No, I am not saying they are supermegageniuses who are going to succeed in their anti-democracy info warfare. For one thing, they’ve been supermegabusted. No defeatism here.
But I think we still need to get up to speed on their degree of deviousness, because we need to understand fully what we’re up against. It’s information war, and as the other side in this war we need to be strategic. Central to that is: know the enemy.
We know their goals now, but here’s a quick review from the indictment document. Numbers indicate paragraphs, emphasis is added.
Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 presidential election. (6)
[...]
The ORGANIZATION sought, in part, to conduct what it called “information warfare against the United States of America” through fictitious US personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media. (10c)
[…]
By in or around May 2014, the ORGANIZATION’s strategy including interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with the stated goal of “spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general” (10e)
[...]
Specialists were directed to create “political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation and oppositional social movements.” (33)
[...]
On or about February 10, 2016… Specialists were instructed to post content that focused on “politics in the USA” and to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).” (43a)
On the weekend the Washington Post ran an interesting story about the campaign which I haven’t seen quoted here (apologies if I missed). As well as the indictment, the WaPo reporters sourced a secret NSA assessment they got hold of somehow, plus interviews with two Russian ex-trolls and two Trump supporters they tracked down who undertook political action at the behest of Russians impersonating Americans. Kudos to WaPo for some great journalism here.
Not long after Marat Mindiyarov started working at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll factory indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, he began hearing about the coveted “Facebook Department.” There, workers could earn more money and work alongside a younger, hipper crowd. But to gain entry, job candidates had to prove they could seamlessly insinuate themselves into the American political conversation.
Mindiyarov blew that test, possibly by not bashing Hillary in a question about her prospects, so was relegated to a less glamorous but equally “1984ish” job:
“Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line,” Mindiyarov said.
Still, he took the job. Another former troll, Lyudmila Savchuk, said that not being unmasked was the first order of business, and trolls were taught how to sound American and insert political ideas into other content. ““Their top specialty was to slip political ideas inside a wrapping that was as human as possible,” she said.
Starting two years before the election, the carefully-selected troll team had plenty of time to master the art of sounding American. According to the indictment:
Defendants and their co-conspirators also regularly evaluated the content posted by specialists… to ensure they appeared authentic… Specialists received feedback and directions to improve the quality of their posts. Defendants and their co-conspirators issued or received guidance on: ratios of text, graphics and video to use in posts; the numbers of accounts to operate; and the role of each account (for example, differentiating a main account from which to post information and auxiliary accounts to promote a main account through links and reposts. (38)
That feedback came in part from standard Internet metrics to test the impact of content. The idea, according to the indictment, was to develop fake US social media personas into “thought leaders” in the American discourse—and it worked enough to gain some of the fake accounts hundreds of thousands of followers.
One more little note on this last excerpt, re “defendants and co-conspirators.” We know the defendants are all Russians, by their names. The nationalities of the co-conspirators, however, are not mentioned. Any guesses?
WaPo quotes the NSA assessment, “fault lines” bolded by me:
The Internet Research Agency “clearly sought to identify topics resting on the fault lines of American politics — such as the Second Amendment, same-sex marriage, and the economy — as well as issues often characterized as sensitive or contentious — such as racism and religion — almost certainly to drive a wedge between segments of the U.S. population.”
Because neither Trump or the social media giants have done anything about it, the trolls are still doing this. Take these five issues and watch Hamilton 68 for a while and you’ll see it.
Meanwhile, Marat Mindiyarov and his fellow trolls refined their discourse-influencing tactics:
Sometimes, he said, he and his colleagues would engage in a group troll in which they would pretend to hold different views of the same subject and argue about it in public online comments. Eventually, one of the group would declare he had been convinced by the others. “Those are the kinds of plays we had to act out,” he said.
Have they ever done things like that in the comment sections of Daily Kos? Well, considering that in their research, according to the indictments, they looked for sites:
...dedicated to US politics and social issues… the ORGANIZATION tracked certain metrics like the group’s size, the frequency of content placed by the group, and the level of audience engagement with that content, such as the average number of comments or responses to a post (29).
...I’m going to go out on a limb and say we passed that test.
Putin’s troll gang learned Trumpspeak well enough to trick Trump supporters such as lawyer Max Christiansen and retired sales rep Sherrie Hyer, both from the crucial swing state of Florida, into organizing small Trump rallies. (Though once the rallies were organized, the Russians would apologize and say they couldn’t come.)
Here’s the kicker—neither of these self-styled “patriotic” Americans, on finding out that their contacts were actually minions of a murderous Russian dictator carrying out information warfare to destroy their own country, minded. Hell, they’d have done it anyway.
“I was supporting Donald Trump anyway. I didn’t need persuading,” said Max Christiansen, 28…
In the end, Hyer persuaded 35 or 40 of her own friends to come out and wave signs. The Russian-affiliated group had not needed to provide any people or suggest any messages. All of that came from Hyer and her friends — even the orange prison jumpsuit with the word “Clinton” scrawled on the back...
“There was no Russians at my rally. I knew everyone there,” she said. “I would have done it for Trump anyway. There was still a lot of excitement and Russians had no part of that. This wasn’t a trick for me.”
The temptation is to make a crack about room-temperature-IQ demographics. But the fact is, people like this were primed to believe falsehoods and to hate long before the Russians came along, by the Republican Party and the right-wing noise machine. The Russians are just taking advantage, to destroy America, and democracy.
Which should wake people up about the Republican Party and the right-wing noise machine.
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