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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

"Russian disinformation campaign could succeed there to the extent it did in the west?"

What proof do you have that the Russians had a successful disinformation campaign in the west? I've seen none.

What blatant BS. We know from Facebook that the Internet Research Agency and other Russian backed organizations bought political ads with the clear intent to spread misinformation and inflame both sides in order to sow unrest and distrust in our political system.

To say it wasn't successful is just being obtuse.

>order to sow unrest and distrust in our political system.

Intent =/= Actual Effectiveness

The current debt regime is doing a fantastic job at alienating a generation from the status quo. If Russia paid to piss in a Great Lake of piss, that doesn't mean the Great Lake of piss was created or even substantially altered by Russia.

Well, there were studies showing the impact was minimal to zero - that it reached very few people, constituted a fraction of a percentage of total political content on social media, and those it did reach were already likely to be hyper-partisan.

https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/27/14266228/donald-... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/health/fake-news-conserva... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/fake-news-and-bots...

And then there's the DNI report, which if you actually read, paints a pretty lame picture of what actually happened, and in no way supports the idea that the election was impacted.

I hadn't seen these sources, thanks. Guess I'll have to update my priors a bit.

It's not the fake news reports that were the effective tactic. That was one of many they used in the attack (if you will).

This article is from within days of the one you posted:

https://www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-elect...

It covers the other tactics used and how they were successful—namely false identities.

The US intelligence community saw it as enough of a threat going forward they acted for the 2018 midterm elections:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/disrupted-russian-tro...

The identities used were things like sockpuppet accounts and fake communities set up to look as if there was more virulent discord already organically occurring and dragging legitimate online communities and identities into the same discord.

Here in Canada CSIS has put out warnings for Canadians leading up to the federal election later this year about that very thing. They said it would happen, and now Canadian online communities are devolving into trolling and anger and vitriol like there never was.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/twitter-troll-pipeline-immigr...

https://globalnews.ca/news/4518563/canada-target-russian-tro...

edit: Formatting

We need to be careful of reading too much into the wired article. First, the article makes statements like this, "So anyone trying to tell you there was little impact on political views from the tools the Russians used doesn't know. Because none of us knows." Well, actually the aforementioned studies shed some good light on the impact of fake news stories, and soundly debunk the idea that they were influential in the election. I'll take studies from universities over an opining Wired article any day.

The main thrust of the Wired article is that there were different tactics, but they had different goals. The article is saying almost explicitly that these other tactics didn't (and weren't designed to) change people's minds (e.g. sway an election). They were designed to foment conflict between groups already opposed, e.g. orchestrating protests for two opposing groups at the same street corner, turning opposing thought into violent action. To what degree this was organic after 2016 vs catalyzed by Russia is a great question to dig into, but it shouldn't be conflated with tipping a vote. Being that I'm rather condemnatory of any of these protest movements as futile and counter-productive shit-stirring or worse, I'm not terribly surprised about or sympathetic towards the "victims".

Edit: quoted some silliness from Wired article

The political views impacted were indirectly affected by the aforementioned online communities. Whatever the design of the groups, the resultant effects have been overwhelmingly political.

I don't know much about Ms. McKew as a writer other than she was present during the Russia-Georgia problems and would have been witness first-hand to Russia's prototyping of these kinds of tactics, as well as she's written for other reputable outlets like the Washington Post and was interviewed for Harvard Political Review[0][1]. Couple that with not only our intelligence agencies, or even the five eyes, but other national agencies like the AIVD (Netherlands) have all confirmed that this is happening. They aren't exactly green. And while I would be remiss to just dismiss a university study, I don't know who the researchers were, their methods, or their scope. If it's only about the fake news items, that stuff was almost passé by the time these other tactics really took hold.

If you take a look at the CBC article and the timing of the attacks (for lack of a better word), they aligned quite tidily with a continuing stream of anti-immigrant conversations online to the point where those vitriolic approaches to the subject of immigration were wrapped up in the yellow-vest marches here.

[0] http://harvardpolitics.com/interviews/molly-mckew/

[1] She's also a particularly prominant subject of attack for various [outspokenly] right-wing outlets and pro-Russian sources. It doesn't take much of a search to find that.

Yeah, political views were impacted in the sense of "quickened". I agree that the evidence supports that these tactics have been used and documented elsewhere (Ukraine being a great example) and the phenomenon of increasing destabilization seems to be progressively effective. That phenomenon is different than changing someones voting preference - all the studies we've cited (in the US specifically) discuss these tactics as "hardening" existing views, not changing them.

I'm only trying to compartmentalize these two phenomenon so they can be talked about separately, because there certainly is a narrative out there that the election was illegitimate because of election interference from Russia, and none of the evidence supports that. In fact, the DNI report explicitly disavows that idea. It is pursuant to the goal of fomenting institutional destabilization to irresponsibly push that narrative or allow a conversation about Russian meddling to implicitly support that narrative.

I'm not trying to minimize the concern we should have over a foreign government being an agent provocateur for civil disturbance. I'm just saying that it's contrary to the evidence to think that these actions swayed the election.

As far as I can tell, knowing explicitly whether somebody's political leanings were shifted is an impossible metric to test—earlier, now, or later. People are prone to lying about those things (either to themselves or to others for many reasons).

If you want to see one (non-scientific) example of media affecting someone's political outlook, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad

It's from before all of this and mainly focuses on Fox News'/talk radio style of vitriolic, non-factual reporting. Similar tactics were employed and amplified. I'd be surprised if they had no effect with the amount of noise that has gone up. I've personally seen it in others as well, but I understand that adds little to your search.

If you think that Russia is: a) the only one doing this and b) the most effective actor doing this, then you're the one being obtuse.

What Russia supposedly "did" to us did not even register as a blip. Russia's biggest crime in this case was coming from a place that Americans are remarkably naive and ignorant about.

I never said Russia was the only one or the most effective. I wasn't trying to get into a WhatAboutThem debate, just that saying Russia did nothing effective was wrong.

But seeing the sources above I might have been wrong about that. Still they certainly tried to be effective.

They've been doing that sort of thing for a long long time. And so have we, and so does China, every state or corporation with the capability will do things like that. If your democracy can be subverted by some Facebook ads and twitter bots you have far more fundamental problems. I'd be more concerned about actual election tampering, for example a news media corporation giving debate questions to a candidate before the debate.

people who have worked for russian troll farms have given interviews:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/curious-case-russian-flash...

There's nothing in that interview that suggests any of this was effective (if it even happened at all). Even Correct The Record (Hillary's massive social media astro turf team), couldn't turn the election around for her and it was orders of magnitude larger than what is claimed the Russian's did in this podcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

The fact is, despite all the media whinging, it turns out it's incredibly difficult if not impossible to brainwash an entire nation of people into voting for someone they wouldn't normally vote for.

@drhodes, it's not impossible to say. https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/27/14266228/donald-... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/health/fake-news-conserva... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/fake-news-and-bots...

At some point, an incredibly obstinate subset of the American population will need to realize that Hillary failed for very mundane reasons. At the end of the day, people did/do not like her. Blaming Russia is about the most complex answer you can come with as to why she lost, which should be the first clue that some critical thinking is in order.

How do you measure success?

Same ways you measure engagement with any other advertising campaign. Comments on promoted posts, number of likes, number of shares, number of clicks, etc....

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