Russia-linked account pushed fake Hillary Clinton sex video

A pornographic video that falsely claimed to show Hillary Clinton engaged in a sex act has been traced back to an account that Reddit acknowledged on Tuesday is linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

The account, Rubinjer, was the Russia-linked agency’s most popular account on Reddit and received almost 100,000 upvotes, or Reddit’s version of Facebook’s “likes,” in its lifecycle before it was shut down by the site.

One of Rubinjer’s posts on Reddit’s largest pro-Trump community, r/The_Donald, titled “This is How Hillary gets black votes,” links to an animated gif of the fake porn video that is still available on the platform. The same sex tape was posted five times to PornHub under the name “Leaked Hillary Clinton’s Hotel Sex Tape with Black Guy,” and also the porn site SpankBang.

The video was viewed more than 250,000 times on Pornhub.

A whistleblower from the Internet Research Agency, former employee Alan Baskaev, told Russia’s TV Rain last October that the troll farm had created a fake Hillary Clinton porn video. The video itself had not been credibly tied to a troll farm account until Reddit released usernames tied to the Russia-linked agency Tuesday.

The graphic video shows a blonde woman and a black man having sex through a mock hidden camera in what appears to be a hotel room. Rubinjer was the only user to post the video, and the account pushed the content on several platforms, both as animated GIFs and full videos, before the 2016 election.

Reddit is the fourth-most-visited website in the United States, according to the web analytics company Alexa. It is home to one of the largest and most popular Donald Trump fan communities on the web, r/The_Donald, where Trump once gave a Q-and-A during his presidential campaign. The Rubinjer account posted the porn video to that same community in 2016.

In an announcement to its users on Tuesday, Reddit said that 944 accounts — including Rubinjer — were banned for “suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin.” The company had not previously identified any of the accounts, 71 of which had over 1,000 lifetime “upvotes” on the site.

Since last September, the Internet Research Agency had thousands of accounts deleted from Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, where they pushed divisive messages while posing as Americans. Reddit said it purged suspected accounts as far back as 2015.

Rubinjer, which posted the hoax porn video, last posted on May 18, 2017.

Attempts to push the porn video largely fell flat, with most users expressing skepticism.

“If it’s her I think we’d see her face at least once,” wrote one user on the Reddit community r/Rule34.

The troll farm account mostly posted relatable memes on Imgur to gain trust with users. Its top post, titled “Eating at a Waffle House full of cops,” received over 1,900 upvotes.

Its second top post, posted to the subreddit r/BlackPeopleGifs, is a clip taken from the episode of Saturday Night Live immediately after the 2016 election, in which Dave Chappelle expresses mock incredulity at a character who says that “America is racist.”

Four of Rubinjer’s other top ten posts mock Hillary Clinton on the pro-Trump community r/The_Donald. Many of Rubinjer’s posts remain live on Reddit, although his profile page is inaccessible.

Rubinjer also used Reddit to promote an anti-Hillary Clinton video game, titled Hilltendo, before the 2016 election. Hilltendo’s origins as an Internet Research Agency production were first discovered by CNN last month.

Identifying Russian disinformation became a hobby for many users on Reddit, who believed state-sponsored trolls were plaguing the platform.

One Reddit user, Josh Russell, posted a large cache of suspected IRA-linked accounts to a Reddit thread over the last two months. Russell’s list, which he posted to the community r/Active_Measures, closely mirrored the one Reddit released on Tuesday.

“It was pretty easy to find the accounts,” said Russell, a systems engineer in Indiana who goes by Eye_Josh on Reddit. “I just checked for accounts posting links to known Russian (Internet Research Agency) websites. I mean, not a whole lot of people would know about an anti-Clinton Flash game other than (troll farm employees).”

Reddit largely remained silent on Russian propaganda’s infiltration into its platform until an advertisement for the contents of a data leak from the Internet Research Agency, first reported by The Daily Beast, appeared on a Russian auction website. The listing for the data leak promised “American proxies” to use the service.

Days after the report, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman promised it was doing “our best to identify and remove” state-sponsored disinformation.

On Tuesday, Huffman informed Reddit users their process in identifying Russian propaganda accounts in an announcement post.

“There were a number of signals: suspicious creation patterns, usage patterns (account sharing), voting collaboration, etc,” he said. “We also corroborated our findings with public lists from other companies (e.g. Twitter.)“

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, applauded Reddit’s release of suspected disinformation accounts in a statement.

“It’s clear that the Kremlin will use any means at its disposal to spread propaganda and misinformation, and we each bear some responsibility for exercising good judgment and a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to the things we read and spread on social media,” Warner said.

Pornhub did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, who testified before Congress in 2017 about Russian disinformation tacticts, told NBC News that a pivotal part of Russia’s propaganda strategy is to “place videos like this on 4chan or Reddit and hope it takes off in other places on its own.”

“Reddit and other anonymous platforms, we’ve always believed, were perfect hosting platforms for forgeries,” Watts said.

Watts then pointed to embroiled data firm Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, whose CEO claimed in hidden camera footage that the company could use Ukrainian sex workers to entrap politicians.

Cambridge Analytica suspended Nix from the company after the video was made public.

“Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” Cambridge Analytica wrote in a statement on its website.

Watts noted that the problem of fake videos is just beginning to gain attention.

“Cambridge Analytica talked about setting up Ukrainian prostitutes and putting it out in the media to discredit people. It’s all using the same technique,” said Watts. “This one, it sounds like, was terrible, but it shows the intent to get there. As we see fake audio and video online become more authentic looking, instead of 250,000 views, maybe next time you get 250 million.”

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What You Don’t Know About How Facebook Uses Your Data

On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, will face a second day of testimony on Capitol Hill regarding how his company conducts its business and how it has failed to protect the privacy of its users.

The hearings were spurred by revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company, had inappropriately harvested the detailed personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users and that foreign agents have repeatedly used the social media platform to spread misinformation. Facebook executives have promised that the company is working to prevent similar missteps from happening again.

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Consumer data mining is the engine that fuels advertising-supported free online services. If Facebook is being singled out for the practice, it is partly because it is the market leader and trendsetter.

“There are common parts of people’s experience on the internet,” Matt Steinfeld, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement. “But of course we can do more to help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have.”

Still, privacy advocates want lawmakers and regulators in the United States to have a more pointed discussion about the stockpiling of personal data that remains the core of Facebook’s $40.6 billion annual business.

While a series of actions by European judges and regulators are trying to limit some of the powerful targeting mechanisms that Facebook employs, federal officials in the United States have done little to constrain them, to the consternation of American privacy advocates.

Many other companies, including news organizations like The New York Times, mine information about users for marketing purposes. But privacy advocates say Facebook continues to test the boundaries of what is permissible. Some fault the Federal Trade Commission for failing to enforce a 2011 agreement that barred Facebook from deceptive privacy practices.

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“Congress needs to begin to ask questions like, ‘Why did the F.T.C. allow this to happen?’” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit group in Washington. “We most certainly have to take a different approach if we don’t want it to happen again.”

An F.T.C. spokeswoman said the agency could not comment on the case and referred to an agency statement in which it said it was committed to “using all of its tools to protect” consumer privacy and had opened a nonpublic investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices.

Facebook requires outside sites that use its tracking technologies to clearly notify users, and it allows Facebook users to opt out of seeing ads based on their use of those apps and websites.

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That has not stopped angry users from airing their grievances over Facebook’s practices.

In 2016, for example, a Missouri man with metastatic cancer filed a class-action suit against Facebook. The suit accused the tech giant of violating the man’s privacy by tracking his activities on cancer center websites outside the social network — and collecting details about his possible treatment options — without his permission.

Facebook persuaded a federal judge to dismiss the case. The company successfully argued that tracking users for ad-targeting purposes was a standard business practice, and one that its users agreed to when signing up for the service. The Missouri man and two other plaintiffs have appealed the judge’s decision.

Facebook is quick to note that when users sign up for an account, they must agree to the company’s data policy. It plainly states that its data collection “includes information about the websites and apps you visit, your use of our services on those websites and apps, your use of our services, as well as information the developer or publisher of the app or website provides to you or us.”

In Europe, however, some regulators contend that Facebook has not obtained users’ active and informed consent to track them on other sites and apps. Their general concern, they said, is that many of Facebook’s 2.1 billion users have no idea how much data Facebook could collect about them and how Facebook could use it to influence their behavior. And there is a growing unease that tech giants are unfairly manipulating users.

“Facebook provides a network where the users, while getting free services most of them consider useful, are subject to a multitude of nontransparent analyses, profiling, and other mostly obscure algorithmical processing,” said Johannes Caspar, the data protection commissioner for Hamburg, Germany.

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In February, for instance, a judge in Brussels ordered Facebook to stop tracking users on other websites. Facebook has appealed the decision.

And last Friday, the Italian Competition Authority said it was investigating Facebook for exercising “undue influence” by requiring users to let the company automatically collect all kinds of data about them both on its platform and off.

“Every single action, every single relationship is carefully monitored,” said Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor who oversees an independent European Union authority which advises on privacy-related laws and policies. “People are being treated like laboratory animals.”

Regulators have won some victories. In 2012, Facebook agreed to stop using face recognition technology in the E.U. after Mr. Caspar, the Hamburg data protection commissioner, accused it of violating German and European privacy regulations by collecting users’ biometric facial data without their explicit consent.

Outside of the European Union, Facebook employs face recognition technology for a name-tagging feature that can automatically suggest names for the people in users’ photos.

With facial recognition, brick-and-mortar stores can scan shoppers’ faces looking for known shoplifters. But civil liberties experts warn that the technology could threaten the ability of Americans to remain anonymous online, on the street and at political protests.

Now a dozen consumer and privacy groups in the United States have accused Facebook of deceptively rolling out expanded uses of the technology without clearly explaining it to users or obtaining their explicit “opt-in” consent. Last Friday, the groups filed a complaint with the F.T.C. saying that the expansion violated the terms of the 2011 agreement. Facebook sent notices alerting users of its new face recognition uses and said it provides a page where they can turn the feature off.

Facebook has other powerful techniques with implications users may not fully understand.

One is a marketing service called “Look-alike Audiences” which goes beyond the familiar Facebook programs allowing advertisers to directly target people by their ages or likes. The look-alike audience feature allows marketers to examine their existing customers or voters for certain propensities — like big spenders — and have Facebook find other users with similar tendencies.

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Murka, a social casino game developer, used Facebook’s look-alike audience feature to target “high-value players” who were “most likely to make in-app purchases,” according to Facebook marketing material.

There is concern among some marketers that political campaigns or unscrupulous companies could potentially use the same technique to identify the characteristics of, for instance, people who make rash decisions and find a bigger and bigger pool of the same sort of people.

Facebook’s ad policies prohibit potentially predatory ad-targeting practices. Advertisers are able to target ads to users using the look-alike service, but they do not receive personal data about those Facebook users.

But Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington, warned that this “look-alike” marketing was a hidden, manipulative practice — on par with subliminal advertising — and said that should be prohibited.

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