According to the New Knowledge report, “there appeared to be a strong and consistent preference for then-candidate Donald Trump, beginning in the early primaries,” in the influence operations run by the IRA. By comparison, almost no Russian content favored Trump’s challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the Russians generated an array of anti-Clinton messages in social media posts that appeared to be both left-leaning and right-leaning.
The reports, however, found that a majority of the Kremlin content “focused on societally divisive issues, most notably race.” The IRA’s campaign, Oxford and Graphika wrote, sought to convince African-American voters to “boycott” the elections and turn away from political institutions “by preying on anger with structural inequalities … including police violence, poverty, and disproportionate levels of incarceration.”
