Russian trolls on Instagram focus on Joe Biden

As the 2020 election heats up, so, too, do the trolling and interference efforts. And we already know one of the biggest targets so far: former Vice President Joe Biden.

The information comes as Facebook announced on Monday that it removed dozens of accounts and pages in response to "coordinated inauthentic behavior" by those accounts. The accounts were spread across four networks: three in Iran and one in Russia.

The Russian network showed some telling links to our old friends at the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). It was spreading disinformation via 50 Instagram accounts and one Facebook account. And, according to a company who worked with Facebook, Biden was their top target.

Ben Nimmo, director of investigations for social media analysis firm Graphika, told CNN that it "looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

According to Graphika, a number of the accounts showed support on the Democratic side for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Nimmo also noted Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were targeted, but more from a "character building" perspective, in which the fake accounts showed support for those candidates.

The entire report, available here in PDF, is pretty eye-opening for lots of other details, like the similarity between the memes used by these accounts and ones used in 2016 by the IRA. In fact, the overlapping nature of the 2016 efforts and those of these now-banned accounts led Graphika to name the effort "IRACopyPasta."

And even though the operation was carried out almost exclusively on Instagram, the campaign heavily utilized screenshots of tweets.