Context,the claim was 17 intelligence agencies confirmed that the Russians interfered with the 2016 elections.
Out of the 17 intelligence agencies listed and using the link provided above to read about what each agency does in the scope of their existence.
Very few are actually involved or concerned about Russian intervention,The coast guard is really going to devote time and resources to worry about Russian social media.
A majority of those agencies were sadly underfunded during the previous administration,few had resources to go outside of their designated mission.
So then we can look at who came to the decision.
[[U) Russia's intelligence services have been focused for decades on conducting foreign influence campaigns, or "active measures," and disinformatiori.43,44 The Russian intelligence services "pioneered dezinformatsiya [disinformation] in the early twentieth century," and by the mid-1960's, had significantly invested in disinformation and active measures.45 According to testimony Roy Godson and Thomas Rid provided to the Committee, over 10,000 individualdisinformation operations were carried out during the Cold War involving approximately 15,000 · personnel at its peak.
So all they really did was state the obvious,which they had already known Sense the 1960s.
So how was the decision actually made as to the Russians interfering into the 2016 elections?
The TAG is an external group of experts the Committee consults for substantive technical advice on topics of importance to Committee activities and oversight. In this case, the Committee requested the assistance oftwo
independent working groups, each with the technical capabilities and expertise required two working groups were led by three TAG members, with John Kelly, the founder and analytics firm Graphika, and Phil Howard, an expert academic researcher at the Oxford
. one working group, and Renee DiResta, the Director of Research at New Knowledge, a
dedicated to protecting the public sphere from disinformation attacks, leading the other.
Committee, social media companies, U.S. law enforcement, international partners, fellow researchers and academics, and the American public with an enhanced understanding ofhow Russia-based actors, at the direction ofthe Russian government, effectuated a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation's citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans. The Committee supports the findings therein.
[[U) The Committee also engaged directly with a number of social media companies in the course ofthis study. The willingness ofthese companies to meet with Members and ~taff, share the results of internal investigations, and provide evidence of foreign influence activity collected from their platforms was indispensable to this study. Specifically, the Committee's . ability to identify Russian activity on social media platforms was limited. As such, the Cominittee was largely reliant on social media companies to identify Russian activity and share that information with the Committee or with the broader public. Thus, while the Committee findings describe a substantial amount of Russian activity on social media platforms, the full scope ofthis activity remains unknown to the Committee, the social media companies, and the broader U.S. Government.
Pay close attention to that last sentence.
So “17 intelligence agencies and entire investigative committee involving 100s of “experts” including social media company experts have determined that the scope of the activity remains unknown.
But yet from there went 3 years of the president collusion with the Russians.
3. [[U) The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted
Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush.14 As Clint Watts,
a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee, "Russia's o~ert media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides . ofthe golitical spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin." IRA operators sought"to impact primaries for both major parties and "may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed."15
4. [[U) The Committee found that no single group ofAmericans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target ofthe information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016. Evidence of the IRA's overwhelming operational ei;nphasis on race is' evident in the IRA's Facebook advertisement content [[over 66 percent contained a term related to rac~ ) and targeting [[locational targeting was principally aimed at African- Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Facebook pages [[one ofthe IRA's top- performing pages, "Blacktivist," generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook
' users), its Instagram content [[five ofthe top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content [[heavily focused on hot- button issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests), and its YouTube.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/...rt_Volume2.pdf
