The leak shows that even as the Russian trolls were able to influence and manipulate American political discourse online, they were less equipped to keep their own secrets. While The Daily Beast does not possess anything close to a comprehensive trove of the IRAs internal operations, it is now likely that substantial amounts of the troll farms files are waiting to be discovered online.
But what The Daily Beast has seen provides a new level of texture and detail to the IRAs U.S. efforts, online and off. While the troll farms use of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook is now well-known, the leak shows that the Internet Research Agency also operated on Reddit and had a substantial footprint on Tumblr. They documented and tracked their personalized interactions with specific, unsuspecting Americans, some of whom are named in the leaks.
Those outreach efforts display conceptual sophistication. The leaks show that IRA imposter accounts targeted activists for specific causes the Russians wanted promoted. On the target list: the daughter of one of Martin Luther Kings lieutenants.
But the leaks also provide a glimpse into the troll farms weaknesses. Some of the Americans the group contacted described receiving impersonal entreaties from unfamiliar accounts, asking for trivial aid and then declining to follow up. The Internet Research Agency might have known how to leverage social media, but they knew far less about how users authentically interact with each other on itwhich itself attracted suspicion amongst the very people the Russians were contacting.
I couldnt put my finger on it. I didnt know who they were and why they were remaining anonymous, and I didnt really see the need for it, said Craig Carson, a Rochester, New York, attorney and civil rights activist who was contacted by the farm-created account Blacktivist.