CNN has found an anti-Hillary Clinton video game online called "Hilltendo" which it believes the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) troll factory created and tried to make viral shortly before the 2016 election.
CNN:
On the surface, it looks like a silly, Flash-based game of the sort that populated the internet for years. Yet Hilltendo appears to be more sophisticated than that. In fact, it may indicate an intent to zero in on the people who played the game, track their behavior on social media, and hit them later with micro-targeted advertisements ...
While the description of the game is pretty amusing, CNN explains that the intention behind its creation is far more nefarious.
The game consisted of three levels, starting with this one: "Help Hillary delete as many classified emails as possible before she is caught." Players controlled a Hillary Clinton character who sits on a missile and eliminates emails, all while avoiding FBI agents.
The next level asked: "How much money can Hillary get from the Arab states?" At the top of the screen, nations' flags drop money. At the bottom, the Clinton character holds a basket to collect the cash as it falls.
The final level challenged users to "Help Hillary throw the Constitution as far as possible," and it included caricatures of then-President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton.
The game's website had Facebook and Google tracking software embedded on it. This software would have made it possible for the game's creators to identify people who played the game and later target them with advertising elsewhere on the Web, including on Facebook, potentially to direct them to disinformation campaigns.
CNN explains how it tracked down the game's origins and how an examination of IP addresses and website registration records turned up connections between the game and the IRA. The good news is that the game did not seem to pick up much of a following.
Hilltendo does not appear to have achieved virality on Facebook or Twitter, perhaps in part because it was not playable on smartphones. It was only available on desktop and laptop computers.
The game is no longer online, but numbers previously displayed on the site claimed the game was played almost 19,000 times.
A user named "Peter_Hurst" did post the game on a site considered an alternative to Reddit, and a user with that same name "also regularly posted links to Internet Research Agency websites" on Reddit itself. Reddit brands itself "the front page of the internet.”
The Daily Beast has been following the news of Reddit and Tumblr's roles as targets for Russian propaganda and disinformation during the 2016 election via a leak of internal IRA documents.
Content from IRA-backed websites like BlackMattersUs.com received hundreds—and sometimes thousands—upvotes on subreddits like r/The_Donald and r/HillaryForPrison in the run-up to the 2016 election. Trolls purporting to represent the troll farm promised an Ask Me Anything session in October, but the Q-and-A never occurred.
When The Daily Beast reached out to Reddit for comment, a public relations representative requested screenshots and details of the leak, which The Daily Beast provided. The spokesperson told The Daily Beast the company would be in touch if it had any further comment.
(...)
The leaks indicate, at least 21 Tumblr accounts were creations of the Internet Research Agency. The names of the accounts showed bizarre attempts at concocting slang terms, apparently in an effort to appear authentically African-American, like “Ghetta Blasta,” “Hustle In A Trap,” and “Swag In The Rain.” Those users uniformly pushed mostly relatable memes about being black in America, then filtered in invitations to protests by IRA groups like Blacktivist, along with conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman posted a note earlier this week explaining the company had not found much Russian advertising on its site but that it was trying to root out disinformation and fake accounts.
As for direct propaganda, that is, content from accounts we suspect are of Russian origin or content linking directly to known propaganda domains, we are doing our best to identify and remove it. We have found and removed a few hundred accounts, and of course, every account we find expands our search a little more. The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally.
The final case, indirect propaganda, is the most complex. For example, the Twitter account @TEN_GOP is now known to be a Russian agent. @TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda. I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.
The Daily Beast has tried to stay on top of Reddit but says the site has been less than forthcoming and has turned over exactly zero documents to Congress so far.
The New York Times is taking a closer look into how Russian trolls used Facebook not only to buy ads and create fake pages but also to make contact with unsuspecting state staffers working for the Trump campaign.
A review of the private Facebook messages, as well as interviews with the Trump campaign operatives who were targeted by Russians, reveal that Mr. Trump’s team was susceptible to Moscow’s interference campaign. It preyed on unsuspecting staff members who were more interested in capturing the enthusiasm of supporters of their unorthodox nominee and did not envision the seemingly far-fetched possibility that Russians might enlist them as unwitting players in a scheme to undermine American democracy.
“Nobody reasonably would have asked — or even thought to ask — ‘Are you sure you’re not with Russia?’” said Karen Giorno, a Republican operative who was the Florida state director for Mr. Trump’s campaign at the time it was contacted by the Internet Research Agency. “It’s just not something that normally you would think you have to watch out for.”
Read more: How Russian Trolls Crept Into the Trump Campaign’s Facebook Messages (NYT)
Exclusive: Reddit Says It’s Cooperating With Russia Investigations. They’ve Handed Over Zero Documents. (Daily Beast)
Russians released anti-Clinton video game weeks before election (CNN)
Russians Used Reddit and Tumblr to Troll the 2016 Election (Daily Beast)
In response to recent reports about the integrity of Reddit, I’d like to share our thinking.