A new report claiming Russia influenced the 2016 US elections by using every social media platform is being released.
The research was released to the US Senate today, revealing popular sites such as Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram spread propaganda after being leveraged.
The report conducted by the University of Oxford shows platform giants such as Youtube, Tumblr, Paypal and Google+ were affected using digital marking and Russia adapting techniques to spread across multiple platforms.
More than 10 million tweets, 116,000 Instagram posts, 61,000 Facebook posts and 1000 videos were analysed by researchers.
These posts were filed by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is linked to the Russian Government.
Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Dr Philip N. Howard says: “We think the goal was to make the campaigns seem more legitimate.”
The research highlights Russia’s focus on immigration, race and gun rights through posts targeting conservatives.
There was also attempts on spreading mis-information on the electoral process to left-wing African-Americans.
Voting turnout from the African American community dropped to less than 60 per cent according to the US census bureau after a record high of 66.6 per cent in 2012.
However the research points towards all messages benefiting the Republican Party, in particular Donald Trump.
Researchers from Oxford University said social media platforms were able to have propaganda spread through lack of human editors monitoring the sites.
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