They absolutely meddled with our election. Here’s how and why.
In 2013, Russia organized what is known as a “troll farm” called the Internet Research Agency. This is the center where Russian propagandists launched their global disinformation campaign. By 2015, it had grown into a significant operation.
These individuals, armed with fake identities quietly slip into the folds of social media looking like average Americans. Trolls are fake profiles run by real people. This is common on Facebook as it allows for flexibility when commenting. Twitter manipulation, on the other hand, is geared more towards bots. Bots are programs designed to produce automatic responses. Bots allow for quicker dissemination of propaganda and misinformation through the retweet network.
Russian troll/bots are designed to spread misinformation, fake news, propaganda, and are dedicated to controlling and directing public discourse.
Their Goal For You:
By playing your cognitive biases against you, they can coax you into isolating yourself inside your own worldview.
Russia wants people stuck in hyper-partisan echo chambers. They want you to be surrounded by only people of your political party and they want you to weed out dissenting viewpoints. Studies have shown that the stronger your echo chamber, the easier you are manipulate. The stronger your political identity, the more susceptible you become to believing political hoaxes and fake news and the more extreme and divisive political factions become (Colleoni, Rozza, & Arvidson, 2014).
How:
By controlling and directing online public discourse. Twitter hashtags are hijacked and content is manipulated to serve Russian interests. Think of it in terms of a public forum. You can see how the dialogue is playing out, but you don’t know how many of the voices are secret Russians directing it. Manipulating the perception of public consensus is known as “astroturfing” (Rubin, 2017).
On Facebook, trolls will post very divisive and highly controversial comments with the goal that those who engage the comment will become angered (so they stop thinking rationally) and will then use that anger to reinforce their partisan echo chambers. The angrier people become, they more likely they are to engage a troll. They more people engage, the more visible the comment becomes.
Studies have shown that political fake news and propaganda radically favors a pro-Trump agenda (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), it is important to note that they do play both sides of the aisle (Stewart, Arif, & Starbird, 2018). A pro-Trump agenda tends to encourage right-wing, and nationalistic ideology which directly aids Putin’s global interests.
Political Goal:
Russia’s online disinformation campaign is known as information warfare, but their campaign isn’t restricted to the digital realm. Nor is it specified to the United States. They helped fund the Brexit campaign, failed to do the same in France, hacked US voter registration databases (compromising voter registrations for hundreds of thousands of Americans), sowed distrust in the US election system, and attempted a biological assassination on UK soil.
They want to isolate America and divide the EU by supporting right-wing, nationalistic and isolationist ideologies throughout the Western world.
Why?
Because an isolated US and a divided EU leaves Russia as a solitary and supreme world power.
References
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–236. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211
Colleoni, E., Rozza, A., & Arvidsson, A. (2014). Echo chamber or public sphere? Predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in Twitter using big data. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 317–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12084
Rubin, V. L., (2017). Deception detection and rumor debunking for social media. In Sloan, L. &Quan-Haase, A (Eds.) (2017) The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, London: SAGE. https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-sage-handbook-of-social-media-research-methods/book245370
Stewart, L. G., Arif, A., & Starbird, K. (2018). Examining trolls and polarization with a retweet network. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.475/123_4
