Two outside research groups used data obtained from Silicon Valley giants by the Senate Intelligence Committee to paint a sweeping picture of Russia’s online disinformation efforts both before and after the 2016 presidential election in reports released Monday.
[...]
The Internet Research Agency troll farm focused much of its attention on black audiences, creating "an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem," per the New Knowledge report. The group’s cultivation of sometimes-unsuspecting on-the-ground collaborators was "substantially more pronounced on Black-targeted accounts."
It engaged in voter suppression. New Knowledge said that "the suppression narratives were targeted almost exclusively at the Black community on Instagram and Facebook" in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
[...]
"Surprisingly, these campaigns did not stop once Russia's IRA was caught interfering in the 2016 election. Engagement rates increased and covered a widening range of public policy issues, national security issues, and issues pertinent to younger voters," said researchers from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project.
[...]
"We should certainly expect to see recruitment, manipulation, and influence attempts targeting the 2020 election, including the inauthentic amplification of otherwise legitimate American narratives," said researchers from New Knowledge in the report they provided to the panel.
Axios
[T]he most extraordinary aspect of these vital new reports transcends any particular finding. It’s the institutional origins of these reports. It took a congressional committee commissioning reports from outside entities (private and academic) to produce, almost two full years into the Trump presidency, the fullest public accounting the American public has received of the serious new threat our democracy faces. That’s downright remarkable.
It’s also inexcusable insofar as the executive branch is concerned. At the most basic level, the American people deserve to know what happened in the 2016 election, what’s been happening since, and what the new threats are that we’re facing. What’s more, the spread of disinformation is the rare type of national security threat for which informing the public actually can diminish the threat: if Americans know what to look out for online and what not to accept at face value on social media, the power of disinformation deliberately spread by hostile actors is reduced. [...] In France, schools are teaching students how to spot disinformation on social media; but, here in the United States, the President periodically refuses even to acknowledge the threat. Indeed, he often aggravates the threat, by amplifying and disseminating disinformation; but that’s not my focus here. Rather, as we sift through these reports’ extensive findings, we must remind ourselves that we’re now set to enter the third year of flat-footedness on the part of this administration when it comes to addressing disinformation spread by foreign adversaries.
[...]
The Trump administration’s shortcoming on this issue is no mere oversight on the President’s part, of course. Trump seems to have made clear to those around him that even acknowledging the threat posed by foreign election interference is unacceptable, lest doing so calls into question the validity of Trump’s own victory in 2016. A few months ago, National Security Advisor John Bolton claimed that “the President has taken command of this issue;” but we’ve seen precious little from Trump’s executive branch to substantiate that before or after.
[...]
When a President refuses to protect and defend our nation from a new type of national security threat, others must. The new reports make for astonishing reading—but, at the end of the day, what’s most astonishing of all is that we haven’t seen this before from our own executive branch.
Just Security
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment