A New Report Shows That Facebook and Instagram Posts From Russian Intelligence Doubled After Trump Won

A new report released Monday reveals that the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm linked to Russian intelligence, actually increased its social media activity after the 2016 election. The report, which took seven months to complete and is the most comprehensive of its kind to date, comes from researchers at Oxford University and analytics firm Graphika. Their data shows the volume of IRA activity doubling between 2016 and 2017 on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, even as the number of ads purchased by the agency decreased. The amount of activity increased the most on Facebook-owned Instagram, where it more than doubled from 2,611 posts in 2016 to 5,956 posts in 2017. The research is based on Facebook data from 2015-2017, Twitter data from 2009-2018, and YouTube data from 2014-2018 that was provided by the companies to the Senate Intelligence Committee and relayed to the researchers.