Wow.
Did Russia just put its man in the White House? Americans are furiously debating the question as intelligence reports leak, Donald Trump tweets his doubts and Congress vows to investigate.
As analysts who have spent years studying Russia’s influence campaigns, we’re confident the spooks have it mostly right: The Kremlin ran a sophisticated, multilayered operation that aimed to sow chaos in the U.S. political system, if not to elect Trump outright.
The authors of the Politico piece are Clint Watts, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and co-researcher, Senior Fellow Andrew Weisburd. Watts and Weisburd previously published a study about Russia’s propagation of ”fake news,” released around the same time as the controversial Washington Post article which cited the efforts of “PropOrNot," the opaque organization that threw many on the left into a frenzy by revealing how certain publications and media outlets, left and right, were motivated by their own legitimate interests to inadvertently publish Russian propaganda geared to sway the election results. Their work received less attention at the time than the somewhat inflammatory Washington Post piece.
So how did the Russians accomplish this? Not by hacking voting machines. Not by manipulating vote totals. No, as the article notes, “that would be too crude”:
The Kremlin’s canny operatives didn’t change votes; they won them, influencing voters to choose Russia’s preferred outcome by pushing stolen information at just the right time – through slanted, or outright false stories on social media. As we detail in our recent report, based on 30 months of closely watching Russia’s online influence operations and monitoring some 7,000 accounts, the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system.
The Russian effort to influence the U.S. election’s outcome and install Trump as its (willing or unwitting) stooge is simply the culmination of a strategy to undermine NATO that the Kremlin has been employing for the past two decades, adopting the latest technologies and adapting them to events both in Europe and in the U.S. As reported in today’s New York Times:
What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.
The authors of the Politico article conclude that Putin’s propaganda efforts employed seven core strategies, all of which were visible—and well-documented--during this election. in light of Fair Use concerns I will try to highlight and excerpt from some of their main points:
1. Pick close contests: In both the British referendum [to exit the EU, a/k/a ‘Brexit"] and U.S. presidential votes, Russia happened upon an almost perfectly divided electorate. It took a nudge of just a few percentage points in each case to achieve victory...[.]
The authors note that for the Brexit result it was necessary to sway only about 150,000 votes. Pointing out the exceedingly narrow margin of victory by Trump in several swing states, they acknowledge that it cannot be proved outright that Russian influence made the crucial difference—but they ask, rhetorically, what could be divined by a similar correlation of narrow victories for Russian interests, not only in the U.S. and Britain, but in several European states as well.
2. Know your audience:
...Russian operatives have borrowed from this playbook and targeted audiences vulnerable to their influence across the West – largely supporters of the “alt-right” and others angered by the perceived effects of globalization, immigration, terrorism and economic hardship.
This tactic involves creating phony social media platforms with various “conservative” hashtags (such as “#trumppence16” or “#benghazi”) and bios, which then pushed fake news targeted to potential Trump supporters through various outlets.
3. Start early and be persistent: As early as August 2015, Russian English-language outlets and their social media allies were promoting Trump -- at a time when the idea that he could actually win seemed a distant fantasy. And they kept going throughout the Republican primary, surging at key times...
The authors note that the Russian effort was not only focused on defeating Hillary Clinton, but Trump’s anti-Moscow rivals in the Republican primary as well. Of course, the process here was aided by commercial “standard" news outlets such as CNN who saw Trump as a ratings bonanza. The authors note that Russian propaganda to influence Britain’s exit from the European Union followed a similar pattern.
4. Try everything. Stick with what works:
...Since the summer of 2015, we’ve observed Russian messaging pushed to groups across the spectrum, the left and the right politically. Anarchists, anti-capitalists, white supremacists and anti-government militias have all received Russian English-language directed propaganda through the targeted application of bots and person-to-person engagement from what appear to be fellow Americans with strong Russian leanings...
Ever notice how the only people you ever hear from with “strong Russian leanings” are those online? Isn’t it amazing how many people crop up willing to defend a wholly corrupt, oligarchical mafia state? Not all of the tactics worked, but when the Russians found one that did, they stuck with it, predominantly targeting conservative audiences with fake stories that conservatives would be predisposed to believe and share with others:
Sputnik News spun an innocuous email from a WikiLeaks dump into a nonsensical ailment known as “decision fatigue,” a fake story further amplified by an Infowars’ video viewed millions of times. Stories implying the U.S. election results were hacked or rigged led RT and Sputnik news election coverage in the final weeks before voting – a narrative amplified by Donald Trump himself.
...[5. Hack and Release:]
The article also discusses the Russian cyber kompramot, or “compromising material” strategy, in which Western officials are hacked and personal information is strategically released or “doctored" for Release at specific times. Nothing about these efforts are new except the technology—in principle, they date back to Soviet-period disinformation techniques. These tactics, of course, were displayed at regular intervals during the closing weeks of the campaign, with hacked and doctored emails from Clinton staffers regularly receiving blanket media coverage.
The authors also detail the Russian use of “bots” to amplify and reinforce their message across various social media platforms:
Series of accounts programmed to appear as members of the target audience comment, retweet and share breaking conspiracies at a dizzying pace, turning keyword hashtags into Twitter trends. When successful, this artificial volume entices mainstream media outlets to engage on the trending issue, further amplifying the Kremlin’s narrative.
The authors note that even when “fake" news is called out as false by more responsible media, the sheer amplification succeeds in drowning out attempts to “correct the record," thus accomplishing the Kremlin’s goals.
Finally—and this point is stressed--even if the Russian efforts had been unsuccessful (in this case, however, they seem to have succeeded), they would have satisfied the ultimate goal of sowing doubt and confusion about the American electoral process and weakening our democratic (small “d") institutions.
Trump’s blatant attempt to install a pro-Russian cabinet, his bizarre pro-Russian statements during the campaign, his campaign apparatus’ largely unexplored ties to Russia and his own hyperbolic denunciation or ridicule of the suggestion that the election results were influenced by Russian involvement are the clearest indicator that something dreadfully untoward happened in this election.