As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 presidential election, there is an explanation as to why this time the country can be saved from Russia’s crusade for mass interference in 2016. At the time, Moscow had a transparent opportunity. The operational position of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the St. Petersburg-based troll farm established through the Kremlin to disseminate incorrect information during the U.S. election, was approximately $1.25 million a month. It was worth little to pay for a remarkable foreign policy coup: a likely pro-Russian US president on Donald Trump, a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton (whom Russian President Vladimir Putin had long hated) and, above all, the possibility of spreading American democracy as dysfunctional. Unprepared and supposedly oblivious to the planned Russian operation, the United States was a close fruit.
Four years later, Moscow’s calculation is less simple. The pandemic and the consequent fall in oil costs have hit the country hard, and Putin’s approval rates have plummeted. In the past, the Russian president has used victories in foreign policy, such as the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s longtime intervention in Syria, to keep his help at home. The tacit contract of this strategy – which makes Russia wonderful again globally was the value of some economic sacrifices by its citizens – had become fragile even before the pandemic. Now that the Russian economy is on the road to long-term stagnation, most Russians need their government to focus on internal unrest. Selling them some other foreign policy adventure will be an overwhelming challenge.
In addition to those national concerns, the Kremlin deserves to paint harder to manipulate the American electorate and hide its footprints this time. A craft industry of developing analysts now monitors Russia’s disinformation operations around the world. Social media corporations are more competitive in removing paintings on the network of non-authentic accounts and bots, and are more willing to point the finger at Moscow and other governments. And the investigation through US special adviser Robert Mueller revealed the Kremlin’s operational tactics in stunning detail, naming IRA painters and agents of THE GRU, the Russian army intelligence unit, which has carried out cyberattacks opposed to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
However, it is equally credible that Russia is looking again. While Putin is positioning himself as Russia’s leader for life, undermining religion in democracy as a whole remains of interest to the Kremlin. Much of Russia’s interference in 2016 aimed to amplify divisions around hot social issues such as race, immigration and religion. These divisions only deepened the era of coronavirus, providing even more opportunities to incite chaos. A more divided America means a White House that looks more inward and less involved in delaying Russia’s activities in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere. And while the Kremlin once feared the possible consequences of exposure, America’s mild reaction after 2016 dispelled those fears. Although he exposed the scope of Russian interference, the Special Council’s investigation resulted in only thirteen rates opposed to Russian citizens, most of them low-level IRA and GRU agents. The U.S. Congress imposed more specific sanctions on individual Russian officials and entities, but has moved away from more competitive measures, such as imposing general sanctions against Russian trade sectors or restricting Russian monetary institutions’ access to SWIFT’s foreign bank payment system. Meanwhile, Trump, who sees any mention of Russian interference as an attack on his own legitimacy, has continually opposed his country’s intelligence network in the confidence of Putin’s denials.
The Russian government has retreated exasperated, judging by its ambitious covert motions in the years that followed. In 2018, the GRU poisoned and nearly killed former double agent Sergei Skripal in the UK, and earlier this year reported that Russia had orchestrated a plan in 2019 to pay bonuses to Taliban fighters for attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. At the same time, Russian disinformation vendors have subtle tactics, with russian-linked social media accounts spreading lies on a number of topics, from Skripal’s attack to the Catalan independence movement and the pandemic.
The U.S. government, on the other hand, has reacted warmly to Russian interference and is now feeding on the pandemic. Russia and others know they’re opening a door. With new players in the disinformation game, in all likelihood, 2020 will be a repeat of 2016. It’s going to be a lot worse.
A major component of the threat is that Russia is no longer the only danger. Indeed, the absence of serious retaliation or lasting consequences for their behaviour has left the door open for others to follow Russia’s lead. For those newcomers, the Kremlin operation in 2016 opposite the United States offers a practical step-by-step guide.
The first step is to create an audience. As early as 2014, the IRA had created fake social media accounts that were supposedly owned by Americans. By using these accounts, he created content online that was not necessarily a divisive or even political factor, but was designed to attract attention. An Instagram IRA account, @army_of_jesus, first posted still photographs of The Muppet Show and The Simpsons. Between 2015 and 2017, the IRA also purchased a total of more than 3,500 online ads for around $100,000 to advertise its pages.
The step of the moment is to turn the switch. Once an account controlled through the IRA achieved some success, it suddenly began publishing questionable content about race, immigration, and religion. A vital account was the anti-immigrant Facebook organization Secured Borders; another was a couple of pro-Black Lives Matter Facebook and Twitter accounts called “Blacktivist”. The most popular IRA-controlled organization, United Muslims of America, had more than 300,000 fans on Facebook as of mid-2017, when Facebook disabled the account. Many accounts began publishing anti-Clinton content in 2015, adding pro-Trump messages to the combination the following year.
The third step is to make it genuine. Over time, fake IRA accounts sent personal messages to their genuine subscribers, urging Americans to hold rallies to deal with opposing teams. According to the special council’s research, the IRA’s Stand for Freedom Instagram account attempted to host a rally in favor of the Confederacy in Houston as early as 2015. The following year, another IRA rally in Houston, opposed to the “Islamization” of Texas, confronted protesters and counter-demonstrators opposing each other in front of the Dawah Islamic Center. In total, the Special Council’s investigation learned dozens of IRA demonstrations in the United States.
The IRA has been successful in millions and millions of others: 126 million through Facebook alone, according to the company, and 1.4 million through Twitter. The GRU’s publication of thousands of emails stolen from the Clinton Crusade made headlines for months, tarnishing the Democratic Party symbol and the Clinton crusade. Such good luck succeeding in a large number of Americans at a relatively low price has not gone unnoticed, especially through authoritarian regimes. The Iranian government, for example, has intensified its disinformation operations for more than two years, employing strategies reminiscent of those of the IRA. In 2018, Facebook got rid of accounts, pages, and teams related to two misinformation crusades (or “un authentic coordinated behavior” in the company’s language) originating in Iran. One of the crusades targeted users in the United Kingdom, the United States, Latin America and the Middle East. He copied the IRA’s focus on the social issues they divide, especially race, by selling memes to aid former NFL player and social justice activist Colin Kaepernick and cartoons criticizing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Another Iranian crusade, in January 2019, targeted the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation and the wars in Syria and Yemen and targeted Facebook and Twitter users in dozens of countries, adding France, Germany, India and the United States. At least one of the Iran-controlled Facebook pages in question had amassed about two million followers. Earlier this year, Facebook deleted another set of Accounts related to Iran that it suspected were targeting the United States before the presidential election.
Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Egypt, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Venezuela, have also violated Facebook and Twitter regulations that oppose desdata campaigns. But perhaps the ultimate new vital player is China. Until recently, Beijing basically limited its propaganda efforts to its own neighborhood: at the height of the Hong Kong protests in the summer of 2019, Facebook and Twitter first deleted accounts and pages connected to the Chinese government; spread false data about the protests and questioned their legitimacy. But in its attempts to replace the narrative about how its COVID-19 epidemic dealt with, Beijing has more ambition: at the height of the pandemic in Europe last spring, China unleashed a series of spounded attacks on several European states, spreading false data on the virus’s origin and the effectiveness of democracies’ responses to the crisis. This led the EU to take the unprecedented resolution to rebuke Beijing directly and publicly in June this year.
Future elections in the United States and other democracies will face an avalanche of incorrect information and conspiracy theories emanating not only from Russia, but also from China, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Attacks will pass through various channels: state-sponsored classic media, virtual media at night, and fake social media accounts and pages. They will implement synthetic intelligence technologies to produce realistic deepfauxs—audio and video hardware generated through synthetic intelligence that will be seamlessly discerned as such. They will coordinate on major social media platforms, adding Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, but also on smaller platforms, such as Medium, Pinterest and Reddit, which are provided less to protect themselves. China’s new social media platforms, such as the fast-growing TikTok video sharing app, are unlikely to be subject to U.S. political tension in denouncing disinformation campaigns, i.e. those targeted through Beijing. Russia’s “lie launcher,” as RAND Corporation researchers have called it, will become a global tsunami.
The Russian manual has been copied through others, but it has also evolved, largely thanks to Moscow’s own innovations. After social media corporations took a step forward in auditing accounts, for example, Russia began looking for tactics to implement its campaigns without relying on fake online profiles. In the run-up to Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election, which was long a test floor for Moscow’s new political war bureaucracy, Russian agents have tried to “rent” accounts. At least one arrested agent confessed to hunting to pay unsuspecting Ukrainians to temporarily give up their Facebook accounts. The agent planned to use those original accounts to advertise misleading content and acquire political ads.
Moscow has tried similar strategies elsewhere. In the run-up to Madagascar’s 2018 presidential election, Russian agents created a published newspaper and hired academics to write positive articles about the outgoing president. Officers also bought billboards and television commercials, paid protesters to attend the rallies, and then paid reporters to write about them. In the fall of 2019, a large disinformation crusade connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian businessman and Putin’s confidant who supposedly created the IRA, brought the new rental strategy to several other African countries, adding Cameroon, the Central African Republic and Ivory Cote. Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Mozambique and Sudan. Just in case, Russian agents worked with the locals to hide the true origins of the crusade, disguising a foreign-influenced operation as the voices of national actors.
The status quo of the media and social media entities, as Russia did in Africa, is more scalable than co-opting individual social media accounts, allowing Russia to succeed in a wider audience. More importantly, it allows Russia to eliminate this foreign interference developer: founded accounts whose location shows its true identity. In just four years, the line that was once transparent between domestic and foreign misinformation has disappeared.
Americans may also be encouraged to hire their social media accounts or, in a twisted edition of the economics of casual jobs, they may be persuaded to run misinformation campaigns themselves. U.S. citizens can even become involuntary pawns in such an effort, as Russian agents can easily create valid phantom corporations and pay in US dollars. They can also succeed in their goals through encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp (as they did in Africa), adding some other layer of secrecy. And since fake content that is transmitted through strangers may seem like genuine national conversations protected by the First Amendment, it would be harder to suppress. A barrage of attacks, combined with increasingly complicated strategies used to prevent detection, can leave governments, social media companies and researchers struggling to catch up.
Unfortunately, the United States is ill-prepared for such a scenario, as it has done little to deter further attacks. Since 2016, the U.S. Congress. It has not passed any primary law for street sellers of dysdes other than limited sanctions that oppose individual Russian officials and entities, nor has it required social media companies. In fact, it is not known who owns the challenge in the United States government. The Global Engagement Center is guilty of fighting erroneous state-sponsored data, but as a member of the State Department, you are not mandated to act within the United States. A government agency organization has issued rules on how the federal government deserves to alert the U.S. public to foreign interference, but is weak in detail. The Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency has developed an entertaining brochure that shows how simple it is to polarize an online network over possible benign challenges, such as putting pineapple on a pizza. The agency’s parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, has worked to protect the physical mechanism of elections, update and update electronic voting machines, and decorate security around the election data garage. And it has tried to share data between federal, state and local electoral authorities. These are vital measures to protect against electoral piracy, however, they are totally opposed to foreign desdata operations. And Trump’s tendency to muddy the waters and undermine U.S. intelligence agencies has only exacerbated US confusion over the nature of the 2016 Russian attack, making them vulnerable to long-term operations aimed at undermining confidence in the democratic process.
Social media corporations, on the other hand, have their own patch of responses and policies. While Twitter has banned all political advertising (and even limited the visibility of some of Trump’s tweets for violating his policy of opposing abusive behavior), Facebook has said it will allow classified political ads regardless of their veracity. Concerned about user privacy, social media corporations have also been reluctant to share knowledge with third parties, making it difficult for governments and independent teams to inform the public about the extent of the threat. In the United States, the powerful First Amendment protections for freedom of expression carry a layer of complexity as corporations try to navigate the gray spaces of content moderation.
A multitude of study groups, experts and non-profit organizations have emerged to denounce misinformation crusades, advise political crusades on them, and expand forward-looking teams to respond to long-term threats such as deepfakes. But the exposure itself is not enough to deter the parties to the conflict or even to keep up with the immediate evolution of their tactics. Sometimes detailing the strategies of a disinformation crusade only provides others with a plan to follow. The same can happen when Russian observers observe their strategies for detecting disinformation operations: once these strategies are revealed, Russia and others will try to circumvent them. Therefore, companies, scholars and governments are caught up in the mole game, avoiding misinformation crusades as soon as they are carried out without any proactive strategy to save them in the first place.
It’s too late, but not too late, for U.S. defenses in time for the November election. The concentrate deserves to be in Russia, given its prestige as the leading author and innovator of disinformation operations. Fortunately for Washington, the Kremlin tends to make consciously calculated decisions. Putin has been willing to take dangers in his foreign policy, but there is a price limit he will incur. Therefore, Washington’s task is to increase the pain Moscow will feel if it engages in new disinformation campaigns. This, in turn, would send a transparent message to other states seeking to emulate Russia.
As a first step, the U.S. government includes Americans and state-linked entities participating in disinformation campaigns on its sanctions list. Existing executive orders and the Counter-Adversary Act of the United States through Sanctions, passed by Congress in 2017, give the government the strength to be much more competitive on this front. Changing the behavior of states through sanctions, as the United States sought to do with the now-designed Iran nuclear deal, requires an extensive sanctions regime that combines the smart habit with sanction relief. This effort has been lacking in the case of Russia. A more assertive sanctions policy, which would likely require new legislation, could simply sanction the entire Russian cyber war apparatus: government agencies, fast-generation corporations, and cybercriminals.
Second, the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development deserve to increase investment for independent study teams and investigative hounds running to spread Russian-related corruption around the world. The 2017 Panama Papers investigation through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has revealed endemic corruption in Putin’s inner circle. Little is known about how such corruption is helping to fund state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, however, the budget spent on the IRA status quo was the maximum likely to have come from illicit sources. Identifying Russia’s complex net paints of illicit financing is a necessity to cut off the livelihood of these operations. Once companies, Americans and other entities are known to be involved in illicit financing systems in aid of disinformation campaigns and cyber operations, they deserve to be punished. But these research paintings are expensive and dangerous. In 2018, for example, three Russian hounds died in the Central African Republic while investigating the activities of the Wagner Group, a military-controlled military organization controlled through Prigozhin related to Russia’s 2019 disinformation campaigns in Africa.
Perhaps most importantly, the U.S. government wants to do much more for its citizens what the state-sponsored mis-data is and why they deserve to worry. Prior to the 2018 national elections, the Swedish government came to send each and every family in the country an explanatory pamphlet detailing what the wrong data is, how to identify it, and how to fix it. Other European governments, such as the ONE in the UK during the Skripal scandal, have developed strategic communication campaigns to counter false discourse. The European Union, through its foreign affairs arm, has established an immediate reaction mechanism that allows Member States to obtain percentage data on overseas disdid campaigns. Washington may be informed by its partners’ reports. With a president still wondering about the damning evidence of Russian interference four years ago, it will be a complicated task for the U.S. government, if that’s possible. But unless Washington acts now, Americans may soon return to the 2020 election with the same surprise and disbelief they felt in 2016. This time, all they have to do is blame themselves.
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