The Phantom Crowd: The Mid to Late 2010s: The Age of the IRA and SNS Operations.

The Phantom Crowd: The Mid to Late 2010s: The Age of the IRA and SNS Operations.

With the rapid spread of social media in the 2010s, the space of public discourse expanded as a new arena for democracy. At the same time, however, it also became a hotbed of state manipulation of public opinion. The Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in St. Petersburg, Russia, is emblematic of this trend.

The IRA attracted attention when it established fictitious organizations such as Heart of Texas and United Muslims of America on social networking sites, posing as real civil movements. Using sensitive topics such as immigration, religion, and black racism, they repeatedly made confrontational postings; in 2016, they had an anti-Muslim rally and an Islamic advocacy rally simultaneously held in Houston, causing real-life clashes between citizens. In that moment, when the fiction of cyberspace turned into the rage and confrontation in the streets, the perils of information warfare were exposed.

At the time, Facebook ads offered broad reach at low cost, and the IRA used ad operations and fake profiles to tailor incitement to specific regions and demographics through geo-targeting. The campaign continued to manipulate different groups into divisions, calling on the black community to boycott the vote and calling for anti-immigrant policies among conservative voters. These activities were later presented as evidence before the U.S. Congress, which confirmed that the IRA had generated tens of millions of impressions.

The world was already becoming aware of the fragility of its information infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of the Snowden affair, which exposed the surveillance activities of the NSA and GCHQ. The IRA's activities, which joined them, presented a new form of cyber warfare. The IRA's activities presented a new form of cyber warfare, using account interactions to create a sense of trust, and combining advertising and posts to spread the word. Data analysis was used to strategically distribute posts that would sway people's emotions. These techniques were a diversion of commercial advertising techniques to political disruption.

More recent studies have found little evidence that IRA postings actually significantly changed voters' ideology or voting behavior. More important than its direct impact, however, is the fact that it showed that the information space can be "weaponized. Judicial authorities indicted several officials, further straining U.S.-Russian relations.

In the mid-to-late 2010s, the IRA's social networking operations emerged as a digitally renewed version of Cold War propaganda warfare. Fictional crowds gathered in the streets and divisions were transcribed into the real world. This was not mere electoral intervention, but a symbol of the 21st century "invisible Cold War," a serious question posed to the foundations of democracy.