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- Russia influence on the 2016 presidential election spanned beyond Facebook and Twitter, according to new reports provided to the Senate intelligence committee.
- The research concluded that the disinformation campaign reached several social
media platforms previously unnamed, including Instagram, Vine, and Pinterest. - Business Insider has compiled all the social media platforms named in the reports, and the roles that each platform played in the Russian-linked influence operation.
The use of social media to spread political disinformation has been widely acknowledged, but two new reports show that the Russian-linked influence campaign spread way beyond Facebook and Twitter.
The two new reports, conducted for the Senate's intelligence committee, detailed the widespread impact of online propaganda leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Researchers found that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm behind the disinformation campaign, left few social media platforms untouched.
IRA-linked content was found heavily on popular platforms Instagram and YouTube, and also on smaller platforms like Pinterest, SoundCloud, Vine, and even Pokémon Go.
"The breadth of the attack included games, browser extensions, and music apps created by the IRA and pushed to targeted groups," New Knowledge researchers wrote in their report. "It was designed to exploit societal fractures, blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself."
Here are all the social media platforms identified in the most recent reports on the Russia-linked disinformation campaign: