From the US side, it appears that interference in other countries elections is coming more from the political parties and NGOs than from the government itself, although the NGOs do attempt to get funding for these activities from the government. Consider the recent case of foreign meddling in Israel's elections.
This was probably the most effective countermeasure:
"Knowing that they would be hacked, the campaign forged emails and fake documents themselves to confuse the hackers with irrelevant and even deliberately ludicrous information. By placing false flags, the campaign wished to inundate, confuse, and impede the work of the hackers with false information and slow them down. The campaign’s strategy of “counter-retaliation for phishing attempts”11 is known as cyber or digital blurring. It worked by turning the burden-of-proof tables on the hackers. The Macron campaign staff did not have to explain potentially compromising information contained in the Macron Leaks; rather, the hackers had to justify why they stole and leaked information that seemed, at best, useless and, at worst, false or misleading. The whole thing made the population doubt the authenticity of any of the leaked material."
I’m a Russian citizen living in the US, and here’s what I think is true.
1. Social media was constructed for all sorts of parties to influence the American consumer as a set of bought & sold “audiences” (in adtech speak). Some of these audiences are defined using political parameters. Some advertisers targeting these audiences via social media are politically motivated. The whole thing - all of social media - is a form in interference in the way people think.
2. Some advertisers are based in Russia. Most are not. Anyone can buy ads targeting a specific audience on any number of platforms.
3. I’m surprised they bothered to create a shell org to do this. Russia - like many other countries - has vested interests in US policy. Consider this a form of lobbying: just like American corporations go to Washington in order to lobby (“have undue influence over”) elected officials, so do countries “lobby” the American electorate come election time, because the public is seen as susceptible to such influence. In fact America even built platforms for this: social media.
4. Probably, but so is the US, and everyone else. I cannot believe Americans are so upset about something they themselves made possible.
I've seen allegations that Kremlin-backed interference went as far as organizing opposing protests from afar. If this is true, would you consider it to fall under "lobbying" or would you say a line has been crossed?
Re. 4, OP said that the interference was unproven. The extent to which the US has interfered with other elections is a separate discussion worth having, but it's not the issue here.
All first world foreign entities attempt to influence the electoral process of other nation states - wouldn't a better approach by the EU be to discuss this reality and solutions than just accusing 'Russia' of this while being holier than thou?
So ture. How many govts have been toppled in recent times through military action. I think surprise is that it is happening first time to west without direct military action. Last time govt was toppeled in west was French govt in WW2.
Actually the last time the French government was toppled was in 1958. The communists had become the largest party, and French officers, unhappy with decolonization, especially in Algeria, seized Corsica and planned to invade Metropolitan France in Operation Resurrection.
There is widespread, documented evidence of Russian interference in the US and French elections as well as Brexit. Which when you throw in state sponsored doping demonstrates a pattern for “not following the rules”. And I don’t see why that even if what you say is true why Russian interference can’t be investigated also.
Only a complete fool believes that Russia was able to influence the US elections with a few thousand dollars worth of Twitter ads.
The Russian narrative exists to create a distraction in the form of an external enemy for the establishment. It is a completely ridiculous narrative for anyone that has a brain.
Obama interfered with the Brexit vote when he told the Brits that if they voted for Brexit, they would need to go to the back of the queue.
Only a complete fool believes that it was only a few thousand dollars worth of Twitter ads, or that Russian interference is some sort of fake bogeyman created to distract people. The threat is real and part of the threat are willing accomplices such as yourself.
> The threat is real and part of the threat are willing accomplices such as yourself.
You realize this kind of behavior, accusing others of being traitors for doubting your narrative, is textbook propaganda behavior?
It's also really odd behavior considering you didn't even back up your first claim, saying "there's more than only Twitter ads" without saying what "more" adds literally nothing to the discussion.
Nobody is doubting that "Russian interference" exists, what many people are doubting is how much influence it actually had on Trump being elected or Trump's daily business in general. Because the narrative that Russia is to blame for everything from Brexit, Trump getting elected to the resurgence of nationalist sentiments is just that: A narrative designed to build the perfect bogeyman.
I should have added a general recommendation for the book itself, because it's an extremely interesting and eye-opening read.
Negative national stereotypes have always existed, but during WWI whole governments put in organized efforts to purposefully paint these stereotypes. Usually, most people think of Hitler and WWII when talking about "propaganda war", but WWI already had plenty of that going on, on all involved sides.
> Nobody is doubting that "Russian interference" exists
Well, I for one doubt it.
The reason being that I have listened to the words that the Russian President had to say on the matter, as translated by a Youtuber (Inessa S) who gets a few quid from Patreon subscribers rather than as filtered into soundbites by Western media who get a few quid from the arms-trade.
Sometimes you have to listen to what people say and the explanations that they provide for their behaviour. Sometimes listening may involve reading subtitles. Listening is different to assuming and going along with what other people tell you to think.
The Russian President is an extremely smart thinker and as he saw it, even if meddling was possible, this would not help matters further down the road. Russian reputation in the wider international community would be undermined whatever the outcome had interference gone on. This would undermine whomever they 'interfered with' to get elected. This is the key reason why there was no 'interference'.
Although nobody including the Russian President knew the outcome of the U.S. election until it happened, it was clear to people in Moscow that Trump suited the mood of the times and that he did have genuine and popular support despite the many obnoxious things he said and had done. It was also clear to them that Trump and 37% of Republican voters had a lot of respect for the Russian President whilst that Clinton woman was a hater towards Russia.
So, coming from a nation that is better at chess, the Russian President really had no incentive to meddle. To believe otherwise is foolish thinking and to misunderstand the multi-lateral world based on the rule of law that Moscow wants for the world.
There is no 'they influenced it a bit', Moscow stayed out of it, neutral. The shoe is actually on the other foot when you go down the rabbit hole of what 'Cambridge Analytica' was all about.
I just don't think the Russian government, and it's intelligence services in general, are as much of a monolith, as they are being painted as.
Even your comment makes it look like Putin is personally responsible and in oversight, of literally every single thing going on in Russia.
Which is usually a narrative used to make him personally responsible for literally everything negative Russia as a state does.
I'm not a fan of either of those two, governments and countries, especially of that size, are way too big and complex to run them in such a direct "in person" style.
Assuming that the threat is real and one of the big/influential countries does that, what’s the solution? The secondary media space, i.e. non-tv-radio which are expensively licensed and controlled, is open to the influence, to categorizing, labelling and other ranking by its nature. The main force there is popularity and small money (compared to e.g. military). Is it the “aggressor” that should change or the media space that is so vulnerable now? You’re basically put down all the [mind] defenses and then complain that it was influenced. It will, dude, if not by politicians, then by advertisers and other trick dealers.
That’s all theoretic since I don’t believe that government forces are vulnerable at all. As I understand, it is just a new convenient “evil axis” to fight against. Even if you assume that Trump was heavily supported by russians, then it means that US democracy had only one viable candidate on last elections and half of the US politics were basically bought. That’s in my opinion either nonsense, or the end of US democracy.
Google: "study Twitter accounts propaganda news". Start digging. There's a lot of secondary news and primary sources from independent researchers. There are patterns of how tweets travel between groups of popular accounts. There are known rings of accounts which are excited in Russian about Crimea one month and then in French about Macron the next month. There are groups of accounts constantly replying with Russia praise 9-5 Moscow time.
As much as I hate the "do your research" response, there are so many articles already out there, I don't even know where to start and not seem arbitrarily selective.
At this point there have been so many claims of election interference with nothing to prove it so I have no qualms about simply dismissing yours unless you deem it worthwhile to back up your claims.
I'm not doubting that they interfered, I just haven't seen any evidence of it and you haven't helped at all.
Each story is present it a few places - sourced mixed to reduce bias. We may never know what was the scale of the influence, so that's the debatable part. But unless someone claims that popular social media accounts have no influence over the results, they agree that IRA did play a part.
You could also speculate that IRA is not led by silly people eager to waste government money for internet LOLs. If their efforts were not effective, why do they continue that for years?
One point the NYT briefly tries to make — which is all I'm addressing in the rest of this comment — is that the U.S. in (very) recent years has mainly interfered to support more democratic candidates, and oppose more authoritarian candidates. And Russia, NYT claims, interferes to support totalitarian candidates and sow chaos. Implying subtly that Trump couldn't possibly be anything other than a strong-man or chaos candidate. That there couldn't possibly be any legitimate democracy-respecting reasons to support him over Hillary (campaign donor influence apparently is perfectly democratic, when it's your candidate receiving the donations aka bribes). Trump may be many things: A nationalist, a pathological liar, in need of a fitness regime and a better diet, and a not very nice person (by most accounts)... but I have not seen any attempt by him to subvert democracy or separation of powers. I have not seen him act particularly chaotically, either. (Weren't Democrats afraid he would start a nuclear war the second he got the nuclear football?) To the extent he's a horrible president, that's the fault of the 2-party system and his catastrophically awful opposing candidate.
So, The NYT basically says, yeah, the U.S. interfered in a lot of elections, but recently we've been doing it for the good of democracy. Russia, meanwhile, interferes to the detriment of democracy.
First, that doesn't change the fact that it's intervention, and intervention itself is anti-democratic. If another country wants to democratically elect a strong man, that's not so good, but do other democratic countries have a right to interfere? Maybe the populations of those countries understand something intuitively about their politics that we don't, and the candidate that looks more authoritarian is really the better of two evils?
Second, when we have interfered — in Libya, in Iraq, in Syria — and it turns out that the "democratic" "freedom fighter" opponents of the existing strong-man leader are terrorists or aligned with terrorists, or the country simply devolves into chaos and faction warfare in the absence of that more totalitarian leader, what then? Is interference justified to support a more freedom-loving candidate when we have no idea (or we know perfectly well, but don't care) that the country is not currently viable as a more open democracy, and needs either a totalitarian ruler or to go through the cleansing fire of a long civil war to cement the concept and importance of democracy in the people's minds?
A lot of US interference is way less visible and often quite entrenched in established structures.
In Germany, US NGO's hold a lot of influence, especially on news media. [0]
In 2014 the political satire show "Neues aus der Anstalt" made these connections a topic of one of their shows, showing links between organizations, people, and political players.
Which resulted in them getting sued, by one of the people on their chart, and being forced to take the video down.
3 years later a German court ruled nothing about the video was wrong, so it wouldn't even have been needed to take down. But taken down it was and the whole topic quickly buried under other themes, like the Syrian civil war and the resulting refugee crisis.
Finding any English language sources on this is extremely difficult, and even a lot of the German sources often delve off into the far too deep ends of conspiracy theories with this. So it's not an easy topic to explore.
> “It’s not just apples and oranges,” said Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute. “It’s comparing someone who delivers lifesaving medicine to someone who brings deadly poison.”
I think this is right description for comparing US and Russian attempts.
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=66198
http://thehill.com/policy/international/236565-netanyahu-pol...