facebook this morning is all the sort of regular tricks that you would expect from the russians are in play here about disinformation, misinformation, fake personas, people posing as reporters in ukraine. and finally one last interesting thing, attack that is becoming more and more common online called mass reporting. which is they found facebook found a network of 200 accounts that were set up to report, so if somebody criticized russia, these accounts would report this person to facebook, to try and get facebook to pull that down. all of this happening in the background and we re learning a lot of what russia is doing today, we also know that a lot of this is also happening on the other side as well. donie o sullivan, thank you for that reporting. the fbi arrests men accused of impersonating dhs agents for more than two years. the bizarre new details ahead. but first, chef, writer, traveler and friend anthony bourdain played a special role in millions of people s lives
the left-leaning accounts focused on denigrating clinton and supporting the candidacy of either bernie sanders or jill stein. and the right-leaning accounts were unvariably opposed to clinton s candidacy. so in 2016, we saw the internet research agency, directed by the kremlin, playing both left-wing and right-wing fake american personas. hitting hillary clinton from the left, hitting hillary clinton from the right. both to the benefit of donald trump. now, in 2020, we re seeing the exact same thing. internet research agency directed by the kremlin, using fake personas, fake american personas that appear to be from the left, from the right, particularly ones that seem to situate themselves in swing states and they re hitting joe biden, both from the left and from the right, both to benefit donald trump. sometimes they re hitting the other democratic candidates, too, just in case biden doesn t get the nomination, but it s the exact same play. russia right now today is playing it online
from the right. both to the benefit of donald trump. now, in 2020, we re seeing the exact same thing. internet research agency directed by the kremlin, using fake personas, fake american personas that appear to be from the left, from the right, particularly ones that seem to situate themselves in swing states and they re hitting joe biden, both from the left and from the right, both to benefit donald trump. sometimes they re hitting the other democratic candidates, too, just in case biden doesn t get the nomination, but it s the exact same play. russia right now today is playing it online exactly the same way they did in 2016. i mean, it s literally today, facebook took down these russian meme-making anti-democratic online personas. these pro-trump online engines. so that part is in place again, just exactly like it was before. i mean, why wouldn t the russians do it again, right? it s not like they got in trouble for doing it the first time. and we ve got this president who
the russian cyberattack of 2016. really have three elements to it. the first was to penetrate the democratic party servers and the e-mail top official of the hillary clinton campaign. the other was to get into state election systems, to their databases. and the third element of this was to inflame or create divisions within the american political culture. they did this with twitter and youtube and probably, most of all, facebook. creating fake pages, fake personas, fake tweets. putin s goal, according to u.s. intelligence agencies was to hurt hillary clinton, help donald trump and provoke conflict without leaving any fingerprints. the documents stolen by wikileaks. blasting russia and vladimir putin. state-sponsored russian hackers. polls now open. the most contentious and controversial presidential campaign is history.
hillary clinton campaign, because here they would have to fight on so many different fronts. it s very likely they are still very active in social media creating fake personas, sowing discord. very active on social media sites. and we don t know and this is obviously the most scary, we don t know the extent to which they ve been active in altering voter rolls and have the capacity to alter voter tabulation. jeremy, it also seems like so many of the forces who still have the courage, the political courage to stand up to vladimir putin are no longer really on the field. bob corker who championed and ultimately shamed the white house into supporting sanctions is retiring. he ll be out of office in a matter of weeks. we ve lost john mccain who was perhaps the strongest and loudest and most powerful skeptic and critic of vladimir putin. other than the president, what else does vladimir putin have to navigate around in our politics? well, there may be some new russia sanctions on the hor