Senate Intel Committee report on Russian social media activity in 2016 election affirms IC conclusion that Russian online campaign overwhelmingly opposed Clinton and boosted Trump. | "The Committee found, that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin." This is the second of five reports the panel intends to release from its investigation into Moscow's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election - Volume 2: Russia's Use of Social Media
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf

Findings:

• The Committee found, that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.
  
• The Committee found that the IRA' s :lnformation warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton's campaign.
  
• The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush. As Clint Watts, a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee, "Russia's overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin." IRA operators sought "to impact primaries for both major parties and "may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed."
  
• The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016. Evidence of the IRA's overwhelming operational emphasis on race is' evident in the IRA's Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to race) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at African Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Face book pages (one of the IRA's top performing pages, "Blacktivist," generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hotbutton issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests), and its YouTube activity (96 percent of the IRA's YouTube content was targeted at racial issues and police brutality).