Abstract
Social media empowers communities of activists, as well as groups of extremists and abusers, to discover each other and coordinate their activity. The same tools can be used to spread political messages, both by legitimate communities and by disingenuous actors—even foreign states seeking to interfere in the electoral process of another country. That’s the environment we find ourselves in today, as the United States, NATO, the EU, and their (potential) allies are under attack from a Russian campaign of information warfare. In this chapter, we’ll unpack some of their operations, culminating in the 2016 US presidential election, and conclude with a view toward future threats and defenses.
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Notes
- 1.
“FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide,” David Mikkelson, Snopes, accessed January 3, 2019, www.snopes.com/fact-check/fbi-agent-murder-suicide/ .
- 2.
“Was Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta Involved in Satanic ‘Spirit Cooking’?,” Dan Evon, Snopes, published November 4, 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/john-podesta-spirit-cooking/ .
- 3.
“Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Amanda Robb, Rolling Stone, published November 16, 2017, www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/ .
- 4.
Martin Kragh and Sebastian Åsberg, “Russia’s strategy for influence through public diplomacy and active measures: the Swedish case,” Journal of Strategic Studies 40/6 (2017), DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2016.1273830, p. 6.
- 5.
Stephen Blank, “Moscow’s Competitive Strategy,” American Foreign Policy Council, published July 2018, p. 2.
- 6.
Heather A. Conley, James Mina, Ruslan Stefanov, and Martin Vladimirov, The Kremlin Playbook (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 1ff.
- 7.
Philip Howard in: “Foreign Influence on Social Media Platforms: Perspectives from Third-Party Social Media Experts,” U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Open Hearing, August 1, 2018, www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-foreign-influence-operations'-use-social-media-platforms-third-party-expert .
- 8.
Todd C. Helmus, Elizabeth Bodine-Baron, Andrew Radin, Madeline Magnuson, Joshua Mendelsohn, William Marcellino, Andriy Bega, and Zev Winkelman, Russian Social Media Influence: Understanding Russian Propaganda in Eastern Europe (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2018), DOI: 10.7249/RR2237, p. 15.
- 9.
Mariia Zhdanova and Dariya Orlova, “Ukraine: External Threats and Internal Challenges,” in Computational Propaganda, ed. Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Howard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 47.
- 10.
Russian Social Media Influence, p. 104.
- 11.
Zhdanova and Orlova, p. 55.
- 12.
Russian Social Media Influence, p. 9.
- 13.
Zhdanova and Orlova, p. 51.
- 14.
Kragh & Åsberg, p. 8.
- 15.
Neil MacFarquhar, “A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories,” New York Times, August 28, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html .
- 16.
Kragh and Åsberg, p. 16.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 19.
“Journalist who infiltrated Putin’s troll factory warns of Russian propaganda in the upcoming Swedish election - ‘We were forced to create fake facts and news’,” Jill Bederoff, Business Insider, published April 7, 2018, https://nordic.businessinsider.com/journalist-who-infiltrated-putins-troll-factory-warns-of-russian-propaganda-in-the-upcoming-swedish-election---we-were-forced-to-create-fake-facts-and-news--/ .
- 20.
“Russia’s growing threat to north Europe,” The Economist, October 6, 2018, www.economist.com/europe/2018/10/06/russias-growing-threat-to-north-europe .
- 21.
“Maria Butina’s Defiant Plea and Yet Another Russian Ploy,” Natasha Bertrand, The Atlantic, December 13, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/maria-butina-pleads-guilty-russian-agent/578146/ .
- 22.
Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
- 23.
Sheera Frenkel, “Meet Fancy Bear, The Russian Group Hacking The U.S. Election,” BuzzFeed News, published October 15, 2016, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/meet-fancy-bear-the-russian-group-hacking-the-us-election .
- 24.
Raphael Satter, “Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails,” Associated Press, published November 4, 2017, www.apnews.com/dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a .
- 25.
“What Illinois Has Learned About Election Security Since 2016,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, broadcast September 17, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/09/17/648849074/what-illinois-has-learned-about-election-security-since-2016 .
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Raphael Satter, “Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails.”
- 28.
Sheera Frenkel, “Meet Fancy Bear.”
- 29.
Raphael Satter, “Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails.”
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Jeff Stein, “What 20,000 pages of hacked WikiLeaks emails teach us about Hillary Clinton,” Vox, published October 20, 2016, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/20/13308108/wikileaks-podesta-hillary-clinton .
- 32.
Adam Goldman and Alan Rappeport, “Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign,” The New York Times, published October 28, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbi-hillary-clinton-email.html .
- 33.
Full disclosure: I coauthored one of those reports.
- 34.
United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, LLC, et al., www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1035562/download .
- 35.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 40.
Renee DiResta, Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan Fox, Jonathan Albright, and Ben Johnson, “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” New Knowledge, published December 17, 2018, https://disinformationreport.blob.core.windows.net/disinformation-report/NewKnowledge-Disinformation-Report-Whitepaper-121718.pdf , p. 5.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 43.
Adrien Chen, “The Agency,” The New York Times Magazine, published June 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html .
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
“The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” p. 13.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 45.
- 48.
For examples of the most popular Jesus-vs.-Hillary memes, see Kate Shellnutt, “Russia’s Fake Facebook Ads Targeted Christians,” Christianity Today, published November 3, 2017, www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/november/russia-fake-facebook-election-ads-targeted-christian-voters.html . Some of the memes are also displayed and discussed in the New Knowledge report to SSCI.
- 49.
“The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” p. 93.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 99.
- 51.
Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox, “Russians Meddling in the Midterms? Here’s the Data,” New York Times, published November 6, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/opinion/midterm-elections-russia.html .
- 52.
Kevin Poulsen and Andrew Desiderio, “Russian Hackers’ New Target: a Vulnerable Democratic Senator,” Daily Beast, published July 26, 2018, www.thedailybeast.com/russian-hackers-new-target-a-vulnerable-democratic-senator .
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Shaffer, K. (2019). Democracy Hacked, Part 1. In: Data versus Democracy. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4540-8_5
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