For Albright, the CrowdTangle findings were a seed that germinated, weed-like, far beyond Facebook. He spent late nights and early mornings studying what he’d found and soon realized that the very same memes and accounts he discovered there were popping up on other, less discussed, platforms. He collected IRA-linked ads on Instagram that Facebook hadn’t yet publicly reported. A reporter at Fast Companytook notice, and afterward, Facebook discreetly added a last-minute bullet point to an earlier blog post, acknowledging that yes, the Russian trolls had abused Instagram, too.
He used a list of Twitter handles associated with the IRA to scour sites like Tumblr for suspicious content posted by accounts of the same name. He found plenty, including particularly egregious posts intended to stoke outrage about police brutality among black Americans. Albright helped Craig Silverman at Buzzfeed Newsbreak the story. A month later, Tumblr announced that it had indeed found 84 IRA accounts on the platform. Albright had already identified nearly every one of them.
“You have a conversation with Jonathan, and you feel like you’ve just learned something that he realized six months or a year earlier,” Craig Silverman says.
I know the feeling. More often than not, a single message from Albright (“rabbit hole warning”) leads me to so many unanswered questions I’d never thought to ask. Like in late February, when Albright finished reading through the follow-up answers Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, sent to the Senate following his congressional testimony.
Albright realized then that over the course of hours of testimony and 32 pages of written responses, Stretch never once mentioned how many people followed Russian trolls on Instagram. That struck Albright as a whale of an oversight because, while the Russians posted 80,000 pieces of content on Facebook, they posted 120,000 on Instagram. (And yes, these are numbers Albright knows by heart.)
When, prompted by Albright, I asked Facebook this question in March, they said they hadn’t shared the number of people who followed Russian trolls on Instagram because they—a multibillion-dollar company that had already endured hours of congressional interrogation—hadn’t calculated that number themselves. Another time, Albright mentioned that Reddit still hosted live links to websites operated by the Internet Research Agency. Several of these accounts had already been deleted, but at least two were still live. When I asked Reddit about the accounts, the company suspended them within hours. (Disclosure: Conde Nast, which owns WIRED, has a financial stake in Reddit.)
Silverman, of Buzzfeed, describes Albright’s research as a “service” to the country. “If Jonathan hadn’t been scraping data and thinking about cross-platform flow and shares and regrams and organic reach and all these other pieces that weren’t being captured, we wouldn’t know about it,” he says.
But this work has come at a personal price. When I ask Albright what he does to blow off steam, he says he travels—for work. Nights and weekends are mostly spent in the company of his spreadsheets, which are often loaded up with fragments of humanity’s worst creations—like conspiracy theories about survivors of a high school shooting.
And, yet, that’s also what drives him. When the Parkland shooting happened, Albright says he was thinking about slowing down, and taking some time to plot his next steps. But he couldn’t help himself. “The fact that I was seeing Alex Jones reply to a teenager who had just survived a mass shooting, and he’s calling him a fake and a fraud, that’s just un-fucking-believable,” Albright says. “I’ve never seen that. Not like that.”
By late spring of this year, almost two years after he’d started this quest, it looked like even Albright was beginning to realize this life was unsustainable. Especially given the distance, Albright’s erratic schedule requires a lot of patience on his partner’s part. “You have to be pretty laid back and cool to be with someone who’s doing this kind of work,” he says. And this spring, Albright’s father died of cancer, requiring him to take some time off and make the cross-country trip home to Oregon. Recently, his typically busy Twitter feed has quieted down. He’s hard at work on a book proposal and thinking up ideas to pitch as part of Facebook’s new research initiative, which grants independent academics access to the company’s data.
Silverman, of CrowdTangle, says he hopes this initiative will help Facebook work more closely with people like Albright. “The really best case scenario is there will be a lot of Jonathans and a larger community of folks flagging these things and helping raise awareness,” he says.
Meanwhile, tech giants have begun taking some responsibility for the mess they made. Facebook and other tech companies have started making major changes to their ad platforms, their data-sharing policies, and their approaches to content moderation.
Albright knows that returning to writing academic papers that warn of some far off threat may not capture the public imagination or make the front page of the country’s leading newspapers. That’s particularly true given that tech companies, federal investigators, and vast swaths of the country are still looking in the rear-view mirror. But he’s ready to start looking forward and thinking holistically, not forensically, about the influence technology has on our lives.
“I can’t just be a first responder for propaganda,” Albright told me in May, several months after we met under the leaky pipes.
Yet, minutes later, he had a new discovery to share. The day before, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee published all 3,500 ads Russian trolls bought on Facebook in the run-up to the election. Aside from Albright’s own collection, it was the most thorough look yet at how Russia had used social media to try to influence American voters. Albright couldn’t help but take a look. He compiled the ads into one 6,000-page PDF, and as he scanned the images he realized a lot of the ads were familiar. And then he noticed a series of ads unlike any of the ones he’d seen before. He thought I might find them interesting. He suggested I take a closer look.
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