One of the more cogent explanations of the intent, scope, and goals of the Kremlin's interference in American elections that I have stumbled across.
Does anyone fondly remember the days when Trumpettes bellowed this was all about some fat guy with a laptop sitting in his bed, who probably wasn't even Russian?
p.s., smart people, sentient people, erudite people read the New Yorker, not Breitbart.
Does anyone fondly remember the days when Trumpettes bellowed this was all about some fat guy with a laptop sitting in his bed, who probably wasn't even Russian?
p.s., smart people, sentient people, erudite people read the New Yorker, not Breitbart.
How Trump Helps Russian Trolls
In 1998, Igor Panarin, a Russian intelligence official turned scholar, presented a paper at a European conference about information warfare, predicting that the United States would, in the near future, descend into another civil war and divide into several mini-nations, each backed by a different world power. Panarin’s prediction was greeted in the West with amusement, and over the years various profiles of the professor by Western reporters treated him as a curiosity. The map he produced—you can see a copy here—about the post-apocalypse United States was absurd, and the specificity of the date of America’s civil war—2010—was silly. But, in Russia, Panarin and his theories were embraced by the Putin regime, and he became a well-known expert pontificating on TV about the decline of the United States, as well as an adviser to the Kremlin. His thinking has been repeatedly cited as a window into the Putin view of how to undermine the United States: use racial and religious diversity and political polarization to exacerbate existing divides. I remember reading about Panarin’s ideas years ago and laughing. How could the Russian government be so clueless about the United States? But his theories about an America headed for some kind of breakup seem less funny these days.
I was reminded of Panarin this week, as I watched hours of congressional hearings about how online Russian trolls and bots, at very little cost, were able to foment offline unrest and division through social media. Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified before several House and Senate committees, and, while their testimony was defensive and enormously vague when it came to solutions to combat online propaganda, the Russian-backed online ads released by several members of Congress were highly revealing, demonstrating a sophisticated, if cartoonish, understanding of American politics.
The social-media companies, especially Facebook, have dragged their feet in coming to terms with the vast scale of this problem. They were also slow to disclose the actual content of the Russian advertisements. Senators Mark Warner and Dianne Feinstein each delivered well-deserved lectures to the executives from the three companies present at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. Even now, a year after the election, each company still doesn’t know exactly how its platform was used to spread disinformation and set Americans against one another. But the preliminary findings are astonishing. On Facebook, the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg group at the heart of the interference campaign, bought thirty-three hundred and ninety-three advertisements through August of this year—yes, it continued long after the election—which were seen by over eleven million American users. User-generated content from fake accounts by Russian trolls, often posing as concerned and politically engaged Americans, was even more widespread and effective. With less than five hundred accounts, the I.R.A. spread content viewed by a hundred and twenty-six million Americans, which is not that much fewer than the number of people who voted last year. On Twitter, some thirty thousand Russian bots generated two hundred and eighty-eight million views.
How much impact these online campaigns had on the election is impossible to gauge. The Russian hacking that resulted in the release of thousands of Democratic Party e-mails, including the personal account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, clearly damaged Clinton and benefitted Trump, but much of the material from the Russian social-media campaign was directed at sowing division in general rather than attacking a specific candidate. Senator Susan Collins told a story of how trolls seized on racist comments made by the governor of Maine to set up two phony groups, one of African-Americans protesting the governor’s comments and one of nationalists defending him. Senator Richard Burr described a devious Facebook campaign that organized a real-life duelling protest in Houston last year between supporters of Muslim rights and Texans in favor of secession. Earlier this year, Russian trolls pushed both sides of the N.F.L. debate over kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality toward minorities.
Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, released a trove of online ads that suggested how sophisticated the Russians are now at understanding America’s culture wars. The packet of information he released included ads on Black Lives Matter, illegal immigration, Sharia law, “state pride,” gay rights, and Christianity. The Russians seem determined to do everything they can to nudge the United States toward Panarin’s prediction of a country divided. (And, as one member at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing pointed out, after pushing Brexit and several nationalist movements in Europe, the Russians are now fomenting division in Spain and Scotland, by trying to fan demands for independence.)
Of course, none of the Russian bots and trolls would be effective if there wasn’t something to these underlying divisions in the United States. Most of the Republicans on the committees took the problem seriously. But it was hard not to look at the content of the Russian-backed ads and think that Putin’s campaign of division isn’t all that different from Trump’s. That fact raises two troubling aspects of Russia’s social-media-propaganda efforts. The first is that it echoes and complements the same set of culture-war issues that Trump often seizes on to gain political advantage. In a way that most Republicans still refuse to admit, the latest revelations expose Trump and Putin as de-facto political partners. The second is that combatting the spread of misinformation requires encouraging Facebook and Twitter users to spot it. Senator Angus King compared this to how most Americans know not to believe ridiculous stories they see on the covers of supermarket tabloids while waiting in the checkout line. That might be too simplistic an analogy, considering the many ways that fake news can be disguised online, but the point is valid: members of the public need to become better-educated consumers of news.
That requires leadership. Unfortunately, instead of seeing the spread of fake news by Russia as a national-security threat—as almost every member of Congress seemed to, regardless of party, in the hearings this week—Trump has spent a year dismissing concerns about Russian propaganda while echoing its tropes, and attacking the American news media as the real fake news. His aides even sometimes repost the very accounts recently unmasked as Russian plants. There are no remedies that can halt social-media exploitation by foreign entities without raising serious free-speech issues. But, until we have a President who doesn’t act like a Russian troll, the problem is not going to get better.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-trump-helps-russian-trolls
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