What Hillary knew about Putin's propaganda machine

[Jacque67 7,328]

But the goal of “active measures” is even grander than influencing an election: It uses disinformation, propaganda and cyberware to weaken the West, foment division in NATO and undermine America’s image around the world. The social media that accompanied Crimea wasn’t so much to support Russia’s point of view, but to sow doubt about anyone understanding what was happening. Russian digital disinformation is post-modern: It’s less the propagation of lies than the idea that there is no truth. Ultimately, “active measures” seeks to undermine the very concept of empirical facts.

Last week, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Clint Watts, a former FBI officer who is an expert on Russian disinformation, said that what Russia did on social media in 2014 around Ukraine was a “dry run” for the 2016 election. He called it “capabilities development.” And it was. They seeded false stories about a 3-year-old ethnic Russian boy crucified by the Ukrainian military, about how Ukrainian bakeries were refusing to sell bread to Russian speakers, and how the new Ukrainian government was going to cancel the May 9 World War II commemoration and stage a gay pride parade instead. These efforts presaged the internet ecosystem of 2016: Disinformation is launched on Twitter; it is then covered by Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik; those stories are loaded up on YouTube and are then pushed out to sympathetic Facebook communities. At the time, our most senior NATO commander, U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove, told me this was “an information blitzkrieg unlike anything in the history of information warfare.” In military terms, Russia was preparing the information battlefield for 2016.

The hundreds of Russian ads recently revealed on Facebook and Google are also examples of “active measures.” The ads, ranging from ones that seem to support Black Lives Matter and the Black Panthers to ads saying “The South will rise again” to the headline, “Satan: If I win Clinton Wins!,” fit into the Russian goal of sowing confusion and doubt. The Russians like “frozen conflicts”—a term that applies to territorial disputes like eastern Ukraine or Transnistria in Moldova, but could easily describe the stalemate in Congress, the polarization of American politics, or the debate about Russian “collusion.” It’s these divisions the ads are meant to exploit. Yes, there are plenty that were pro-Trump, but in the early stages of the campaign, the ads were more focused on creating controversy and division than on supporting any one candidate. And that’s the idea—to reveal an America riven by different and irreconcilable points of view, to show modern democracy as a dysfunctional mess. What Russian would want to live in such a society? 

While the delivery system for disinformation is very 21st century, the way Russia uses it hearkens back to Soviet WWII artillery strategy: Shoot fast, aim everywhere and don’t stint on the ammunition. The Russians have an army of botnets and sock puppets and honey pots. They use troll factories to create thousands and thousands of tweets, which cleverly mix political news with apolitical posts about fashion and sports. They exploit all the laws of online social science: Multiple sources are more persuasive than a single one; emotionally resonant content is passed on more frequently; and repetition leads to familiarity which leads to acceptance. I was impressed with how quickly the Russian propaganda machine was on top of the news—but, of course, it takes less time to make up a fact than to check one. And they use our own bias for “objectivity” against us: They know American media will dutifully report Russian fictions, however far-fetched, and try to balance them with accurate reporting.

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/15/hillary-clinton-putin-russia-propaganda-election-215826

 

yep, America's losing this one so far. Education system needs fixing.