Exclusive: Beyond Facebook, Russia colluded with U.S. anti-gay groups to stoke tensions over LGBTQ equality in the run-up to the 2016 election.

“God has decided,” Vladimir Putin told Oliver Stone in Showtime’s Putin Interviews. “I believe it’s my duty to uphold traditional values and family values. But why? Because same-sex marriages will not produce any children,” the Russian president said.

It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia but it’s a crime to wave a pride flag, show same-sex public displays of affection or demonstrate for gay rights. Gay Russians in Chechnya are routinely rounded up and tortured and vigilante gangs use social media to lure hundreds of gay men on fake dates where they are filmed being beaten or sexually humiliated. Everything from same-sex emoji bans to a total prohibition on coming out publicly has been considered by Russia’s legislature.

The anti-gay sentiment in Russia began to swell in the mid-1990’s after the fall of the Soviet Union but it wasn’t until Barack Obama’s election that Russian anti-gay activists began to build bridges with their soul mates in the fringe right of U.S. conservatism.

In the 90’s, two Russian sociologists and an American activist birthed the World Congress of Families, a global coalition of anti-gay groups with deep Russian interests. WCF is based in the U.S. and is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world,” says Larry Jacobs, WCF’s managing director. “At the UN, they are really the ones standing up for these traditional values of family and faith.”

The congress partners with U.S. conservative organizations including Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Alliance Defense Fund, Americans United For Life and Concerned Women For America.

Members of these organizations regularly meet at the WCF conventions around the world and in Russia. This gives them a direct line to anti-gay members of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, the Russian Orthodox Church and to two Russian oligarchs who “are footing many of the WCF’s bills, Vladimir Yakunin, the president of the Russian railways, and investor Konstantin Malofeev,” according to Mother Jones.

A Russian oligarch and Putin ally is a key funder of the anti-gay World Congress of Families. Its president is America’s leading anti-gay activist.

Yakunin is one of Putin’s closest oligarchs. The billionaire is adept at aligning Russian Orthodox Church policies with those of Vladimir Putin. The church has approval over any legislation tabled by the Duma and in turn the church is heavily influenced by Putin’s oligarchs.

Yakunin’s wife, Natalia Yakunina, runs Russia’s anti-gay Sanctity of Motherhood which first invited Jacobs to a conference in Moscow in 2010. The same year, Russia’s Orthodox Church dispatched one of WCF’s Russian co-founders to meet with the U.S. anti-gay group Focus on the Family.

Konstantin Malofeev is also a devout Orthodox christian and is often referred to as “Putin’s Soros”. He operates his own think tank and TV station. He believes in the restoration of the Russian empire and has fostered relations with many of Europe’s far right politicians including France’s Marine Le Pen.

Malofeev is a key financier of the Russian attack on Ukraine. He claims to only send food and water to rebel-held areas but Ukrainian officials believe the oligarch is an arm’s length way for Putin to control the war. In 2013, Malofeev used the church’s Ukrainian missions to subdue opposition to Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea

“I’m in the middle of patriotic circles.” says Malofeev. “People who have patriotic and Orthodox views know me, and sometimes I know them. You can find a link between me and almost any Orthodox activist. But that doesn’t mean I’m paying them a salary or that we’re in the same business,” Malofeev says.

In 2013, Malofeev’s St. Basil charity invited Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage to attend a round table discussion. NOM rose to prominence as the main advocate for California’s Proposition 8 which overturned gay marriage rights in the state.  Brown created a campaign which demeaned the LGBTQ community as predatory, diseased and disordered. Their claims were supported by faux-science, much of it created by the WCF.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian created and funded anti-LGBTQ ads and the organizations which shared them.

Wikileaks published the hacked DNC emails and an unprecedented sequence of Trump-Russia meetings took place in June last year. It’s perhaps not too coincidental that Brown was appointed president at last year’s WCF June convention. “I look forward to continuing to work to advance the pro-family movement in the US and around the world,” Brown said in a statement about his new role.

NOM regularly publishes anti-LGBTQ ads in its Facebook feed, some of it shared from the pages of other organizations like “Moms Like Me” and “Stand With Children”.  One ad showed a photo of Hillary Clinton and Obama under a headline which read: “when you demand everyone deny science so that girls can become boys, you have overplayed your hand.”

A handful of wealthy donors keeps NOM funded to the tune of about $7.4 million annually. Amway’s Doug DeVos (Betsy’s brother-in-law) donated $750,000 to the organization between 2009 and 2012.

NOM’s goal is to support the elections of anti-gay legislators. Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who believes homosexuality should be illegal, is a recent beneficiary of a NOM endorsement. The organization has repeatedly broken election law for not revealing its donors and is listed as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

All of the above could normally fall into the sphere of state-sponsored NGO activity (the U.S. does similar things in other countries to influence human rights) but now there’s an added element of an investigation of conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. This month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller executed a search warrant on Facebook after revelations that Russian-owned accounts bought $150,000 in ads on Facebook on issues from Black Lives Matter, immigration and LGBTQ issues between 2015 and 2016.

The ads were intended to inflame tensions on wedge issues like LGBTQ rights. Mueller’s team has not publicly released the ads but is analyzing their origin and which accounts and pages shared the posts, which in itself could constitute a crime.

“These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another,” the Washington Post reported.

We’ve written before about Russia’s extraordinary efforts to engage the NRA between 2010 and 2016. Investigators are now probing if the Kremlin officials infiltrated social, evangelical and constitutional causes and created ads to divide and conquer an electorate. All under the pretense of shared values but with only one aim in mind: furthering Russia’s kleptocracy.

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An investigation into Facebook’s political donations to Republican and anti-LGBT politicians and its investments from Putin-linked Russian oligarchs. We found a pattern of political activity at odds with the company’s public image.

At 33, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s most recognizable names. Zuckerberg is also one of its richest, estimated to be worth $73.7 billion. The Facebook founder publicly espouses liberal notions on everything from gay rights to immigration but a closer look under the hood of Facebook’s finances and political operations reveals a record of support for conservative causes, opposition to LGBT rights and connections to Russian money.

Zuckerberg is now under enormous pressure to reveal more about Facebook’s role in a Russian propaganda campaign in support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election cycle. Despite a coy statement revealing $150,000 in advertising spend by a Russian social media firm with ties to Vladimir Putin and the FSB and new revelations the social network allowed Russian operatives posing as Americans to create and sell tickets to anti-immigration, secessionist, anti-LGBT and confederate events, Facebook is refusing to release the ads, groups and who was targeted.

“It appeared to me that the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything — our Facebooks, Googles and Twitters — it was my belief the Russians were using those sites to intervene in our elections,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told CNN “And the first reaction from Facebook was: ‘Well you’re crazy, there’s nothing going on’ — well, we find yesterday there actually was something going on.”

Amid all this pressure, a renewed spotlight should be shone on why Facebook donated $120,000 to the Conservative Political Action Committee. Facebook made the donation to CPAC partly to allow conference attendees could easily produce Facebook Live videos, according to the Daily Beast. Facebook had previously contributed to production at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions but the decision to support a partisan action committee conference raises questions about the motives of the donation amid conflicting statements from Facebook and CPAC.

The social network acknowledged the payment but said “our involvement is not an endorsement of any particular position or platform.” CPAC’s Matt Schlapp indicated however there was some ideological participation: “We are glad Facebook agreed to be at CPAC and to acknowledge the importance of conservatives to their company, and we continue to work with them on issues important to conservatives,” he said.

The CPAC convention took place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md in February this year and featured President Donald Trump, VP Mike Pence, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway. The NRA which is also linked to Russian influence is a big funder of CPAC.

Since 2011, Facebook’s PAC has contributed more to GOP candidates including those with anti-LGBT positions.

Facebook started its own Political Action Committee in 2011. The PAC supports politicians on both sides of the aisle which tends to favor Republican causes, giving $477,000 to Republican candidates like John Boehner and Paul Ryan. The PAC gave Democrats $425,000 in donations including to John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. The PAC only supported one presidential candidate in 2016, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who received $4,000.

Since 2012, Facebook has also favored politicians with anti-LGBT voting records. More than 40 percent of Facebook’s PAC contributions, totaling roughly $156,000, have gone to politicians voting against LGBT rights. In 2014, Northstar Asset Management which owns more than 55,000 shares in Facebook filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission demanding the company’s PAC fall in line with Facebook’s values of being pro-gay and intellectual property rights.

Facebook rejected the claim, saying: “We have practices in place to ensure the appropriate disclosure and oversight of our lobbying and political activities. The proposal seeks to impose requirements that would be cumbersome to apply, are not required by law and are not standard amongst other companies, including competitors”.

A look inside Facebook also reveals a culture devoid of diversity. There are literally no people of color on Facebook’s board which is mostly men. As a whole, 90% of Facebook is white or asian. In 2015, only 2% black overall and 3% black in senior leadership.

One of those white men who has a seat on the board is Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump (he personally donated $1.25 million to the Trump campaign and spoke at the RNC). Zuckerberg has resisted pressure to oust Thiel from the board but as investigators turn up evidence of Facebook’s role in targeting and delivering Facebook ads on behalf of the Trump campaign, Thiel’s role is likely to receive new scrutiny.

Zuckerberg touts Thiel as an example of ideological diversity. “I think the folks who are saying we shouldn’t have someone on our board because they’re a Republican, I think that’s crazy,” Zuckerberg told a forum at North Carolina A&T State University. “I think you need to have all kinds of diversity if you want to make progress together as a society.”

Thiel is also tied to mercenary Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos who favors a private army take over the war in Afghanistan and is vocally opposed to rights for transgender people.

One of Facebook’s biggest shareholders is a Russian company partly-owned by an oligarch known as the “hard man” of Russia and is very close to Vladimir Putin.

In 2009, Facebook was struggling financially. The company sought outside investment and it came from Russian internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which invested $200 million for 2% in the company in 2009 (the stake has since climbed to between 5.4% to 10% depending on who you ask). Digital Sky’s CEO is Russian oligarch Yuri Milner but its largest shareholder and initial funder is Alisher Usmanov who is known “as the hard man” of Russia.

Usmanov is criticised for being a “racketeer and gangster”. He is a convicted criminal and was in jail in the former Soviet Union though he claims he was a political prisoner. He owns Britain’s Arsenal Football Club and investments in mines, metals factories, media properties, and mobile phones in Russia. He is the Chairman of ‘Gazpromholdings’, a subsidiary of state-run Gazprom, which has been sanctioned by the U.S.

“Usmanov became a billionaire oligarch in the gangster takeover of Russia’s “privatised” mineral assets. He is close to Putin, and has been used by him to buy up and neutralise much of the little remaining independent media in Russia. Usmanov does this in his own name or as Chairman of ‘GazpromInvestHolding’. Independent journalists have died in mysterious accidents following Usmanov takeovers,” says former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray who has taken on a personal crusade against the oligarch and was sued for his effort.

Usmanov owns 35 per cent of DST which makes him the indirect owner of a significant amount of Facebook through Digital Sky. “For a blackmailer who is a key tool in Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime, to have a share in Facebook is totally unacceptable,” says Murray.

Digital Sky’s CEO Milner presents a cleaner image to the world but is also very close to Putin, regularly attending meetings with Usmanov and the Russian president. DST is heavily invested in Silicon Valley including investments in Twitter, Groupon and many young startups.

Facebook’s reliance on DST was not just about getting Russian money. It gave the social network access to the Kremlin and the Russian digital market. “If Facebook wants to be successful in Russia, DST can bring a lot to the table besides knowledge. DST is close to the government there, the source said, and while outright involvement (or obstruction) from the Russian government is highly unlikely, if Facebook wants its business to go more smoothly, DST can help,” a source close to DST told CNET.

Facebook has many business reasons to supports conservative voices but it remains an open question how much they knew about Russia’s interference in 2016.

Silicon Valley is increasingly concerned about aggressive Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice antitrust investigations over “unfair or deceptive”, monopolies and online data collection and use, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and spam. According to Forbes, the FTC is known in Silicon Valley as the “Federal Technology Commission”. From a business perspective Facebook’s support for conservative allies makes some sense but that they fly in the social network’s public values could harm the company.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents is “zeroing in on how Russia spread fake and damaging information through social media and is seeking additional evidence from companies like Facebook and Twitter about what happened on their networks,” according to Bloomberg.

Mueller’s focus on social media is said to be “red hot” and Facebook, Twitter and Google executives may be called to testify in front of congressional committees as well. More troubling is a notion first floated by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Facebook, Twitter and Google may indeed be the scene of the biggest political crime in history. This would expose the tech giants to extraordinary examination by prosecutors and ironically the very regulation they may have sought to dissuade with their political efforts.

The post A Dirty Little Secret appeared first on Narativ.

Exclusive: The Kremlin began supporting Donald Trump on Facebook as soon as he announced his White House bid in June 2015. Investigators want to know if the campaign colluded with Russia to use Facebook as a propaganda tool.

Brad Parscale picked up the phone on Wednesday June 17, 2015. It was real-estate mogul Donald J. Trump. The San Antonio web designer had built websites for the Trump organization before but this request from his client was far bigger than anything the then 39-year-old Kansan had ever worked on before.

A day earlier, Trump descended the escalator at his Manhattan Tower to a basement full of supporters and journalists to announce his bid for the White House. Trump told Parscale on the phone he wanted him to build a full presidential campaign website.

Parscale had no political or campaign experience but in the ensuing seventeen months he would build the most aggressive digital media campaign for a president anyone had ever seen. The 6’7? web designer assembled a team in San Antonio, Texas where he lived while Donald Trump began doing the rounds on cable news.

“You think you’d be able to get along with Vladimir Putin,” Sean Hannity asked Trump on Fox News. “Did you talk to him?”

“I don’t want to say,” Trump dodged the question, then added with something of a wink: “Putin truly hates Obama. He thinks he’s terrible. He thinks he’s arrogant. He thinks he’s just terrible.”

At exactly the same time Trump said he was open to dealing with Putin, a Russian company funded by a “close Putin ally with ties to the Russian intelligence” began buying ads on Facebook supporting Trump campaign issues and continued doing so throughout the campaign. The social network describes the ads bought by Internet Research Agency as “amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum?—?touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights”

Trump launched his campaign with a tirade against Mexicans immigrants and proposed a border wall. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting,” he told supporters.

On Facebook, a Russian created community called “SecureBorders” with 133,000 followers, began publishing racists ads to amplify Trump’s message, including one of a cartoon Trump dangling a man wearing a T-shirt with a Mexican flag over a wall with the headline “You have to go back pal”.

Russian oligarch Evgeney Prigozhin hired hundreds of Russians to pose as American conservatives and post fake news on issues closely aligned to the Trump campaign.

“SecureBorders” and hundreds of other fake pages like “Spread Your Wings”, “Art Gone Conscious” and “Celebrities Against Obama” were created by the IRA which is funded by Russian oligarch Evgeney Prigozhin. Prigozhin was Putin’s chef for more than a decade. Since then, he’s built a catering empire serving Russian public sector and military contracts. He is now under sanctions by the U.S. for running a digital propaganda machine serving up fake news and memes to American voters.

Prigozhin pumped millions of rubles into the IRA to hire hundreds of well-paid 20 and 30-something year olds to generate content on a specific agenda. The New York Times Magazine revealed employees at the St. Petersburg agency had multiple fake Facebook accounts all created in the summer of 2014. They parroted, commented and shared content, amplifying the message across social media on Facebook groups by posing as American conservatives.

A former employee of the agency described a culture plagued with homophobia, racism and poor grammar. “You see these people with a lot of tattoos,” the insider told the New York Times Magazine. “They’re so cool, like they’re from New York; very hip clothing, very hip tattoos, like they’re from Williamsburg but they are stupid,” said Marat Burkhardt. “In office conversation, they used gay slurs to refer to [Ukrainian politician] Petro Poroshenko and called Barack Obama a monkey,” Burkhardt said.

Investigators want to know if the Trump Campaign coordinated efforts with a Russian propaganda army.

Facebook claims to have found $150,000 worth of ads from 470 suspicious Russian accounts but this may just be the tip of the iceberg. “This is a very significant set of data points produced by Facebook,” Congressman Adam Schiff told the Washington Post. “Left unanswered in what we received from Facebook — because it is beyond the scope of what they are able to determine — is whether there was any coordination between these social media trolls and the campaign. We have to get to the bottom of that,” Schiff said

Which brings us back to Brad Parscale. In the months after Parscale got the call from Trump to build a campaign website in June 2015, Parscale’s became something of a campaign manager involved in communicating every message for the Presidential nominee.

His company Giles-Parscale which was accustomed to billing in the double-digit thousands received $90 million dollars during the campaign, most of it destined to Facebook. Facebook was on-site at the Project Alamo headquarters in San Antonio. “They were helping us,” Trump social media director Theresa Hong told the BBC. “They were basically our “hands on” partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.” Hong said.

Facebook worked alongside Cambridge Analytica in San Antonio. CA’s parent company SCL has been accused of stealing 30 million Facebook profiles through a malicious Facebook app. The social media network shut down the app in 2015. Facebook must also have been aware that Cambridge Analytica was profiling users through innocuous looking quizzes on the social network for use in the campaign.

Parscale’s team was able to identify voters in minute detail. “What I needed to do was to find smart people who came from the Republican Party, subcontractors and my own company and say how do we find these individual voters and the exact right ones,” Parscale told the Joe Page show. “I didn’t need a gut, because I had the data”.

Congressional investigation committees and Special Counsel Robert Mueller want to know if someone within the campaign helped the IRA target its Facebook ads geographically, which implies granular knowledge the campaign’s progress and local issue in specific counties across the country.

Parscale testified before the House Intelligence Committee in July he was unaware of any Russian links to the his social media campaign. We “used the exact same digital marketing strategies that are used everyday by corporate America,” Parscale said in a statement. This may be true but campaigns are not corporations and are subject to regulations forbidding foreign propaganda supporting a campaign.

The FBI is now investigating if Sputnik News and Russia Today, which use Facebook to distribute content, failed to register as foreign agents.

Investigators are also probing Facebook outlet “DC Leaks” which published the first samples of material stolen by Russian hackers from the DNC and they’re investigating the role of Russian news services like Sputnik and Russia Today, as well as Breitbart, in pushing fake news on Facebook at the Kremlin’s behest.

Andrew Feinberg, a former journalist who worked for Sputnik News told Yahoo! News he received his marching orders from his mostly Russian editors at the Washington D.C. office and claims they often said, “Moscow wants this, or Moscow wants that.” Feinberg was interviewed by the FBI recently about Sputnik’s operations to determine if it is in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

“This tells me they have good information and intelligence that these organizations have been acting on behalf of the Kremlin and that there’s a direct line between them and the [Russian influence operations] that are a significant threat to our democracy,” says Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Sputnik, along with Russia Today and Breitbart, relies heavily on Facebook and Google to target its news content at American consumers. If indeed Sputnik failed to register under FARA, their entire operation could become the subject of prosecution or expulsion. Dmitry Kiselyov runs Sputnik and formerly headed Russia Today and is widely referred to as Putin’s chief propagandist.

The big question now is whether the campaign coordinated its social media efforts with the Trump Campaign, and specifically Brad Parscale. If investigators are able to find this type of cooperation, it could well be the most conclusive proof of a conspiracy between Russia and Trump to influence the 2016 election yet.

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