Glenda Jakubowski is an Intelligence Analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
(Το παρόν και πολλά άλλα ενδιαφέροντα άρθρα θα βρείτε στο τεύχος 94 του JFQ, που θα βρείτε μέσω του Ιστολογίου μας στο αντίστοιχο tab στην κορυφή της σελίδας)
In June 2013, Vladimir Putin stated that Russia must “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global information streams.”1
By April 2014, Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) formed the
“translator project,” which “focused on the U.S. population and
conducted operations on social media platforms such as YouTube,
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.”2
Four years after the translator project began operations, Special
Counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment against three Russian
companies and 13 Russian individuals, alleging Russian actors stole the
identities of individual Americans, posed as individual Americans, posed
as American interest groups and political activists, hacked voter
registration data, and scraped social media profiles to influence U.S.
elections and political processes. The information operations would be
“the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history,”
according to Clint Watts, a senior fellow in the Center for Cyber and
Homeland Security at The George Washington University.3
It was social media that made Russia’s information operations so
effective and efficient, particularly social media–enabled social
engineering, identity theft, targeted advertisements, profiling through
psychometrics, dissemination through bots, trending algorithms, creation
of false personas, and psychological hacks to increase trust and
verisimilitude. The psychology behind pleasure, rewards, social groups,
and fear makes social media addictive and credible. This is the same
psychology that makes social media’s use in information operations so
pernicious and possibly impossible to counter.
Russia has used social media to foster conspiracy
theories, plant rumors, and spread fake news in Bulgaria, Denmark,
Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia,
Lithuania, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia, Spain, Sweden,
Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.4
Experts have correlated Russian information operations with the
referendums on Brexit, Scottish independence, and Catalonian secession
from Spain, and in one academic study, researchers correlated Russian
information operations with changes in U.S. voter behavior that possibly
affected the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.5
Russia’s information operations successes, however,
are not uniform. Factors that contributed to or mitigated Russian
information operations successes include the target nations’ historical
relationships with Russia, percentage of ethnic Russians in the
population, ethnic homogeneity, racial conflict, migration, national
control of media and the Internet, and the level of trust between
citizens and their governments. Many of these factors make the United
States, with its constitutional freedoms, Internet saturation, and
political and racial divides, particularly vulnerable to and less able
to defend against these information operations.
Social Media Is a Game Changer
According to testimony by Clint Watts
before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, five social media
functions are necessary for “full-spectrum social media campaigns:
reconnaissance, hosting, placement, propagation, and saturation.”6 Russia used all of these in its information operations against the West. Briefly, reconnaissance in social media equates to knowing the target audience, and hosting refers to the site, such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Placement,
during the Cold War, referred to placing forged items in news outlets
that unknowingly published the items as authentic. In current usage, it
is placing “digital forgeries” on sites such as 4chan and Reddit that
then spread to mainstream sites, fueling conspiracy theories and false
narratives. Propagation refers to
spreading narratives broadly and quickly, which social media
particularly enables through such means as bots that cause news items to
trend, increasing the likelihood they will jump to mainstream media.
Finally, the networked nature of social media enables saturation
in multiple types of media outlets, which lends credibility to false
stories. According to Watts, Russia is the first entity to incorporate
the “entire social media ecosystem” into its information operations.7
The Social Media Ecosystem
The combination of false news, social
media, politics, conspiracy theories, sensationalism—and human
nature—creates a perfect propaganda storm. Studying 126,000 news stories
shared from Twitter’s inception in 2006 until 2017 by approximately 3
million people, researchers found that false news spreads “further,
faster, deeper, and more broadly” than legitimate news—even more so for
false news about political subjects compared to items about “terrorism,
natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”8
The researchers found that bots speed the dissemination of true and
false stories equally; although bots may increase the amount of
information spread through social media, it is humans that spread false
news more quickly than factual news. Thus, false tweets reached more
people than true tweets; true tweets rarely reached as many as 1,000
people, compared to false tweets, which routinely reached up to 100,000
people. Additionally, false information spread six times faster than
true information, and false political information spread even more
quickly and was more viral.9
The data scraping enabled by firms such as
Cambridge Analytica is an example of reconnaissance. Cambridge Analytica
brought “big data and social media to an established military
methodology—information operations—then turn[ed] it on the U.S.
electorate.”10 The company analyzed
potential voters’ social media profiles, then sent the users
“micro-targeted” Facebook advertisements to influence their voting
behavior. In 2017, the Cambridge Analytica chief executive officer (CEO)
boasted at a marketing conference that he had about 5,000 separate bits
of information on each of 220 million Americans and that his company
had “played a significant role” in contributing to the success of the
Presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica applied analysis to these
discrete bits of information gleaned from Facebook profiles and from
publicly available information to “send the right people to the right
ads through cookie matching, mail shots, set-top box viewing data
matching, and highly targeted, non-public, paid Facebook posts often
referred to as ‘dark ads.’”11
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica presented slides on
how to disrupt elections to a Russian oligarch with strong ties to
Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to solicit oil contracts.12
Coincidentally, Russia around this time began to use micro-targeting in
social media to attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential
election.13 In U.S. Senate committee
hearings in 2018, when asked whether the 126 million users the Russian
IRA targeted with Facebook ads were also among those whose data
Cambridge Analytica accessed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied, “We
believe it is entirely possible.”14
Whether or not Russia directly used data gained
from Cambridge Analytica, by 2015 Russia was using social media to
spread conspiracy theories to specific audiences surrounding issues that
would become 2016 campaign hot buttons, including gun rights, big
government, and Islamophobia. One of its targets, according to former
Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, was a 2015 U.S.
military exercise conducted in seven southern U.S. states called Jade
Helm 15.15
Jade Helm 15 was a U.S. Special Operations Command
joint exercise conducted in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California,
Nevada, Utah, and Colorado from July 15 to September 15, 2015, to
improve special operations forces’ unconventional warfare capabilities.16
However, conspiracies propagated on Russia-controlled Instagram,
Twitter, and YouTube accounts and Russia-created Facebook pages, such as
Heart of Texas, claimed Jade Helm 15 variously was a psychological
operation to build complacency about the military’s presence in the
affected states to enable an eventual invasion, an international or
United Nations (UN) operation to seize citizens’ guns, a military
operation to round up political dissidents, a military operation to
remove state and local political leaders who would oppose the Federal
Government’s imposition of martial law, an operation using recently
closed Walmarts to supply invading Chinese troops, or a military plan to
impose martial law and disarm citizens in the wake of an apocalyptic
meteor strike predicted to occur the same day Jade Helm 15 concluded.17
As bizarre as they seem, the conspiracies surrounding Jade Helm 15
garnered reactions from U.S. politicians—reactions that gave credence to
the Russian information operations. These included Texas governor Greg
Abbott calling on the Texas State Guard (equivalent to the National
Guard) to monitor the exercise, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) promising to
“look into” the exercise, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) assuring constituents
that he had inquired about the exercise from Pentagon officials “because
the Federal Government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy,”
and Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) demanding the military revamp
the exercise “so the Federal Government is not intentionally practicing
war against its own states.”18 The Jade Helm 15 information operation is an example of hosting, placement, propagation, and saturation.
Russia’s social media–enabled information
operations continue to garner official responses, which give the
impression that Russia’s false news is authentic. According to an NBC
News report, more than 40 celebrities and politicians were “roped into
retweeting or otherwise engaging with accounts created by a Russian
‘troll factory’ to millions of followers,” and 3,000 news outlets
worldwide published articles containing embedded Russian troll farm
tweets in the runup to the 2016 election—an example of stunningly
successful placement.19
Cross-referencing a list of IRA Twitter handles with archived tweets by
nearly 900 politicians and celebrities, NBC found the list of
influential people who have retweeted or engaged with Russian
propagandists includes President Donald Trump; his son, Donald Trump,
Jr.; white nationalist Richard Spencer; Trump political associate Roger
Stone; former UN Ambassador Samantha Power; former Ku Klux Klan grand
wizard David Duke; Senator John Coryn (R-TX); Kellyanne Conway; Women’s
March coordinator Linda Sarsour; Michael Flynn, Jr.; Ohio senator Nina
Turner; Ted Cruz; former White House communications director Anthony
Scaramucci; former White House press secretary Sean Spicer; Sean
Hannity; Ann Coulter; Laura Ingraham; Jake Tapper; Lou Dobbs; Nikki
Minaj; Sarah Silverman; Trevor Noah; the Washington Post; Breitbart; Buzzfeed; the Daily Mail; UN officials; academics; and authors from both the right and left.20
Celebrity retweeters who agree with the original tweets add credibility
to the Russian propaganda. But even when celebrities disagree with the
original sentiment, their celebrity status aids in the propaganda
dissemination through the social media phenomenon of trending.
Social media groups tend to share worldviews, in a phenomenon called homophily.21
Homophily and data scraping enabled Russia to target social media
network groups most likely to believe the information operations message
and most likely to share it with similarly minded groups. In this
manner, a false news item can metastasize quickly from a small number of
discrete cells to a trending conspiratorial cancer in a matter of days
or hours. The Comet Ping Pong conspiracy provides an example.
The information operation involving the “news” that
Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were pedophiles running a sex ring
out of a restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, in Washington, DC, almost
certainly began with the Russian military intelligence service hack of
John Podesta’s email server on March 19, 2016. Among those emails were
exchanges between Podesta and his friend, Comet Ping Pong owner James
Alefantis.22 WikiLeaks published the
hacked emails on October 7, 2016, and by late October, the first
allegations about Comet Ping Pong appeared in a few posts on 4chan and
another anonymous message board that purported to cater to New York
Police Department (NYPD) users. Within hours of the putative NYPD post, a
real person posted about the alleged sex ring on Facebook, citing her
“NYPD source.” Four days later, the conspiracy theory–themed show, Info Wars,
broadcasted the story. The conspiracy also was mentioned on a law
enforcement Facebook page, and from there a Russian bot posing as a U.S.
Air Force veteran posted it on Twitter. The bot, whose profile picture
shows a middle-aged woman, has followers that include former Trump
deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka and former National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn. Eventually, the Comet Ping Pong conspiracy would be
shared 1.4 million times, including by at least 14 Russian bots and by
real people including Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort; Ann Coulter; and
Roger Stone. On December 4, 2016, a North Carolina man fired an AR-15
rifle in the occupied Comet Ping Pong restaurant, seeking to free the
children he thought were held there as sex slaves for the Clintons and
their friends.23 As of June 2018, a
cursory search revealed multiple current social media posts on YouTube,
Twitter, and Facebook claiming “Pizzagate” is real and that the Clintons
and Democrats are continuing to run pedophile and human-trafficking
rings.
Why would Russia promote conspiracy theories as
part of its information operations? Russia scholar Ilya Yablokov asserts
it is because the conspiracy theories are “a specific tool of Russian
public diplomacy aimed at undermining the policies of the U.S.
Government.”24 Crucially, the
conspiracy theories—and the information operations—are not challenges to
ideology; Russia’s information operations today are not a reprise of
Soviet-era communism-versus-capitalism battles for hearts and minds. The
current goal for Russia is to “undermine trust in information
generally.”25 Among the ways to do
so is to use specific, trustworthy messengers, which is where Russia’s
use of stolen social media profiles and micro-targeted outreach come in.
In early June 2016, the Web site DCLeaks went live,
featuring stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee.
Eventually DCLeaks would post emails stolen from more than 300
high-ranking government and military officials. The U.S. Intelligence
Community assesses DCLeaks to be linked to Russian military intelligence
and the Russian hacking entity Guccifer 2.0.26
Within days of DCLeaks’s launch, “Melvin Redick,” allegedly of
Harrisburg, PA, posted a link to DCLeaks on multiple Facebook group
pages.27 Melvin Redick, however,
does not exist. He is a fake persona created by Russian actors using the
stolen Facebook profile of a Brazilian salesman.28 Similar posts by “Alice Donovan” and “Katherine Fulton” appeared on Facebook the same day.29
As with Melvin Redick, Alice Donovan and Katherine Fulton are fake
personas created by Russian cyber actors. Their posts targeted real
Facebook users who Russian cyber actors determined, through psychometric
profiling such as that done by Cambridge Analytica, would be most
susceptible to their messages. In concert with the Facebook posts,
hundreds of Twitter posts also linked to DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, or
similar sites associated with Russian intelligence. Many of these were
fueled by bots, some hijacked legitimate Twitter accounts, and many
included the Twitter handles of mainstream news organizations or
influential accounts, including @realDonaldTrump.30 These events are examples of reconnaissance, hosting, placement, propagation, and saturation.
A Florida voter was one of the people Russia
selected as part of its micro-targeting reconnaissance efforts. In
August 2016, a stranger sent her a private message on Facebook from a
Russia-affiliated fake Facebook group called Being Patriotic, asking her
to organize a pro-Trump rally. The Russians chose well in targeting
this woman, who showed up for the rally dressed as Hillary Clinton in a
prison jumpsuit.31 In addition to
that person (who was not paid), Russia used micro-targeting to pay
multiple Floridians to build cages and pose as Clinton behind bars.32 Another person, also from Florida, responded to a Being Patriotic Facebook request that he host a pro-Trump gathering.33
Similarly, another Floridian agreed to wave pro-Trump signs at a rally
after receiving a phone call in August 2016 from a stranger from a
Russian front group called Florida Goes Trump.34
Yet another Floridian received a phone call out of the blue, followed
by emails from people she thought to be college students from Texas but
who actually were Russians.35 She
received about $600 and a script from the Russians to don a Hillary
Clinton mask and an orange jail jumpsuit to participate in one of 20
pro-Trump rallies in Florida scheduled for the same day in August. And
still another individual received a similar payment after Russians
posing as Americans contacted him on the Being Patriotic Facebook page,
asking him to build a cage as part of the same rally.36
None of the targeted Americans, when informed of
the Russian origins of the requests for political activity, considered
the Russian interference a problem. They dismissed concerns over the
Russian effort as a “waste of time,” insisted they would have held
rallies for Trump or parodied Clinton anyway without Russian trickery,
and claimed the Russian efforts had no effect because the targeted
voters “didn’t need persuading.”37
Many of the examples above demonstrate the
psychological aspects of social media that make it so effective as a
force multiplier in information operations. They show Russia’s use of
psychological factors such as homophily, or retweets by trusted or
influential people, or receiving phone calls, emails, and private
messages from “friends,” to pressure its adversaries to accept false
stories as truthful. In addition to these, Russia also exploits the fact
that social media itself has been designed to activate areas in the
brain associated with rewards and addiction.
According to neuroscientist Shannon Odell, people
use social media such as Facebook and Twitter for two reasons: to
connect with people and to control the impressions they make on others.
The “like,” “share,” or “retweet” is positive reinforcement for both of
those motivators, activating neural pathways for reward and addiction.38
Additionally, when users in one experiment were shown photographs, the
photographs with more “likes” activated the brain’s reward circuitry
more than the photographs with fewer “likes.” People are apt to approve
of social media posts their friends approve of, even if those “friends”
are strangers.39 Yet another study
corroborates the power of the “like,” finding that social media users
are more likely to adopt those emotions that are “over-expressed in
their social network.”40 The level
of emotional “contagion” is significantly influenced when the agent
seeking to spread an idea uses bots. Russian information operations
benefited from not only the mechanics of bot propagation and troll farm
employees generating multiple “likes” and “shares” to influence trends
algorithms, but also the psychological tendencies of humans exposed to
bot propagation and to “peer group” emotions. A user confronted with
false news on social media that comes appended with hundreds of
bot-generated “likes” is psychologically apt to believe and spread the
false news.
Among the most pervasive questions regarding social
media and false news in the 2016 U.S. election is did they make a
difference in the final vote tally. A definitive answer is difficult.
However, according to one scholarly study and Washington Post
analysis, the data correlate with an affirmative response. Using
multiple regression analyses, Ohio State University researchers
concluded that believing false news encountered on social media was
among the top four variables predicting that a voter who previously
supported Barack Obama would “defect from the Democratic ticket in
2016.” Respondents to an Ohio State survey who believed at least one
false news item plucked from social media were 4.5 times more likely to
have voted against Clinton than respondents who believed none of the
false news items in the survey.41 Using the Ohio State data in predictive probability analysis, the Washington Post
polling director assessed that false news likely cost Clinton 4.2
percent of votes overall and approximately 2.2 percentage points in the
battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In the
2016 election, Clinton lost Michigan by 0.2 percentage points,
Pennsylvania by 0.72 percentage points, and Wisconsin by 0.76 percentage
points.42
Europe’s Answer to Russian Information Operations
Finland is the commonly cited example of
how to counter Russia’s information operations. Finland’s tactics
include a public diplomacy program with support from the Finnish
president, who declared it the responsibility of every citizen to combat
Russian information operations, and support from the prime minister’s
office, which enrolled hundreds of government officials in programs to
understand how disinformation spreads. Experts also credit Finland’s
public education system—which ranks top in the world—with building
critical thinking skills that help strengthen Finns against
disinformation. Additionally, Finns have a high level of trust in their
government and a high level of distrust for Moscow. Finland also has
demographics to thank for its ability to fend off Russian propaganda;
the Finnish population of 5.5 million is quite homogeneous, with a
minimal number of Russian speakers.43
Only 3.5 percent of people living in Finland are foreign born, one of
the lowest rates in the European Union (EU), and the Russian population
in Finland is 0.5 percent, compared to 93 percent native Finns.44
Finns are more alike than they are different from one another, which
makes it difficult for information campaigns focused on exploiting
social rifts to take hold.
Other Baltic nations, such as Latvia, Lithuania,
and Estonia, have been less successful against Russian information
operations. These nations have larger numbers of Russian speakers among
their populations and the strong presence of the Russian-language,
Russia-owned television station, Channel One. In Finland, the
Russia-owned, Russian-language Sputnik television station lacked enough
viewers to remain operational; in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia,
government moves to block Russian programming backfired, leading to
protests from the Russian populations in those countries and feeding the
Russian propaganda narrative of marginalization.45
The Baltic states do focus on countering Russian propaganda, but “if
you only focus on countering, you’re on their territory,” stated a
member of the Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Latvia.46
Finland is an outlier, then, and it seems unfair to suggest others use
it as a model, when the variable that likely works most toward Finland’s
favor—its homogeneity—is outside other nations’ control. Other European
countries have been tackling the Russian information operations
problem, including, in some cases, the social media aspect of the
operations. Some examples follow:
- Tracking False News
- Britain, France, Germany,
the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden,
Ukraine, Latvia, and Slovakia maintain sites to track false news and
social media conspiracy theories.47
- The EU’s EAST Stratcom Task
Force publishes a weekly disinformation review in 18
languages—including calling out fake fact-checkers that appear to be the
work of Russia.48
- Working with Media, Social Media, and Advertisers
- More than 1,400 advertisers in Slovakia are boycotting a list of false Web sites compiled by a nonprofit researcher.49
- The night before the French
presidential election, Russian military intelligence hackers released
hacked emails and documents connected to then-candidate Emmanuel Macron.
Most French media outlets agreed to election commission requests to
refrain from publishing the hacked documents.50
- Facebook agreed to requests from France and Britain to disable multiple thousands of false accounts connected to elections.51
- Sweden urges all mainstream media to fact-check news stories.52
Mainstream media, of course, is not the major purveyor of false
stories, and Sweden so far is doing nothing about the Russian trolls
that are averaging 2,000 comments per person, per inflammatory news item
posted on a right-wing site.53
- Legal Measures
- The French electoral code
makes it illegal to “broadcast to the public by any means of electronic
communication anything that could be considered electoral propaganda.”54
- The EU has enacted a code
of practice against disinformation aimed at social media companies that
requires them to prevent “disinformation and the manipulative use of
platforms’ infrastructure.”55
- On May 25, 2018, the EU
enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to
all companies doing business in the EU regardless of the companies’
locations. The GDPR guarantees EU citizens the right to know of data
breaches within 72 hours, the right to access their data from social
media companies and to know where and for what purpose their data is
used, the “right to be forgotten,” the right to data portability, and
the right to privacy by design—that is, the inclusion of data protection
from the onset of designing systems. Failure to abide by the GDPR can
result in tiered fines of up to 4 percent of profits or 20 million
euros.56
- Political Cooperation.
German political parties agree not to use bots in their social media
campaigns. (Russia continues to use bots on social media in Germany,
however.)57
- Public Diplomacy. Sweden
distributes pamphlets advising Swedes what to do in case of war with
Russia, or terrorist attacks, in an attempt to shape how Swedish
citizens think about Russia.58
- Countermessaging
- The United Kingdom, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are countermessaging Russia Today and Sputnik “news” items.59
- Also, in Lithuania, citizen
volunteers who call themselves elves “identify and beat back the
‘trolls’ employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation.”60
- Government Initiatives.
In Sweden, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, which is roughly
equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, monitors Web
sites for false, inflammatory stories.61
What About the United States?
The United States shares some challenges
with its European partners in fighting Russian information operations
and also has some U.S.-specific challenges. The United States is far
from homogeneous; according to the Census Bureau in 2017, about 60.7
percent of the population is white, 18.1 percent is Hispanic (which can
be any race), 13.4 percent is black, 5.8 percent is Asian, 2.7 percent
are mixed race, and 1.5 percent are other.62
Russia laser-targeted racial and social divides in America during the
runup to the 2016 election, as well as controversies over immigration,
gun control, Islamophobia, gay rights, and other divisive topics. Russia
continues, post-election, to use social media in information operations
to “create general distrust or confusion about information sources by
blurring the lines between fact and fiction.”63
The United States is unlikely to enact a domestic
propaganda program such as Finland’s. Reforms of the Smith-Mundt Act in
2013 allow domestic broadcasts of State Department programming produced
for foreign audiences, such as Voice of America broadcasts, but forbid
broadcasting propaganda targeting American audiences.64
However, reactions from some politicians and defense officials to the
reforms indicate the suspicion many in the United States feel toward
government information programs. Opponents claimed the reforms would
make Americans vulnerable to government disinformation campaigns to
“prop up unpopular policies” and “remove protections” against U.S.
Government information campaigns targeting U.S. citizens that may be
“inaccurate or completely false.”65
That the opponents were themselves presenting inaccurate information
about the new Smith-Mundt Act did little to reduce confusion surrounding
the reforms, but much to illuminate the distrust many Americans likely
would feel toward a domestic government information campaign.
After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s House and
Senate testimony on Cambridge Analytica’s breach of users’ data, Senator
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) introduced the
Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act, which is
similar to the GDPR. The bill requires social media companies to
disclose to users what data are being collected on them, who has access
to user data, and how companies that have that access are using the
data. The bill also allows users to opt out of having their data
collected and to demand that Web sites delete any data that had been
collected on them.66 As of this writing, the proposal has been sitting in the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee since late April 2018.67
Conclusion: A Social Media Problem Requires a Social Media Solution
Measures such as the Code of Practice on
Disinformation, GDPR, and Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer
Rights Act will mitigate social media–enabled information operations
because they empower privacy and data protection. However, these
measures will not eliminate the psychological aspects of social media
that make it such a powerful tool for information operations. Humans are
motivated by desire and fear. Just as “likes” activate areas of the
brain associated with desire, conspiracy theories and false news about
other races, other religions, and other opinions activate fears in
susceptible audiences. What makes the United States strong—its
technology, its diversity, its commitment to free speech—also,
unfortunately, makes it enduringly vulnerable to information operations
by an adversary such as Russia.
The Constitution prohibits the U.S. Government from
restricting free speech. But private companies are free to set their
own limits, and indeed, social media companies such as Facebook have
removed hundreds of fake accounts since the hearings looking into
Russia’s use of social media in its information operations. Public
scrutiny can pressure private companies to prohibit data mining and
practice due diligence against foreign entities using their platforms
against the United States. The United States can
mitigate—somewhat—social media–enabled information operations. But
governments cannot mitigate neuropsychology. No amount of critical
thinking education, anti-Russia pamphleteering, domestic propaganda, or
“outing” Russia (recall the Americans duped by Russians who, after
learning the truth, stated they were unconcerned about being Russian
targets) will eliminate the neural feedback loop that is reinforced
every time users are deceived by hundreds of artificially placed “likes”
or retweets. Humans are wired to believe. JFQ
Notes
1 Jill Dougherty, “How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 21, 2015, available at <www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/how-the-media-became-putins-most-powerful-weapon/391062/>.
2 United States v. Internet Research Agency et al., Case 1:18-cr-00032-DLF, February 16, 2018, available at <www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download>.
3 Clint Watts, “Clint Watts’ Testimony: Russia’s Info War on the U.S. Started in 2014,” The Daily Beast, March 30, 2017, available at <www.thedailybeast.com/clint-watts-testimony-russias-info-war-on-the-us-started-in-2014>.
4 U.S.
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on
Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National
Security,” S. Prt. 115-21, 115th Cong., 2nd sess., 2018, available at <www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/FinalRR.pdf>.
5 Ibid.;
Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck, and Erik C. Nisbet, “Fake News May Have
Contributed to Trump’s 2016 Victory,” Ohio State University, March 8,
2018, available at
<www.documentcloud.org/documents/4429952-False-News-May-Have-Contributed-to-Trump-s-2016.html>.
6 Clint Watts, “Extremist
Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find
Solutions,” Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism questions for
the record, October 31, 2017, and hearing, November 7, 2017, available
at
<www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Watts%20Responses%20to%20QFRs.pdf>.
7 Ibid.
8 Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (March 9, 2018), 1146–1151, available at <http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146.full>.
9 Ibid.
10 Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” The Guardian, March 18, 2018, available at <www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump>.
11 Charles Kriel, “Fake News, Fake Wars, Fake Worlds,” Defence Strategic Communications 3 (Autumn 2017), 172–190.
12 Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool.’”
13 United States v. Internet Research Agency et al.
14 “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April
10, 2018, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/?utm_term=.ce270a6edca3>.
15 Cassandra
Pollock and Alex Samuels, “Hysteria Over Jade Helm Exercise in Texas
Was Fueled by Russians, Former CIA Director Says,” Texas Tribune,
May 3, 2018, available at
<www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-helm-exercise-texas-was-fueled-russians-former-cia-/>.
16 U.S.
Army Special Operations Command, “Request to Conduct Realistic Military
Training (RMT) JADE HELM 15,” 2015, available at
<https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3axduuybL0jdjZQUjhsSmJsZTA/edit>.
17 Jim Shea, “Thank You Texas and Good Luck with the Invasion,” Hartford Courant,
May 17, 2015, available at
<www.courant.com/features/too-shea/hc-shea-weekinreview-0517-20150517-column.html>;
Jon Austin, “U.S. Military Secretly Planning for Giant Asteroid That
Will Wipe Out Mankind in September,” Daily Express
(London), June 8, 2015, available at
<www.express.co.uk/news/weird/583002/US-military-secretly-preparing-asteroid-wipe-
out-mankind-September-Jade-Helm>.
18 Pollock and Samuels, “Hysteria Over Jade Helm Exercise in Texas Was Fueled by Russians.” Patrick Svitek, “Jade Helm 15: The Black Helicopters Are Coming. Well, Maybe Not,” Texas Tribune,
April 30, 2015, available at
<www.texastribune.org/2015/04/30/abbotts-letter-puts-jade-helm-national-stage/>;
David Weigel, “Ted Cruz Says He Has Asked the Pentagon for Answers on
Jade Helm 15,” Bloomberg, May 2, 2015, available
at
<www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-02/ted-cruz-says-he-has-asked-the-pentagon-for-answers-on-jade-helm-15>;
Louie Gohmert, “Gohmert Statement on Jade Helm Exercises,” May 5, 2015,
available at
<https://gohmert.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398216>.
19 Ben
Popken, “Russian Trolls Duped Global Media and Nearly 40 Celebrities,”
NBC News, November 3, 2017, available at
<www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/trump-
other-politicians-celebs-shared-boosted-russian-troll-tweets-n817036>.
20 Ibid.
21 Jarred Prier, “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2017), 50–85.
22 Cecilia Kang, “Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking,” New York Times,
November 21, 2016, available at
<www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html>.
23 Amanda Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, available at <www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/>.
24 Ilya Yablokov, “Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT),” Politics 35, no. 3/4 (2015), 301–315.
25 Kate
Starbird, “Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media
Ecosystem,” HCI and Design at UW, March 14, 2017, available at
<medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-
wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f>.
26 “Background
to ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S.
Elections’: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution,” ICA
2017-01D (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, January 6, 2017), available at
<www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf>.
27 Scott Shane, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” New York Times, September 7, 2017, available at <www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html>.
28 Scott Shane, “Mystery of Russian Fake on Facebook Solved, by a Brazilian,” New York Times, September 13, 2017, available at <www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/us/politics/russia-facebook-election.html>.
29 Shane, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election.”
30 Ibid.
31 Anton Troianovski et al., “The 21st-Century Russian Sleeper Agent Is a Troll with an American Accent,” Washington Post,
February 17, 2018, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/the-21st-century-russian-sleeper-agent-is-a-troll-with-an-american-accent/2018/02/17/d024ead2-1404-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html?utm_term=.aa5c01a98cfa>.
32 United States v. Internet Research Agency et al.
33 Troianovski et al., “The 21st-Century Russian Sleeper Agent Is a Troll with an American Accent.”
34 Ashley Parker and John Wagner, “‘Go Donald!’: Inside the Russian Shadow Campaign to Elect Trump,” Washington Post,
February 16, 2018, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/politics/go-donald-inside-the-russian-shadow-campaign-to-elect-trump/2018/02/16/dea562c2-134a-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?utm_term=.a1ce4565b4bd>.
35 Frank Cerabino, “Local Trump Supporters Shrug Off Being Paid and Played by Russians,” Palm Beach Post,
February 23, 2018, available at
<www.palmbeachpost.com/news/local-trump-supporters-shrug-off-being-paid-and-played-russians/3WCytHAHy3PodLVePU1PMK/>.
36 Ibid.
37 Parker and Wagner, “‘Go Donald!’”; Troianovski et al., “The 21st-Century Russian Sleeper Agent Is a Troll with an American Accent.”
38 Shannon
Odell, “Your Brain on Social Media: Neuroscientist Shannon Odell
Explores the Insatiable Effects and Drivers of Social Media Addiction,” PR Newswire, April 24, 2018.
39 “Social Media ‘Likes’ as Yummy as Chocolate,” Science Teacher 83, no. 6 (2016), 20–22.
40 Emilio Ferrara and Zeyao Yang, “Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media,” PLOS ONE 10, no. 10 (2015), 1–14, available at <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142390>.
41 Gunther, Beck, and Nisbet, “False News May Have Contributed to Trump’s 2016 Victory.”
42 Aaron Blake, “A New Study Suggests False News Might Have Won Donald Trump the 2016 Election,” Washington Post,
April 3, 2018, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/03/a-new-study-suggests-fake-news-might-have-won-donald-trump-the-2016-election/?utm_term=.ddaa357e0020>.
43 Reid Standish, “Why Is Finland Able to Fend Off Putin’s Information War?” Foreign Policy,
March 1, 2017, available at
<http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/01/why-is-finland-able-to-fend-off-putins-information-war/>.
44 See “Finland Population 2019,” World Population Review, available
at
<http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/finland-population/>;
and “Finland Demographics Profile 2018,” Index Mundi/CIA World Factbook,
available at
<www.indexmundi.com/finland/demographics_profile.html>.
45 Standish, “Why Is Finland Able to Fend Off Putin’s Information War?”
46 Christian Caryl, “If You Want to See Russian Information Warfare at Its Worst, Visit These Countries,” Washington Post,
April 5, 2017, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/04/05/if-you-want-to-see-russian-information-warfare-at-its-worst-visit-these-countries/?utm_term=.1ab2a9e9a132>.
47 Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum, “Europe Has Been Working to Expose Russian Meddling for Years,” Washington Post,
June 25, 2017, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europe-has-been-working-to-expose-russian-meddling-for-years/2017/06/25/e42dcece-4a09-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.8c9dd9d96071>.
48 “Behind
the Scenes at the Swedish Troll Factory,” EU vs. Disinformation
Campaign, February 20, 2017, available at
<https://euvsdisinfo.eu/behind-the-scenes-at-the-swedish-troll-factory/>.
49 Priest and Birnbaum, “Europe Has Been Working to Expose Russian Meddling for Years.”
50 Alex Hern, “Macron Hackers Linked to Russian-Affiliated Group Behind U.S. Attack,” The Guardian,
May 8, 2017, available at
<www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/08/macron-hackers-linked-to-russian-affiliated-group-behind-us-attack>;
Priest and Birnbaum, “Europe Has Been Working to Expose Russian
Meddling for Years.”
51 Priest and Birnbaum, “Europe Has Been Working to Expose Russian Meddling for Years.”
52 Michael Birnbaum, “Sweden Is Taking on Russian Meddling Ahead of Fall Elections. The White House Might Take Note,” Washington Post,
February 22, 2018, available at
<www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/sweden-looks-at-russias-electoral-interference-in-the-us-and-takes-steps-not-to-be-another-victim/2018/02/21/9e58ee48-0768-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html?utm_term=.b871124aed50>.
53 “Behind the Scenes at the Swedish Troll Factory.”
54 Kim Willsher and Jon Henley, “Emmanuel Macron’s Campaign Hacked on Eve of French Election,” The Guardian,
May 6, 2017, available at
<www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/06/emmanuel-macron-targeted-by-hackers-on-eve-of-french-election>.
55 Julia
Fioretti, “EU Piles Pressure on Social Media Over Fake News,” Reuters,
April 26, 2018, available at
<www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-internet-fakenews/eu-piles-pressure-on-
social-media-over-fake-news-idUSKBN1HX15D>.
56 General Data Protection Regulation portal, available at <www.eugdpr.org>.
57 Priest and Birnbaum, “Europe Has Been Working to Expose Russian Meddling for Years.”
58 Birnbaum, “Sweden Is Taking on Russian Meddling Ahead of Fall Elections.”
59 Caryl, “If You Want to See Russian Information Warfare at Its Worst, Visit These Countries.”
60 Priest and Birnbaum, “Europe Has Been Working to Expose Russian Meddling for Years.”
61 Ibid.
62 U.S.
Census Bureau Quick Facts, 2017, available at
<www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217>. These
percentages add to 102.2 percent. To reach the correct 100 percent, one
has to subtract those who identified as “White alone” (76.6 percent)
from those who identified as “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino” (60.7
percent). The resulting difference has to be subtracted from those who
identified as “Hispanic or Latino.” The resulting difference of 2.2
percent, after subtracting from 102.2 percent, then corrects the overall
percentage. The seemingly incorrect numbers are the result of
overlapping identities.
63 Watts, “Clint Watts’ Testimony: Russia’s Info War on the U.S. Started in 2014.”
64 John Hudson, “U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans,” Foreign Policy,
July 13, 2013, available at
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/>.
65 Michael Hastings, “Congressmen Seek to Lift Propaganda Ban,” Buzzfeed, May 18, 2012, available at <www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen-seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban>.
66 Harper Neidig, “Senators Introduce Bipartisan Privacy Bill,” The Hill,
April 24, 2018, available at
<https://thehill.com/policy/technology/384550-senators-introduce-bipartisan-internet-privacy-bill>.
67 “Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act of 2018,” 115th Cong., S.2728, 2018, available at <www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2728>.
