WaPo notes a special report to the Senate on Russian disinformation efforts:
The report traces the origins of Russian online influence operations to Russian domestic politics in 2009 and says that ambitions shifted to include U.S. politics as early as 2013 on Twitter. Of the tweets the company provided to the Senate, 57 percent are in Russian, 36 percent in English and smaller amounts in other languages.
The efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year after, as teams of operatives spread their work across more platforms and accounts to target larger swaths of U.S. voters by geography, political interests, race, religion and other factors. The Russians started with accounts on Twitter, then added YouTube and Instagram before bringing Facebook into the mix, the report said.
To my mind, the poor fit between national politics and an international communications tool is the highlight, at least from this article (the report, by Howard, Ganesh, and Liotsiou, all of Oxford University, and Killy and François of Graphika is here). There’s no easy fix, as everyone knows, other than shutting the Internet down.
Kevin Drum’s a little puzzled:
I don’t really understand this. Why were the Russians trying to get Republicans elected back in 2013 and 2014? Was it an anti-Hillary thing even back then? Were they convinced that Republicans would be softer on them than Democrats? That doesn’t really make sense. And when, exactly, did the pro-Trump propaganda start? As soon as he announced he was running? Or was it later than that?
Drum’s not thinking well. We are the super-power, and that makes us the enemy for Russia. I suspect the two major political parties were evaluated by the Russians for vulnerability, and the Republicans won – easily. After all, they’re expected to vote the party line, which makes the investment to put a properly corrupted candidate in place of a lower risk than the more fractious Democrats. The Democrats also have stronger civil liberties instincts than do the Republicans, which are repugnant to Russians, who prefer an all-or-nothing approach to governance. Finally, the Republicans have been running further and further to the right since, well, really since the days when Goldwater warned about the changing nature of the Republican Party! But, more clearly, since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House (1995-1999) and took the Republicans away from the idea of shared governance and towards dominance and isolation.
This is clearly a fascist mindset and is quite compatible with that of the current Russian government. In order to get their hooks into a Republican Party whose soul had been ripped away by Gingrich and his buddies, they started during the Obama days – or does Drum not remember the irrational refusal of the Republicans to share governance with President Obama and the Democrats? This report certainly serves to help solidify the case that the Republicans have been co-opted by the Russians through the insertion of certain ideological tenets and, even more importantly, the alienation of Republican culture from the greater American culture. By reinforcing the fear of change in the minds of the Republicans, they slowly are tearing the United States apart. Doubt it? Just consider recent Republican actions in end-of-term legislative actions in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina meant to hobble incoming Democratic office-holders. These over-the-line tactics are classic examples of the all-or-nothing mindset that refuses to trust the opposition; in contrast, most Americans expect that trust to be present, as expressed by the current aphorism, elections have consequences.
Or, at least, that’s how I’d do it if I were a Russian.
