[Peace-discuss] FW: Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme

[David Johnson]

February 17, 2018


Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing
Scheme


http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influen
ce-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html#more

 

Yesterday the U.S. Justice Department indicted the Russian Internet Research
Agency on some dubious legal grounds. It covers thirteen Russian people and
three Russian legal entities. The main count of the indictment is an alleged
"Conspiracy to Defraud the United States".

The published
<https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=4380489-Justice-Department-
s-Internet-Research-Agency> indictment gives support to our
<http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/10/3000-facebook-ads-the-russian-influenc
e-campaign-is-a-profitable-click-bait-scheme.html> long held believe that
there was no "Russian influence" campaign during the U.S. election. What is
described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme
which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created
online crowds around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial
customers wanted to promote. The size of the operation was tiny when
compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign expenditures. It had no
influence on the election outcome.

The indictment is fodder for the public to prove that the Mueller
investigation is "doing something". It distracts from further questioning
the origin of the Steele dossier. It is full of unproven assertions and
assumptions. It is a sham in that none of the Russian persons or companies
indicted will ever come in front of a U.S. court. That is bad because the
indictment is build on the theory of a new crime which, unless a court
throws it out, can be used to incriminate other people in other cases and
might even apply to this blog. The later part of this post will refer to
that.

In the early 1990s some dude in St.Petersburg made a good business selling
hot dogs. He opened a colorful restaurant. Local celebrities and politicians
were invited to gain notoriety while the restaurant served cheap food for
too high prices. It was a good business. A few years later he moved to
Moscow and gained contracts to cater to schools and to the military. The
food he served was still substandard.

But catering bad food as school lunches gave him, by chance, the idea for a
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/kremlin-caterer-accused-in-u-s-election-meddli
ng-has-history-of-dishing-dark-arts-1518823765> new business:

Parents were soon up in arms. Their children wouldn't eat the food, saying
it smelled rotten. 

As the bad publicity mounted, Mr. Prigozhin's company, Concord Catering,
launched a counterattack, a former colleague said. He hired young men and
women to overwhelm the internet with comments and blog posts praising the
food and dismissing the parents' protests.

"In five minutes, pages were drowning in comments," said Andrei Ilin, whose
website serves as a discussion board about public schools. "And all the
trolls were supporting Concord."

The trick worked beyond expectations. Prigozhin had found a new business. He
hired some IT staff and low paid temps to populate various message boards,
social networks and the general internet with whatever his customers asked
him for.

You have a bad online reputation? Prigozhin can help. His internet company
will fill the net with positive stories and remarks about you. Your old and
bad reputation will be drowned by the new and good one. Want to promote a
product or service? Prigozhin's online marketeers can address the right
crowds.

Image removed by sender.
Pic: A Russian influencer

To achieve those results the few temps who worked on such projects needed to
multiply their online personalities. It is better to have fifty people vouch
for you online than just five. No one cares if these are real people or just
virtual ones. The internet makes it easy to create such sock-puppets. The
virtual crowd can then be used to push personalities, products or political
opinions. Such schemes are nothing new or special. Every decent "western"
public relations and marketing company will offer a similar service and has
done so for years.

While it is relatively easy to have sock-puppets swamp the comment threads
of such sites as this blog, it is more difficult to have a real effect on
social networks. These depend on multiplier effects. To gain many real
"likes", "re-tweets" or "followers" an online persona needs a certain
history and reputation. Real people need to feel attached to it. It takes
some time and effort to build such a multiplier personality, be it real or
virtual.

At some point Prigozhin, or whoever by then owned the internet marketing
company, decided to expand into the lucrative English speaking market. This
would require to build many English language online persona and to give
those some history and time to gain crowds of followers and a credible
reputation. The company sent a few of its staff to the U.S. to gain some
impressions, pictures and experience of the surroundings. They would later
use these to impersonate as U.S. locals. It was a medium size, long-term
investment of maybe a hundred-thousand bucks over two or three years.

The U.S. election provided an excellent environment to build reputable
online persona with large followings of people with discriminable mindsets.
The political affinity was not important. The personalities only had to be
very engaged and stick to their issue - be it left or right or whatever. The
sole point was to gain as many followers as possible who could be segmented
along social-political lines and marketed to the companies customers.

Again - there is nothing new to this. It is something hundreds, if not
thousands of companies are doing as their daily business. The Russian
company hoped to enter the business with a cost advantage. Even its
mid-ranking managers were paid as little as $1,200 per month. The students
and other temporary workers who would 'work' the virtual personas as
puppeteers would earn even less. Any U.S. company in a similar business
would have higher costs.

In parallel to building virtual online persona the company also built some
click-bait websites and groups and promoted these through mini Facebook
advertisements. These were the "Russian influence ads" on Facebook the U.S.
media were so enraged about. They included the promotion of a Facebook page
about cute puppies. Back in October we
<http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/10/3000-facebook-ads-the-russian-influenc
e-campaign-is-a-profitable-click-bait-scheme.html> described how those
"Russian influence" ads (most of which were shown after the election or were
not seen at all) were simply part of a commercial scheme:

The pages described and the ads leading to them are typical click-bait, not
part of a political influence op. 
...
One builds pages with "hot" stuff that hopefully attracts lots of viewers.
One creates ad-space on these pages and fills it with Google ads. One
attracts viewers and promotes the spiked pages by buying $3 Facebook
mini-ads for them. The mini-ads are targeted at the most susceptible groups.


A few thousand users will come and look at such pages. Some will 'like' the
puppy pictures or the rant for or against LGBT and further spread them. Some
will click the Google ads. Money then flows into the pockets of the page
creator. One can rinse and repeat this scheme forever. Each such page is a
small effort for a small revenue. But the scheme is highly scaleable and
parts of it can be automatized.

Because of the myriad of U.S. sanctions against Russia the monetization of
these business schemes required some creativity. One can easily find the
name of a real U.S. person together with the assigned social security number
and its date of birth. Those data are enough to open, for example, a Paypal
account under a U.S. name. A U.S. customer of the cloaked Russian Internet
company could then pay to the Paypal account and the money could be
transferred from there to Moscow. These accounts could also be used to buy
advertisement on Facebook. The person who's data was used to create the
account would never learn of it and would have no loss or other damage.
Another scheme is to simply pay some U.S. person to open a U.S. bank account
and to then hand over the 'keys' to that account.

The Justice Department indictment is quite long and detailed. It must have
been expensive. If you read it do so with the above in mind. Skip over the
assumptions and claims of political interference and digest only the facts.
All that is left is, as explained, a commercial marketing scheme.

I will not go into all its detail of the indictment but here are some points
that support the above description.

Point 4:

Defendants, posing as US. persons and creating false U.S. personas, operated
social media pages and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences. These
groups and pages, which addressed divisive US. political and social issues,
falsely claimed to be controlled by US. activists when, in fact, they were
controlled by Defendants. Defendants also used the stolen identities of real
U.S. persons to post on social media accounts. Over time, these social media
accounts became Defendants' means to reach significant numbers of Americans
...

Point 10d:

By in or around April 2014, the ORGANIZATION formed a department that went
by various names but was at times referred to as the "translator project."
This project focused on the US. population and conducted operations on
social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By
approximately July 2016, more than eighty ORGANIZATION employees were
assigned to the translator project.

(Some U.S. media today made the false claim that $1.25 million per month
were spend by the company for its U.S. campaign. But Point 11 of the
indictment says that the company ran a number of such projects directed at a
Russian audience while only the one described in 10d above is aimed at an
U.S. audience. All these projects together had a monthly budget of $1.25
million.)

(Point 17, 18 and 19 indict individual persons who have worked for the
"translator" project" "to at least in and around [some month] 2014". It is
completely unclear how these persons, who seem to have left the company two
years before the U.S. election, are supposed to have anything to do with the
claimed "Russian influence" on the U.S. election and the indictment.)

Point 32:

Defendants and their co-conspirators, through fraud and deceit, created
hundreds of social media accounts and used them to develop certain
fictitious U.S. personas into "leader[s] of public opinion" in the United
States.

The indictment then goes on and on describing the "political activities" of
the sock-puppet personas. Some posted pro-Hillary slogans, some anti-Hillary
stuff, some were pro-Trump, some anti-everyone, some urged not to vote,
others to vote for third party candidates. The sock-puppets did not create
or post fake news. They posted
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russia-used-mainstream-m
edia-to-manipulate-american-voters/2018/02/15/85f7914e-11a7-11e8-9065-e55346
f6de81_story.html> mainstream media stories.

Some of the persona called for going to anti-Islam rallies while others
promoted pro-Islam rallies. The Mueller indictment lists a total of eight
rallies. Most of these
<https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/964919619440992256> did not take
place at all. No one joined the "Miners For Trump" rallies in Philly and
Pittsburgh. A "Charlotte against Trump" march on November 19 - after the
election - was attended by one hundred people. Eight people came for a
pro-Trump rally in Fort Myers. 

The sock-puppets called for rallies to establish themselves as  'activist'
and 'leadership' persona, to generated more online traffic and additional
followers. There was in fact no overall political trend in what the
sock-puppets did. The sole point of all such activities was to create a
large total following by having multiple personas which together covered all
potential social-political strata.

At Point 86 the indictment turns to Count Two - "Conspiracy to Commit Wire
Fraud and Bank Fraud". The puppeteers opened, as explained above, various
Paypal accounts using 'borrowed' data.

Then comes the point which confirms the commercial marketing story as laid
out above:

Point 95:

Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money
from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements
on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their
co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social
media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content
on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being Patriotic,
Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.

There you have it. There was no political point to what the Russian company
did. Whatever political slogans one of the company's sock-puppets posted had
only one aim: to increase the number of followers for that sock-puppet. The
sole point of creating a diverse army of sock-puppets with large following
crowds was to sell the 'eyeballs' of the followers to the paying customers
of the marketing company.

There were, according to the indictment, eighty people working on the
"translator project". These controlled "hundreds" of sock-puppets online
accounts each with a distinct "political" personality. Each of these
sock-puppets had a large number of followers - in total several
hundred-thousands. Now let's assume that one to five promotional posts can
be sold per day on each of the sock-puppets content stream. The scheme
generates several thousand dollars per day ($25 per promo, hundreds of
sock-puppets, 1-5 promos per day per sock-puppet). The costs for this were
limited to the wages of up to eighty persons in Moscow, many of them temps,
of which the highest paid received some $1,000 per month. While the upfront
multiyear investment to create and establish the virtual personas was
probably significant, this likely was, over all, a profitable business.

Again - this had nothing to do with political influence on the election. The
sole point of political posts was to create 'engagement' and a larger number
of followers in each potential social-political segment. People who buy
promotional posts want these to be targeted at a specific audience. The
Russian company could offer whatever audience was needed. It had
sock-puppets with pro-LGBT view and a large following and sock-puppets with
anti-LGBT views and a large following. It could provide pro-2nd amendment
crowds as well as Jill Stein followers. Each of the sock-puppets had over
time generated a group of followers that were like minded. The entity buying
the promotion simply had to choose which group it preferred to address.

The panic of the U.S. establishment over the loss of their preferred
candidate created an artificial storm over "Russian influence" and assumed
"collusion" with the Trump campaign. (Certain Democrats though, like Adam
Schiff,
<https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/adam-schiff-russia-intervention-raytheon-par
sons> profit from creating a new Cold War through their sponsoring armament
companies.)

The Mueller investigation found no "collusion" between anything Russia and
the Trump campaign. The indictment does not mentions any. The whole "Russian
influence" storm is based on a misunderstanding of commercial activities of
a Russian marketing company in U.S. social networks.

There is a danger in this. The indictment sets up a new theory of nefarious
foreign influence that could be applied to even this blog. As U.S. lawyer
Robert Barns  <https://twitter.com/Barnes_Law/status/964638715367706625>
explains:

The only thing frightening about this indictment is the dangerous and dumb
precedent it could set: foreign nationals criminally prohibited from public
expression in the US during elections unless registered as foreign agents
and reporting their expenditures to the FEC. 
...
Mueller's new crime only requires 3 elements: 1) a foreign national; 2)
outspoken on US social media during US election; and 3) failed to register
as a foreign agent or failed to report receipts/expenditures of speech
activity. Could indict millions under that theory. 
...
The legal theory of the indictment for most of the defendants and most of
the charges alleges that the "fraud" was simply not registering as a foreign
agent or not reporting expenses to the FEC because they were a foreign
national expressing views in a US election.

Author Leonid Bershidsky, who prominently writes for Bloomberg,
<https://twitter.com/Bershidsky/status/964765764698935296> remarks:

I'm actually surprised I haven't been indicted. I'm Russian, I was in the
U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o
registering as a foreign agent.

As most of you will know your author writing this is German. I write
pseudo-anonymously for a mostly U.S. audience. My postings are political and
during the U.S. election campaign expressed an anti-Hillary view. The blog
is hosted on U.S, infrastructure paid for by me. I am not registered as
Foreign Agent or with the Federal Election Commission.

Under the theory on which the indictment is based I could also be indicted
for a similar "Conspiracy to Defraud the United States".

(Are those of you who kindly donate for this blog co-conspiractors?)

When Yevgeni Prigozhin, the hot dog caterer who allegedly owns the internet
promotion business, was asked about the indictment he
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/world/europe/prigozhin-russia-indictment
-mueller.html> responded:

"The Americans are really impressionable people, they see what they want to
see. [...] If they want to see the devil, let them see him."

Posted by b on February 17, 2018 at 03:09 PM |
<http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influe
nce-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html> Permalink

 

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