Russia has invented Social Media Blitzkrieg

[Jacque67 7,328]

The tank was a British invention, built to penetrate German trenches during World War I. But it was the Germans who, during the interwar period, figured out how to most effectively utilize the tank, in coordination with aircraft and infantry, for offensive operations. Thus was born the blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) that allowed the Germans to overrun much of Europe in 1939-1940. The British and the French, who still had more and better tanks, were helpless to resist the onslaught.

Something similar seems to have happened with social media networks. All of the leading social media platforms — Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Google — are American inventions. Yet the Russians weaponized them to wage political war.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election was as shocking, in its own way, as the fall of France in May 1940. The complacent French thought they were secure behind the Maginot Line until the German panzers penetrated the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes Forest. Likewise the complacent Hillary Clinton campaign thought it was secure because of its hordes of cash, its extensive on-the-ground operation, and the sheer awfulness of its opponent. Surprise! The Russians stole Democratic Party emails and, acting through cutouts like WikiLeaks, leaked the most damaging tidbits. Then social media did the rest. And lo and behold on Nov. 8, 2016, the unthinkable occurred: Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

The broad outlines of this story have been known for a while — at least since the release at the beginning of this year of an intelligence community assessment of the Russian influence operation — but in recent weeks we have been learning much more about how the Russian intelligence services manipulated social media to help Trump and undermine Clinton.

What we don’t know yet is whether there was coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, but there is good reason to suspect that there was. It’s not just that Donald Trump Jr. was so eager for dirt on Clinton when it was offered by Moscow’s emissaries. And it’s not just that the Trump campaign was run for months by Paul Manafort, who has long been on the payroll of pro-Vladimir Putin oligarchs and tried to trade on his position to curry favor with one of his primary Russian patrons. And it’s not just that the Trump campaign had extensive contacts with the Kremlin.

There is also the CNN report that Russian-linked ads on Facebook targeted voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, both states that Trump carried by less than 1 percent and that were essential to his Electoral College victory. The Russians obviously have the expertise to steal emails, but where did they acquire the knowledge to so expertly target the American electorate? It strains credulity to imagine that it was just a coincidence that the Trump campaign was targeting those two states.

Trump partisans point out that the overall level of Russian spending on campaign ads was relatively low. Google claims to have found roughly $60,000 in ads; Facebook, $100,000; and Twitter, $270,000 — rounding errors compared with the nearly $1.9 billion spent collectively by the Clinton and Trump campaigns. But this ignores how close the election was: It was decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in three states. It would not have taken much to sway the outcome. So it is pretty significant that Facebook now says, according to CNN, “an estimated 10 million people in the U.S. saw at least one of the 3,000 political ads it says were bought by accounts linked to the Russian government.” (Many experts believe that Facebook’s estimate is low and that as many as 70 million people saw those ads.)

[Jacque67 7,328]

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/13/russia-has-invented-social-media-blitzkrieg

 

indeed. America is losing this battle.