On October 19, 2018, a criminal complaint in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was unsealed. It lays out how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency funded and implemented its online influence campaigns in the United States. The level of detail is astonishing. The complaint uncovers the budget of the so-called troll factory, or, as Mueller refers to it, “the Conspiracy.” It reveals the Conspiracy’s organizational structure. It details communications between employees of the IRA.
But one detail in particular stood out to me when the complaint was unsealed. “On or about July 1, 2017,” the complaint reads, “a member of the Conspiracy ... contact[ed] the Facebook accounts for three real US organizations to inquire about collaborating with these groups on an anti-President Trump ‘flash mob’ at the White House, which was already being organized by the groups for July 4, 2017.”
This detail was shockingly familiar; community theater has always been a hobby of mine, and I recalled friends posting about an Independence Day flash mob. They planned to dress in colonial attire at the height of Washington’s muggy summer to sing a parody of “Do You Hear the People Sing?,” the famous revolutionary anthem from the musical Les Miserables, in front of the so-called people’s house.
The event page for the flash mob has long since been removed from Facebook, but in the age of live-streaming, it wasn’t difficult for me to find videos of the festivities. In the Facebook and YouTube videos I found, several hundred people gathered in front of the White House on a sunny, sweaty Washington Independence Day. A young guy in a Revolutionary War getup complete with tri-corner hat and a waistcoat addressed the crowd:
“Hear ye, hear ye, citizens!” he began, ringing a handbell. “Resist the rule of the treasonous King Donald”—the crowd interrupted him, cheering—“who has betrayed the republic and offered his soul and conscience to the Tsar of Russia and consigned American welfare to ruin. Declare your independence from this...stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man! God save the United States!” The crowd waved their American flags and cheered.
According to Mueller’s complaint, the Internet Research Agency spent $80 to buy ads on Facebook to promote the event. In an entirely unexpected collision of my two great loves, it seemed that Russia had weaponized show tunes.
I soon found myself down a bizarre rabbit hole, having coffee with one of the event’s organizers, Ryan Clayton, who had no idea, until I told him, that he had been an unwitting victim of Russian election-meddling a couple of years ago. His oblivion—partly a result of the fact that he had spent a significant amount of the intervening time on a beach in Southeast Asia—triggered a troubling realization for me. Heading into the 2020 election season, how many Americans are currently in Facebook groups or Twitter threads where Russian actors are laundering disinformation, seeding it within authentic American discourse? And how many don’t understand just how sophisticated many of these operations are—that just because a group or message board is locally organized, just because some of its members might know each other “in real life,” doesn’t mean that Russia or other foreign adversaries haven’t found their way in to manipulate them?
Since Mueller’s report, the bulk of our collective attention to Russian election interference—in the media, on social media platforms, and in government—has been focused on fake accounts and outright disinformation. Companies like Facebook and Twitter issue regular takedown reports as part of their furious game of Whack-a-Troll, and Congress’ focus has been on the illicit purchase of campaign ads and content moderation policies. But online information operations have also become more diffuse and more sophisticated, adapting their tactics to increased scrutiny. Rather than simply creating fake accounts, Russian operatives are also infiltrating authentic activism and using American voices to turn us against one another; it was part of the toolkit even in 2016, and my research shows that our collective retreat into more “private” spaces on the internet leaves us even more vulnerable to such manipulation today. This is a complex strategy that’s far more difficult for the U.S. government and tech companies to combat, and one that is especially powerful during times of pitched civil unrest.
The story of that July 4 flash mob in 2017 is a timely warning of just how vulnerable we continue to be to sophisticated foreign machinations as we head into another campaign cycle.
I sought Clayton out when the Mueller complaint revealed Russian support for the flash mob. Clayton was the leader of Americans Take Action (ATA), a progressive activist group that was one of the core organizers of the protest. After nearly two decades working in politics as a campaign manager, political advertiser and bona fide political rabble-rouser, the Trump era did him in. When he protested at an event for right-wing activist James O’Keefe, several attendees put him in a chokehold and pushed him down a flight of stairs, an incident that he says left him with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He left the country in search of solitude.
His group’s website seemed defunct, but I sent out an interview request anyway. A few hours later, Clayton replied. “Holy s***,” he wrote. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”
Our meeting happened a few days later, in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop, just before the 2018 midterm elections. I caught Clayton on one of his trips home to the States; he had been traveling in Asia for four months, a trip prompted by Trump’s election back home.
Clayton had no idea one of ATA’s protests had been described in the criminal complaint until I emailed him, he said. “When I heard about that, I was like ‘Jesus, I’m glad I got out when I did, because Twilight Zone politics just turned into, like, Inception.’”
Clayton and a few progressive friends started ATA right after Trump’s November 2016 victory. They were in New York, standing “outside of Clinton’s Victory Party,” he said, using air quotes, “and I’m like, look, he’s going to win ... We can literally be the first people protesting during his victory speech.” Clayton and his friends headed to the Trump Victory Party. “We are the first people protesting Trump, on the timeline. Everyone else is drinking their tears and shell-shocked and in hiding.” ATA’s protests continued; they secured tickets to Trump’s inauguration and stood up and linked arms as the president-elect was taking the oath of office, revealing blue T-shirts with red-and-white letters that spell out “RESIST.” Clayton wore the letter T. He and his friends were arrested; the picture of their protest became an icon of the Trump era.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference that year, Clayton and ATA handed out Russian flags emblazoned with Trump’s name in gold letters during his address to the attendees. They were found out and ejected from the speech, but not before hundreds of audience members, unaware that they were holding the Russian standard, blissfully waved the flags while chanting “USA! USA!” A few months later, ATA attended the Washington Nationals baseball home opener and dropped a “RESIST” banner from the upper levels of the stadium. In short, creative protest is what ATA built their movement around.
The July 4 Les Mis flash mob was no different. ATA wanted to create a positive environment where people could protest on Independence Day, Clayton said. “Sometimes protests are so angry ... this was like ‘Fun! Singing!’ Every successful social movement in America has had singing.” A few hundred people attended, which he describes as an “outlier” for their events. “We were really shocked that people showed up. We were like, ‘Okay, that’s awesome!’”
They chalked up the high attendance to the creativity of the event. “A lot of people like karaoke, a lot of people like showtunes ... A lot of people had off work. It was July 4. It was on the National Mall. We thought that that’s what” brought people out, Clayton says. “We definitely had no idea there was somebody sitting in the IRA social media unit, drilling psychographically targeted ads to people like us.”
They did know, however, that someone was advertising the event. Several progressive Facebook activist groups came together at the last minute to organize the protest—ATA, Singalong Solidarity, American Against Trump, and Re-Sisters.
The groups got on a conference call before the flash mob, which Clayton vaguely remembered. Someone on the call mentioned that an offer of free advertising had popped up in their Facebook messages. Clayton recalled saying, “Hell yeah, I want free advertising!” But there was a hitch; in order to advertise the event, the group offering the ads needed to be made an administrator of the event page. Clayton hesitated, albeit only a little. “I remember thinking, ‘What’s the group? It’s not like, ‘Politicians for Killing Puppies’ or something?’” He thought it had the word “resistance” in it in some form. Given that “most progressive organizations function in operational poverty,” the group decided they would allow the ads to run.
According to Mueller’s criminal complaint, the organizers were actually communicating with an Internet Research Agency employee posing as “Helen Christopherson,” one of the IRA’s carefully cultivated fake profiles. Created in May 2015, the Christopherson account claimed to live in New York City. Her hometown, she said, was Charleston, South Carolina. “While concealing its true identity, location, and purpose,” the October 2018 criminal complaint says, “the Conspiracy used the false US persona ‘Helen Christopherson’ to contact individuals and groups in the United States to promote protests, rallies, and marches, including by funding advertising, flyers, and rally supplies.” Christopherson wrote to one of the individual organizers of the July 4 Les Mis flash mob in off-kilter, but not entirely incorrect English: “I got some cash on my Facebook ad account so we can promote it for 2 days,” adding, “I got like $80 on my ad account so we can reach like 10000 people in DC or so. That would be Massive!”
Clayton didn’t think these messages were addressed to him; he remembered finding out through the group phone call that an outsider was offering free advertising. If his memory is murky, he has no way to correct his internal record; Facebook removed the Christopherson account and related chats. The criminal complaint says the proposed targeting for the ad, which put individuals “within 30 miles of Washington, D.C., including significant portions of the Eastern District of Virginia” in its crosshairs, reached 29,000 to 58,000 people. And Clayton thought it was impactful.
“Frankly, it worked,” he said. The turnout far exceeded the organizers’ expectations, and he doesn’t remember seeing anyone suspicious at the protest (“Besides us, dressed as American revolutionaries, singing French showtunes,” he quipped). Of course, he can’t definitively say the event was well attended simply because of the $80 in advertising the IRA purchased, but he still thought the Facebook ads brought some people out. Clayton worked for a time in political advertising, and believed that even if he himself had placed Facebook ads for the flash mob, “there wouldn’t [have been] two or three hundred people there.”
Clayton’s political background also made him apprehensive, and perhaps even frightened about what the Internet Research Agency and the Russian government did in 2016, and continued to do as we head towards 2020: divide the American people. At first, Clayton was confused about why the Internet Research Agency bought ads for his event. “It would be like the Democrats running ads for the Republicans,” he said, incredulous. “We are one of the leading voices in the country talking about foreign influence in the election and the illegitimacy of the Trump administration … because of foreign influence from Russia. I hope whoever spent their rubles on those ads at the IRA got fired for it.”
But the $80 spent to drive showtune-loving, progressive, D.C.-area residents to the White House to protest the president in song on July 4, 2017, wasn’t a mistake; Russia has long tried to increase discord in American society.
Repairing, and not exacerbating the rifts in society means more than just playing Whack-a-Troll by deleting inauthentic social media accounts. We need to invest in building public awareness that disinformation isn’t just about cut and dry “fakes.” It feeds on, amplifies, and weaponizes our emotions, pitting us against one another. It’s not just widespread digital literacy campaigns targeted at voters and social media users we need. Politicians need to sign on as well, calling out disinformation—whether foreign or domestic, no matter which political party it opportunistically supports—as the equal-opportunity threat to democracy it is. If our elected officials and political organizations traffic in disinformation, we are doing Russia’s work for it.
Ryan Clayton now understands this far better than most Americans; by buying Facebook ads for a liberal-leaning, Trump-attacking, musical theater flash mob, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was trying to hasten American polarization.
“If you can weight the sides,” Clayton told me, “you can really pull at the fabric of society. You can pull it apart.”
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