Notable
Here is another article that came out the day before the Alabama meddling story broke'
This is the first reference to Instagram that I have seen and further demonstrates how they were trying to set up the narrative only to have it derailed a day later
it also is the best outline of timing and involvement in the reports to SSCI and I will be referring to it in v2 of the map of connections
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/tow-albright-instagram-russia-trump.php
Jonathan Albright on the new Senate report, and the importance of Instagram to Russian disinformation
After laboring in secret for months, a new report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee names a culprit more useful on a user-for-user basis to Russian espionage services than Facebook or Twitter: Instagram.
The Senate committee ordered the report from researchers at cybersecurity company New Knowledge; Jonathan Albright, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism Digital Forensics Initiative (part of Columbia Journalism School); and Canfield Research’s Ben Johnson. The group examined data supplied to the committee by Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Albright says that he hopes this puts an end to the war between the company and the media organizations reporting on it—the US government has weighed in, using data supplied by the companies themselves, and has vindicated claims made by dogged reporters that Facebook often contradicted.
It’s one of two reports to the Intelligence Committee released on Monday, the other coming from Oxford University and private network analysis firm Graphika. The Oxford/Graphika report emphasizes the nature of Russian social media messaging to prospective voters, focusing on infighting on the left and unifying issues on the right.
The New Knowledge report carves into stone much of what has been reported and rumored about the Russian military’s attack on the 2016 election, using data from the tech companies themselves. Albright says that Instagram’s relative absence from investigations into Russian interference is not a measure of its importance to the Russian GRU security service during 2016, but of the company’s success at triaging brand damage to its younger, more promising product. With this report, he hopes that will change.