All the things I do with you, they don't fade away

October 27, 2020 10:21 AM

You may remember Russian propaganda campaigns from the 2016 US presidential election, but did you know operations really kicked into gear after the election of Trump? Things look a little different in 2020, but that is likely how the story will go this time, too.

Earlier this month, the US Department of Homeland Security identified Russia as the key dissemination of dis-and-misinformation in the US (full report). What does that look like, though? Establishing organic-looking connections for greater plausibility is a big goal. How that's achieved can be weird and sophisticated - creating fake left-wing news networks of fake left-wing journalists with faces generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (full report) and hiring real US freelance writers to produce content. As with many other things, these tools are likely to worsen the situation in future.

Just how do Russian operatives reach US readers, anyway? Let's find out!

What's different about 2020? Well, for one thing, state actors are specifically targeting far-right/fascist platforms a whole lot more and pushing even harder to incite conflicts over socioeconomic inequalities and racial division. For another, it's not just propagandists - Energetic Bear, a group known for targeting industrial and infrastructural sites, has gotten in on the action, hacking nuclear plants and the power grid (Yahoo News reprint).

Where does all this come from? That question is beyond the scope of this post, but the curious reader is encouraged to look into the "grey cardinal," Igor Sechin, Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency [1] and Aleksandr Dugin. It wouldn't hurt to brush up on all the domestic practice and efforts to destabilize Ukraine and Crimea - despite the rapid pace of changing technology and adaptation, a lot of this...echoes.

posted by Lonnrot (25 comments total)

I wanted to do a post on Russian propaganda campaigns in the US before the election, but I am severely burned out, anxious and depressed so this is the best you'll get. Feel free to add links and discuss the broader topic here. That'd be awesome.

A few stray threads to snip now: this post is focused specifically on Russian propaganda efforts targeting the US; Russian propaganda efforts targeting other countries also broadly fall under this umbrella, so feel free to talk about that, but this is an enormous topic and I wanted to hone in on specifics. Propaganda campaigns by other countries - targeting the US, Russia or anywhere else - would be getting into the weeds, but I want to acknowledge that all state actors do this in the hopes of snipping any whataboutisms in the bud. Some of the tool sets are new and scary, but destabilizing target regions by piping in so much false, conflicting information that ordinary people can't trust anything they read and the existing social divisions get exacerbated to the point of open conflict... this is an old, ugly game.

Also, the thread title comes from the Notwist song, Electric Bear, because I think I am funny.
posted by Lonnrot at 10:28 AM on October 27, 2020 [9 favorites]

OK, so I just came here after reading a Reddit linked story about the White Helmets in Syria. Apparently one of the leaders / founders committed suicide after the stress of Russian Disinformation campaigns brought all kinds of financial scrutiny on him.

I trust The Guardian to get basic facts straight. There was some shoddy book keeping (it is in a war zone, duh) but no embezzlement or theft was discovered. It was a guy trying to help civilians trapped in a war zone. All major funding was pulled, and he killed himself.

And I go back to Reddit, the first comment is:

The one who worked for British intelligence and who "fell" off a balcony in Turkey after it became apparent he was embezzling funds from the White Helmets? by some guy named MaximusIsraelius.

And I am just so done with all of the bullshit on the Internet. Putin has won, it is all noise and no signal anymore, and this is a very bad thing.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:23 AM on October 27, 2020 [24 favorites]

I sincerely hope that a Biden administration would treat this as the act of war that it is and start hardcore sanctions against every wealthy and politically connected person in Russia as well as every member of their intelligence services. The last four years have clearly shown that this can't be stopped by technological or social means. This has to be addressed through politics, diplomacy, and (as a last resort) the destruction of the Russian computing and network infrastructure that makes it possible.

And by the same token we have to completely stop our own programs of election interference and own up to our history.
posted by jedicus at 12:03 PM on October 27, 2020 [15 favorites]

At the Boston-area "Security Camp" events, I have sat through two FBI presentations on what they call "Foreign Intelligence Information Operations" -- in other words, poisoning our media and social media with lies and bullshit.

I have also sat through many (interesting!) presentations by Harvard's information security staff, describing the ongoing attacks from Russia, and I now can't see that country as anything but an aggressor.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:17 PM on October 27, 2020 [7 favorites]

These are very good links, Lonnrot!

Others may wish to read the recent book, "Sandworm" to see just how effective and pitiless there Russians are -- but as Lonnrot says, this is outside the scope of this thread.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:20 PM on October 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

Putin has won, it is all noise and no signal anymore, and this is a very bad thing.

Flooding the zone with shit.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:31 PM on October 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

A different perspective from Matt Taibbi
posted by chavenet at 12:50 PM on October 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is 100% completely insane, but Russian disinformation trolls have infiltrated my local parents' groups on Facebook. You know, the places where you go to be like, "Hey, anyone have a dentist they like?" I asked a question about flu vaccines locally, and two people whose names I didn't know posted to be like "The flu vaccine doesn't really protect you and just makes money for big pharma" and "It sounds like it's better for your kid not to get vaccinated, vaccines are very traumatic and cause permanent injury." Of course I challenged them and we got into some back and forth, where one kept claiming her child was vaccine-injured but was very cagey about what the vaccine injury was (or how old her child was), and had never heard of NVICP. The other claimed her kid went to a local school but called it not by the local name for it, but by the Google Maps name for it -- it was something like, "St. Philomena's Catholic Preparatory Academy" when literally everyone just calls it "St. Phil's" and nobody knows the whole name, not even people who go there.

I was finally like, who even are these people? And looked at their profiles. Both created within the past 15 days, both only members of parents groups in my area -- but like EVERY parents' group in my general area, from Evanston to Fox Lake to Kenosha, every single suburb/town/school district. Neither name shows up in any local record searches or any other social media sites. (I even had friends look in school directories of schools they claimed their kids attended; no such people.) And they only thing they've commented on is how vaccinations are dangerous and will hurt/kill your child. Neither have ANY facebook friends -- zero.

So I went and searched for prior posts about immunizations in these groups, and the same pattern was there over and over -- newly-created accounts, stock photo or no-photo profiles, names that don't seem to belong to anyone in the area, no facebook friends or local connections or likes of local pages, who claim to be local moms (always moms, never dads), who post less than a dozen times ALWAYS OPPOSING VACCINATION and have otherwise no engagement. And then the accounts seem to get abandoned after a month or so.

I feel literally insane even typing this, but there's a clear disinformation campaign about childhood vaccines coming from not-around-here that's targeting these small local parents' groups of 200 to 5,000 members on Facebook. I don't know that it's a Russian campaign, but it sounds a loooooooooot like these other Russian disinformation campaigns that I've read about.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:13 PM on October 27, 2020 [82 favorites]

Man, what is it with folks like Greenwald and Taibbi? They seem so mad at American empire it blinds them to obvious and transparent aggression from Russia and other actors. Like, hello, there are actual people that live inside this fucked up empire who would like their children not die by measles or COVID. Can we care about multiple things at the same time or does America's misdeeds mean its people (ya know, their fellow Americans) are disposable or expendable ?
posted by flamk at 1:32 PM on October 27, 2020 [20 favorites]

Taibbi is a rapist who has turned into an anti-"cancel culture" crank and Deep State conspiracy theorist, don't link to him
posted by theodolite at 1:58 PM on October 27, 2020 [12 favorites]

Yeah, thirding that Taibbi is utterly unreliable on this. Like Greenwald, his obsessive contrarianism has given him a giant blind spot about Russian psyops. A very wide range of trustworthy groups and individuals can attest to the reality of what Russia is doing.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:15 PM on October 27, 2020 [9 favorites]

Oh, cool. I actually came back to vent about a facet of this I neglected to go into and just encountered again in the wild, but we're already kind of discussing it with what has happened to Taibbi: there has been a concerted effort to target leftists with the narrative that Russian propaganda efforts are a completely fabricated conspiracy and don't actually exist because the US has also historically done the same thing in e.g. Latin American or Middle Eastern countries. Or, worse, that the IRA flat-out does not exist because of US historical atrocities such as African slavery or Native American genocides that, while horrible, are completely irrelevant to contemporary propaganda except that they can be weaponized like this. Classic, basic whataboutism.

I do not even know what to do with this level of willful ignorance. It is true that the US has engaged in similar activities - but every major state actor does this and multiple harmful actions unfortunately do not cancel each other out. It is patently obvious to me that multiple actors can all do harmful things, and that state actors seeking to destabilize targeted regions will focus on exacerbating existing inequalities, tensions and social divisions. To discount all of this - to discount sources like Reuters, BBC, CBC, all the stolid traditional international journalistic outlets out of hand - looks no different to me than the fascists harping on about "fake news." There are so many people eager to believe this despite exhaustive documentation from multiple trustworthy sources that I don't know it originated from any state actors, but many are certainly willing to help push it. Chinese propagandists have been getting in on this one, too.

Often what it looks like is a newer user (with an aged account) will make comments along these lines, and then it will organically snowball with actual US leftists repeating it. That is how a lot of this is intended to work. If you have to actively manage your propaganda campaigns, they aren't very successful. What you want is for your disinfo to start spreading among real users who share it because they actually believe it and/or to so thoroughly poison the well that you can get away with any atrocity knowing there will be legions of real people defending your good name from being sullied by reports about what you're actually doing. Targeting small local groups like Eyebrows describes is unfortunately particularly effective. Propaganda spreads considerably faster if it is coming from a place where you personally know and trust people, and the average user online isn't a careful reader at all (is functionally illiterate, if I share my honest opinion). I have seen much more of that this year than I did in 2016. I think it will get worse. I really do not know what to do. We can sing the virtues of media literacy all day long, but disinformation has got its hooks in and the average person won't have the time or energy to sort information carefully.

Tangentially, I also thought these Reddit AMAs from disinformation researchers and specialists would be interesting addendums to this. They have some ideas re: what to do, but I'm not optimistic about them.

Brendan Nyhan and Claire Wardle
Nina Janjowicz
Nicole Perlroth
posted by Lonnrot at 3:05 PM on October 27, 2020 [13 favorites]

Personally I don't find intelligence agencies of any nation trustworthy and Taibbi is right that most of the sourcing is just echoes, media outfits all quoting each other and/or the same, often anonymous, intelligence sources that are very vague with details but are always sure that Everything is Russia's Fault.
posted by adamdschneider at 4:31 PM on October 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

very vague with details but are always sure that Everything is Russia's Fault

That's possibly the most crystalline example of glaringly-non-self-aware argument I've seen this week.
posted by flabdablet at 5:05 PM on October 27, 2020 [10 favorites]

All the things I do with you, they don't fade away

"There are very limited opportunities for residencies' access to the mass media in the countries of the West, the progress of aquiring new operational sites is progressing slowly, and there is an absence of the necessary cooperation with the other sections of the Soviet KGB and other Soviet ministries and agencies.

-Vladimir Kryuchkov, " Order of the Chairman of the KGB. September, 1990.

go back over a 100 years to Alexandr Herzen who said what he feared most for the 20th. century was a"Genghis Khan with a telegraph".

Now, it is piped right in with obviating grey cut-outs spreading all sort of who-ha creating Instant History ®. There is no real classic whataboutism because all sides do horrid things it's just that it's in the home obfucicating the present with the pasts future.
posted by clavdivs at 6:34 PM on October 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think it's very important to mention that it took me a couple seconds of clicking through just one of the linked articles to find this highly specific and well-sourced allegation based on uncovering an overlooked connection in the source code exposing the Russian account behind several "American" far-right sites.
posted by traveler_ at 6:56 PM on October 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

Isn't 'Russian Disinformation' at this point a side-effect of 'the United States military industrial complex created the internet' which the entire world adopted, and as such the concepts of 'news' and 'truth' no longer have any true meaning?

All we're getting is information war now. Every side is doing it. I know I'm tilting perilously close to a tin foil hat, but how much longer can this go on before nobody knows anything? There's a goddamn worldwide pandemic that 50% of my country thinks is a partisan hoax.

Maybe I'm just proof of concept.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 7:35 PM on October 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

Nobody knowing anything is essentially the human condition. Nothing wrong with it. What's really dangerous is widespread acceptance of truthy horseshit that's absolutely not true.

The idea that we're living in a post-truth world functions in much the same way as the idea that advertising is necessary. Both are gateway drugs, feet in doors, thin ends for huge, self-serving and horribly destructive wedges. I recommend not giving either much credence.

Fact checking matters. The Putin, Modi, Netanyahu, Kim, Xi, Trump, Duterte and Bolsonaro administrations are just part of the current round in a very long line of historical examples that show why this is so.
posted by flabdablet at 7:54 PM on October 27, 2020 [10 favorites]

Isn't 'Russian Disinformation' at this point a side-effect of 'the United States military industrial complex created the internet' which the entire world adopted, and as such the concepts of 'news' and 'truth' no longer have any true meaning?

Yeah, no. Twenty-first-century Russia is a place where the government constantly assassinates journalists and directly takes over newspapers and television stations whenever it wants, to control what the media says and what citizens talk about. As a successor to the Soviet Union's intellectual and media environment, which was led by a newspaper published by the Communist Party which many individuals and organizations were required by law to subscribe to called Правда / Pravda / "Truth", and which did stuff like edit political figures who had fallen out of favor with the government out of photographs as damnatio memoriae of people who were sometimes still living, but getting scurvy and gangrene and being beaten in a Siberian gulag.

The present-day Russian government engaging in massive military-backed disinformation campaigns in an attempt to exert similar control over foreign media sources and conversations it can't bring its domestic techniques to bear on is not some mirage side effect of the US military-industrial complex and academic institutions inventing ARPANET during the 1970s and 80s or an illusion that has arisen because empiricism stopped working during the 27 years since the web browser was invented.
posted by XMLicious at 10:26 PM on October 27, 2020 [18 favorites]

A friend of mine says we should just give Putin an award and a dasha. He's the world's foremost potentate and an expert on subterfuge, as evidenced by what we know of the Russian campaigns to undermine Western unity and liberalism. There's a lot more that we don't know, of course. We still don't know, and probably will never know precisely, to what extent the 2016 US elections were influenced by Russian meddling. We still don't know the extent to which Trump was compromised by Putin personally.

I also vividly remember the triumphalist hubris and arrogance of the US and EU in the 2000's and early 2010's. The eastward expansion of NATO. The missile shield in Poland. The rank hypocrisy of the Obama administration saying that "sphere of influence" politics was behind us, while instigating "color revolutions" across the Mediterranean/Middle East and (later) coercing Ukraine to associate with the EU, which would have deprived Russia of access to a key naval installation in Crimea. Hawkish pundits and cabinet members openly denigrating Russia's capability to do anything about it. What are they going to do, with their rusting military and laggard economy? Hah hah hah. Poor dumb Russians! What are they going to do indeed.
posted by dmh at 3:26 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Isn't 'Russian Disinformation' at this point a side-effect of 'the United States military industrial complex created the internet'

I mean, if we're gonna go that far back you might as well say Russian disinformation is a side effect of developing opposable thumbs, or agriculture, or electricity.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:11 AM on October 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

I feel literally insane even typing this, but there's a clear disinformation campaign about childhood vaccines coming from not-around-here that's targeting these small local parents' groups of 200 to 5,000 members on Facebook. I don't know that it's a Russian campaign, but it sounds a loooooooooot like these other Russian disinformation campaigns that I've read about.

If you haven't already, it's worth contacting the admins of the Facebook group, and pointing out that those particular members aren't really connected with the school and should probably be booted out of the group (leaning heavily on the 'member of every parents group going' angle). Usually people running those groups don't want them to be infested with random spammers, and if they do get rid of these particular ones it might also open their eyes to the idea that they should be cautious about group membership. If the school board is big enough to have a comms/social media person, then it's possible that they might want or be able to do something to help.

On Facebook, groups are very much the future and a lot about whether they can remain uninfiltrated by nonsense is in the hands of admins who usually don't know a great deal but have good intentions. (It doesn't stop actual legit members posting anti-vax stuff but infiltration is a more serious problem, as you're noting.)
posted by plonkee at 8:44 AM on October 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee, I have seen something similar in one of the bigger neighborhood groups I’m in. And yes, I feel insane saying it. But I’m certain that’s what I’m seeing- maybe not Russia, but someone. The most recent one, they were advocating hard for people to go out trick or treating, defying the city. Also lots of anti mask and pro trump rhetoric.

My understanding is Russia, China, ans others are basically trying to create chaos. I’m sure that’s what it is too, what a better way to destabilize the US, do it when there is a pandemic.

I wish I had taken more screenshots when I started to notice it, it’s been a few profiles, and I called them out, told mods, and for the last one, reported to facebook as a fake. That one was weird because normally if you report to Facebook, they tell you yes or no. They never did.

2 weeks before the 2016 election, I suddenly saw how bad the filter bubble was skewing people’s news and more importantly their perception of what people around them believed. I ranted about it on Facebook but what could I do? In the days after the election, when everyone else started screaming “filter bubble”, I both felt vindicated and really wish I had known to tell *someone* that could have used that information. But I figured it was obvious to other people too, even if not my Immediate peers.

I feel the same way about these fake profiles on facebook in local groups. But who the fuck do I tell? But the smart people in charge have got to be seeing this, right?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:14 PM on October 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

I don't understand how anybody manages to maintain a belief that the people in charge of 2020 are smart.
posted by flabdablet at 8:42 AM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Smarket. (N.) Denizen Autocrat while obtaining a degree of power, belief in education, religious zealotry, and unbridled greed will be supplanted by one last shot, like Jacob Marley.
posted by clavdivs at 7:03 PM on November 1, 2020