“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC.
The New Knowledge report is one of two commissioned by the Senate committees.
The second report was written by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University along with Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media.
The Russian influence campaign in 2016 was run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency, owned by a businessman, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Prigozhin and a dozen of the company’s employees were indicted in February as part of the investigation of Russian interference by Robert Mueller, the special counsel.
Both reports stress that the Internet Research Agency created social media accounts under fake names.
Creating accounts designed to pass as belonging to Americans, the Internet Research Agency spread its messages not only via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which have drawn the most attention, but also on YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+, among other platforms.
The new reports largely confirm earlier findings: that the campaign was designed to attack Clinton, boost Donald Trump and exacerbate existing divisions in American society.
The Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife.
The New Knowledge report criticizes social media companies for misleading the public.
“Regrettably, it appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress,” the report says, noting what it calls one false claim that specific population groups were not targeted by the influence operation and another that the campaign did not seek to discourage voting.
“It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion,” the report says.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.