Russians are already trying to interfere in the 2020 election, Facebook data shows

Profiles originating in Russia had since the beginning of this year been building a network of accounts on Instagram designed to look like groups in swing states, the company said. Instagram is owned by Facebook (FB).

Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn’t bother voting for her

Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S. Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.

“It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides,” Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business.

Nimmo also observed attacks on other candidates, including Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but said those attacks seemed more the result of “character building” in which the accounts were sharing content to bolster their respective personas — for instance, liberal-looking accounts attacked Trump, while conservative-looking accounts posted negative content about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Among the accounts focused on black activism, there was strong support for Bernie Sanders along with a moderate amount of content opposing Kamala Harris,” Graphika said in its analysis. “Education reform and student debt relief were two of the most commonly mentioned reasons for supporting Sanders, while Harris’s record as a California DA was mentioned as a reason to oppose her candidacy. Mixed in with these was a small amount of content attacking Joe Biden, primarily due to gaffes related to his previous handling of racial issues.”

Nimmo said the accounts sent just under 75,000 posts, the majority of which were not directly related to the 2020 election, but to broader political and social issues in the US.

Facebook said Monday those behind the operation had taken steps to conceal their identities and locations. The company did not publicly say how it had determined the accounts were linked to the Internet Research Agency but said it had shared details with law enforcement.

The campaign mostly recycled existing memes and posts from real American news organizations and political groups.

“This wasn’t Russians targeting Americans with Russian content, this was Russians targeting Americans with American content,” Nimmo said.

The decision to recycle existing content, rather than create new material, might have been part of the campaign’s strategy to conceal its Russian links, Nimmo said. However, errors in some of the accounts’ posts suggested the accounts weren’t run by native English speakers.

“What the future for their children will be?” the caption read on one post apparently criticizing Americans who don’t remember the Confederacy fondly. Another account posted “What a bullsh**.”

Nathaniel Gleicher, who leads Facebook’s team investigating foreign influence operations, said the company had caught the operation in its early stages and that the Russian group had been focusing on audience building. Gleicher said the accounts were “trying to make themselves look like ordinary citizens” in a way that could later have lent credibility to their posts.

“People in Russia are still trying this,” Nimmo told CNN Business on Monday. But, he said, they are finding it a lot harder because the social media companies “are hunting them.”

“In 2016, you could have set up an account posing as a Tennessee Republican and have it registered to a Russian phone number,” he noted.

While most of the focus on online foreign interference in the US has been devoted to Russia, over the past 12 months, Facebook has detected multiple Iranian campaigns targeting the United States.