I've made attempts to reach out to some of my old friends there on the T&S team in light of some evidence really blatant Russian agitprop thriving and finding an audience there. Between this and the Zhang memo, however, it looks quite doubtful that I'd be able to do much more than reconnect and share a rather depressing lunch as they explain that their hands are tied because of executive will.
The IRA and/or its successors or friends appear to have taken the same approach as Russian security services have with the rash of targeted murders in Europe, with a "this totally isn't our doing, but anyone slightly educated on the subject will recognize our hand, because we want them to be aware that it's us and we don't actually mind people knowing" wink wink nudge nudge threadbare veneer of disclaiming responsibility.
Normally, I wouldn't really care: the 2016 stuff everyone made a fuss about on social media was largely ineffective and at best served as a smokescreen to distract from their very successful actions outside social media--Buff Bernie is a lasting meme treasure and nothing more. This go 'round, however, they've apparently learned from their mistakes, and I'm seeing.evidence that personal friends _are_ receiving and and are influenced by their messaging.
I thankfully haven't really had to watch any family or friends succumb to the Fox News media poison, and thought my social circles largely insulated from that sort of problem, but I was apparently quite wrong--right about _what_ wouldn't influence people, but blind to the idea that other actors would follow the same model and create content that _would_ suck in their target audience.
https://twitter.com/evelyndouek is a good source of reporting about Facebook and other social media cos' continued lackluster attempts to stand up potemkin independent review bodies, if you want more info on the space and can stomach more disheartening news.
They didn't, oddly enough! They were as surprised at the outcome as most everyone else was, and had more intended to put the expected Clinton presidency off on a bad foot. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-a... is fairly on the mark about their goals then and now.
American coverage on their efforts was by and large terrible, at least from major outlets. Focused analyst coverage in the space has been a lot more nuanced, but nobody's reading that without an existing personal or professional interest.
The other half of that analyst coverage is that they rapidly became quite tired of Maddow and friends hammering on a very simple narrative that missed the point, but was very effective at achieving its actual goal, keeping consumers of major media on the left-of-center end of the American political spectrum engaged in their content and bringing in continued advertiser money. That tiredness is relegated to water cooler discussion on Twitter, however, so it's not going to shape major outlet coverage much.
Thanks for the link; that seems like a nice summary. I appreciated the warnings about "loose talk" "despite a lack of evidence to justify such", but this lampshade is the size of a tent and swallows the whole article. Jack Cable described real things that could be verified and don't contradict facts we already know. That was good stuff, but everything else seems exactly like loose talk without justifying evidence. Basing the argument for "Russians hacked Hillary's campaign" on the Podesta emails, for one thing, is problematic. Although we're warned "the Russians have grown adept at tailoring bespoke messages that could ensnare even the most vigilant target. Emails arrive from a phony address that looks as if it belongs to a friend or colleague, but has one letter omitted.", in reality the phish that got Podesta was totally generic. [0] There are probably a million people around the world who could have executed this phish. I think I could have done it, if I'd had the inclination.
That's about the extent of the claims that can actually be checked by the reader. Of the rest, I certainly agree with the warnings about poor security for voting machines and other election infrastructure, but that's been a commonplace on HN for a decade, and the most salient if by no means the most egregious example this cycle, the Iowa Primary, is totally dismissed. Also in other parts of the article we're assured without any sort of proof that no one hacked a voting machine in 2016. Can we be so sure? The narrative walks a narrow path. The Russians did bad things but not catastrophically terrible things (i.e. they prepared to discredit the election on social media but didn't change the results). Voting machines should be more secure but let's not even mention requirements for open code and hardware audits (about which I've been writing my legislators for many years). Federal efforts on election security since Trump took office have been paltry but everything before that was great. Did Goldilocks write this? Was she the confidential source who provided most of the information without attribution?
I'm glad that normal neoliberal Democrats will finally distance themselves from the Maddow noise, but I would have preferred actual progress by this date rather than just "yeah sorry we went loopy for 3.5 years". I'd also like some indication that the next president, whether he takes office in January or four years later, will do anything at all to make voting more secure and more accessible to citizens. As it is, I just expect more attacks on the First Amendment. News media firms won't complain; as you observe they're banking fat stacks with Trump to kick around. The concern that keeps me up at night is that they're cooking up a new Russia effigy with which to torment the public now that Covid-19 seems likely to remove Trump himself from public office.
How terrifying that sneaky Russians are able to effect arbitrary social change by just throwing $100k of FB ads at the problem! I thought I was a moderately intelligent and well-informed person, but after reading your comment, I now understand that no amount of reason or self-awareness can protect me from miniscule amounts of ad spend by foreign spies.
The point is that they're well-educated themselves, persistent, and capable of learning from their mistakes. Earlier attempts were childishly bad. The contemporary ones are better-crafted, and may not be reaching you--I don't know you and can't speak to that--but they are reaching people I know and care about.
Can you rule out that those people they are supposedly reaching don't simply have different values than you and you're currently seeing circumstances that make them alter their stance because it hits a fault line between your values and theirs?
Not entirely, no--arguably we may have similar values, in a sense, but (and this is where the guesswork comes in) may have arrived at them via different paths. I'll posit that the path matters, a lot.
The people in question are current students at my alma mater, where I studied, among other things, Russian language and the former Soviet Union. Some in the current class are likely studying the same, but most aren't, and even those that are, well, they're just starting to study it.
Again--no certainties there, but while I received a fairly decent US high school education, coverage of the cultural and political history of the former Soviet Union is limited by necessity--there's just not enough time to slot that in among everything else US high schoolers are expected to learn.
My gut feeling is that if I'm seeing them share this sort of content, that it's reaching them organically, not because they're finding it after a long time studying the whole of the space over a decade of hobby interest--that's where I'm coming from. The end viewpoints and values may have similarities, but they will be colored by many other factors, and those factors matter.
If that intuition is right, while we may share views in some sense, their view is quite possibly being shaped by actors whose intent is to shape it in a particular direction, who recognize that there are avenues to do so (the amplification/radicalization potential of internet content rabbit holes is well-documented at this point), and who aren't really interested in building a nuanced perspective grounded in mutual understanding of both FSU and American history.
Intuitively, based on their past actions, those actors want the opposite: to (skillfully, mind you) leverage their own nuanced understanding to craft a shallow, targeted narrative that's believable enough, with the primary goal of supporting their own agenda and political goals, not with the goal of building a strong basis of mutual understanding across borders. Is trying to reason about those aims hard, to the point of being nearly impossible to get right? Yes! Entirely! But I don't think the response warranted is "well, it's hard, we should all give up and just see what happens". We must try to instead do the best we can, both in our words and actions in a given moment and with an expectation that we won't be entirely on the mark always, but that we can and should try to watch for our mistakes and catch them as early as we can--that is how we improve and help one another.
So, to sum up, can I rule that out definitively? No. Can I make what I think is a reasonable assessment of what's going based on the information available to me and my own background of knowledge, and recognition of what's changed in the world since I made a similar journey? Hopefully, albeit worryingly, yes. I therefore think it's important to not abdicate any notion of responsibility or to call it a day and agree to disagree on a lot of the nuance--doing so tacitly grants one sort of nuance authority, and the intent behind it may not be entirely benign--historically, it hasn't, and an about face seems unlikely at this time.
The IRA and/or its successors or friends appear to have taken the same approach as Russian security services have with the rash of targeted murders in Europe, with a "this totally isn't our doing, but anyone slightly educated on the subject will recognize our hand, because we want them to be aware that it's us and we don't actually mind people knowing" wink wink nudge nudge threadbare veneer of disclaiming responsibility.
Normally, I wouldn't really care: the 2016 stuff everyone made a fuss about on social media was largely ineffective and at best served as a smokescreen to distract from their very successful actions outside social media--Buff Bernie is a lasting meme treasure and nothing more. This go 'round, however, they've apparently learned from their mistakes, and I'm seeing.evidence that personal friends _are_ receiving and and are influenced by their messaging.
I thankfully haven't really had to watch any family or friends succumb to the Fox News media poison, and thought my social circles largely insulated from that sort of problem, but I was apparently quite wrong--right about _what_ wouldn't influence people, but blind to the idea that other actors would follow the same model and create content that _would_ suck in their target audience.
https://twitter.com/evelyndouek is a good source of reporting about Facebook and other social media cos' continued lackluster attempts to stand up potemkin independent review bodies, if you want more info on the space and can stomach more disheartening news.