. Moreover, the inclusion of these hashtags presents another example of how the IRA aimed to infiltrate the Black virtual sphere without detection (Carney, 2016; Hassan, 2018).

As scholars have articulated, social networking sites provide spaces where Black visual storytellers can contest dominant beauty standards and showcase new and oppositional representations of beauty in ways that resemble Kwame Braithwaite's seminal “Black is Beautiful” project (Adesina, 2020; Vasudevan, 2020). Sixteen of the advertisements we studied celebrated natural hair, Black skin and encouraged Black people to be proud of their “roots,” “Blackness,” and “ethnicity.” Two of the advertisements within this subset resembled a Soviet-era propaganda strategy to depict racial harmony. From the 1960s and to the 1980s, according to artist and curator Yevgeniy Fiks (Goff & Fiks, 2016), Soviet propaganda softened and shifted away from depictions of anti-colonial militancy towards multicultural coexistence. These representations of global harmony depicted people of different ethnicities, cultural garb, and skin tones in solidarity with one another. An advertisement published on November 3, 2016, by the Blacktivist account, features an uncredited photograph of ten Black women of varying skin tones embrace one another in a laterally composed shot, and the accompanying caption states, “All Shades” alongside emoji symbols depicting love and prayers fulfilled. The text message of the advertisement states, “Look at these gorgeous queens in all shades.” Similar images can be found throughout the web to contest colorism, empower Black women and promote Black-owned businesses (Hassan, 2018). We highlight the IRA's sampling of this visual discourse in its influence campaign for two reasons. First, the Soviet-era images depicting multicultural equality resemble contemporary images of racial equality used by Black Americans, which prompts the question: How has historic Soviet and contemporary Russian propaganda campaigns influenced the cultural practices of Americans? Secondly, we draw attention to this visual connection to articulate how the affordances of Facebook allow for this continual, memetic cultural iteration. However, rather than iterate on the visual meme celebrating “all shades” of Black skin, we again conclude that the IRA's efforts were a form of memetic racism that used real conversations about colorism to target Black Americans.

Encouraging Black Civic Participation and Separatism

In the weeks preceding and after election day, Facebook advertisements encouraged Black Americans to engage in multiple forms of community organizing and political participation. In the months and years prior to the 2016 election, books such as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and films such as Ava Duvernay's 13^th raised awareness about the systemic racism that Black Americans have endured. By 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement had established local chapters throughout the country, and had made racial justice a national discourse. Independent Black artists, filmmakers, and photographers created digital and offline spaces to showcase oppositional artwork for communal mourning, learning, and celebration (Vasudevan, 2020). In short, the IRA entered a political climate with renewed efforts by Black Americans and allies demanding equal citizenship. The Russian-created Facebook accounts promoted twelve rallies, protests, and vigils during this period, six of which we verified took place. Prior to the election, events were organized to honor Black men and children who had been killed by law enforcement, celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, and contest racist groups such as the Klu Klux Klan. The events honoring Black people killed by police or who died in police custody were composed using a consistent visual design. For example, in an advertisement about an event to remember Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot dead by a Cleveland police officer in 2014, an image of Rice smiling is positioned next to all capitalized text, “REMEMBER TAMIR RICE.” The accompanying text recounts the horrific end to Rice's life and describes his death as the result of a “corrupt system.” According to an article by the Cleveland-based Fox8 news station on November 26, 2016, people attended the remembrance, though the organizers from the Black Matters Facebook group did not show up. The image accompanying the story shows White Americans holding signs with text such as “Here with Samaria Rice,” in solidarity with Tamir Rice's mother. The empathic storytelling of the advertisement compelled Americans to participate in offline civic action in service of racial justice. The usage of Tamir Rice's likeness and death as currency to influence Facebook users that ultimately led to offline civic action in support of racial justice problematizes the understanding of the Russians’ efforts, explored further in the Discussion.

In the days following election day, resonant with the findings of DiResta et al. (2018), we observed an increase in the number of Facebook advertisements that directly addressed the 2016 election. Again, resonant with DiResta et al. (2018) and Howard et al. (2018), we found that the advertisements encouraged Black Americans to bear arms and create their own governance, regardless of who is president, the American project is no longer viable for them. In contrast to the celebration of Black activism of yesteryear in advertisements before the election, images of radical Black leaders were used to encourage political action. This is illustrative of priming, a design strategy in which a symbol or image that contains shared cultural significance is used to encourage a future action or behavior by the message creator (Macrae & Cloutier, 2009). For example, an advertisement published on October 18, 2016, contains a monochrome image of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, two founding members of the Black Panther Party, smiling, and embracing one another. The image includes the words “POWER TO THE PEOPLE,” and the accompanying text above the image explains the Black Panther Party was created for “Self-Defense in October 1966.” After the election, representations of the Black Panthers were used to encourage Black Americans to bear arms and liberate themselves from “the system.” An advertisement published on November 11, 2016, by the Williams and Kalvin account promoted Black gun ownership including an image of the Black Panther Party demonstration at the California State Capitol building in protest of gun control legislation. Our finding suggests the IRA used priming as a memetic tool that would allow them to use representations of historic Black activists and leaders to encourage political activity that both enriched democracy and sought to undermine it.

Discussion

Racial inequality in the U.S. and the mistreatment of Black Americans have provided fuel for Russian propaganda efforts for nearly a century. This study develops upon existing literature about the Russian influence campaign during the 2016 election by examining these efforts as part of a continual project to undermine American democracy that is rooted in Soviet-era propaganda. We found that in ways consistent with Soviet-era propaganda, the IRA published advertisements using emotional visual and textual language that drew attention to real accounts of state violence against Black Americans. Facts were often blended with unsubstantiated assertions and nontruths, while decontextualized representations of Black Americans were used as a currency, a practice we described as memetic racism. Facebook provided an appropriate canvas for the frictionless spread of empathic media, like the tabloids and propaganda posters that were crucial to Soviet-era influence campaigns. The IRA ads adhered to contemporary conversations amongst Black Americans by celebrating explorations of Black histories, aesthetics, activism, and achievement. This suggests that social networking sites not only provide the capacity to spread messages but tostudy and emulate the cultural vernacular of social groups. Finally, our findings provide a more complicated understanding of how the IRA's advertisements encouraged offline action. Prior to the election, the advertisements catalyzed memorial events for Black men and boys killed by police, while after the election, advertisements featuring radical Black activists encouraged both Black civic participation and separatism. This study also makes a methodological contribution to research about digital propaganda. By combining journalistic fact-checking, multimodal qualitative analysis, and historical context, we were able to locate the IRA's influence campaign as part of a longer-term project that began with the Soviet Union's efforts to dismantle American capitalism in the 1920s.

While much has been said about the Russian efforts to influence American voters, much less has been said about why their influence campaign went undetected. Racism, not just Russian propaganda, remains a core threat to American democracy. Police brutality, voter disenfranchisement, and mass incarceration continue to be used by White Americans to deny equal citizenship to Black Americans. Our findings come at a time when many state legislatures are drafting (and passing) bans on teaching Critical-Race Theory within schools (Camera, 2021). It begs the question of who is really at the center creating this legislation and who benefits from it? As Oates (2020) argued, Facebook acts as a marketplace, and the protection of users would “adversely affect service to the advertisers and the shareholders” (p.119). There is a pressing need for both racial justice and the regulation of technology platforms. Otherwise, as has been the case for nearly a century, Russia and other countries will continue to exploit the horrors of racism and the United States’ porous digital borders to spread disinformation and influence democratic practice.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Bobbie Foster Bhusari

Author Biographies

Bobbie Foster Bhusari is a Ph.D. candidate in the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on digital culture, Internet memes, and cultural heritage rhetoric. Foster Bhusari recently served as the research director for the Mapping Impactful Media Literacy project by NAMLE. She holds a master's from the University of Arkansas, where she was assistant director for the Center for Ethics in Journalism.

Krishnan Vasudevan is a critical scholar and filmmaker whose work examines within the intersections of media, cultural, journalism and design studies. He employs filmmaking, ethnographic methods such as field research and collaboration as well as textual analyses methods to understand how and why members of different social groups such as taxi drivers and artists produce media.

Sohana Nasrin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on activism, climate justice, and meta-journalistic discourse. Nasrin holds a master's in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. A 2013 professional fellowship award from the U.S. State Department supported Nasrin's to travel to the U.S. to learn the best practices in journalism and to complete a textual analysis of audience perceptions on humanitarian issues, public diplomacy through social media in Western Hemisphere countries, and critical cultural analyses of popular media.

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