Russia’s attempts to distort reality are not new. The tactics of disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies date back decades in fact. But the world today is a place where, through social media, these messages can be spread quickly, especially when amplified by bots and paid trolls posing as regular folk, and those messages can then be given further oxygen by useful idiots.
In the winter of 2013 Ukraine became the target of what was, then, an unprecedented wave of information warfare. As the Revolution of Dignity gained traction, in tandem the efforts to delegitimize what was happening in Kyiv and across Ukraine were ramped up.
In time we learned that a major hub of anti-Ukrainian comment was coming from a “troll farm” based in St. Petersburg, with early reports by journalists in Russia tracking down the farm. To those of us who had been on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse and outright falsehoods, things started to make sense. The information element of Russia’s war against Ukraine was always obviously coordinated, now we knew where it was being coordinated from.
What began as an operation to discredit protests and protestors in Ukraine was then expanded: The operation on Savushkin Street branched out and began sowing seeds of division in the United States too. This was well before Donald Trump decided to take his reality TV personality to another level and assault American politics from the inside. As it happened, and more likely by design than coincidence, the kind of divisive messages Russian trolls had pushed into the ether then also happened to become mainstays of the (Russian-infiltrated) Trump election campaign.
That same troll farm that had attacked and was still attacking Ukraine had started to undermine U.S. President Barrack Obama and his likely successor, Hillary Clinton. Russia had started to influence the U.S. election. The degree of influence has not yet been measured, but it certainly took place.
If you are reading this in the United Kingdom and you don’t think that the same troll farm had any involvement in the debate around whether to vote to Leave or Remain in the EU, sorry, you’re being incredibly naïve. That same troll farm played a role in supporting the “Yes” side in the Scottish Independence Referendum, Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections, and it has doggedly pursued Angela Merkel too, while supporting the message of the far-right AfD party in Germany as well.
That troll farm is allegedly run by, and funded by, an individual close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. His name is Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin earned the nickname “Putin’s Chef” due to the fact that the Russian President has conveyed favor on this twice-convicted individual (Prigozhin has apparently spent a total of nine years in prison) after becoming a fan of Prigozhin’s restaurants in Moscow.
However, Prigozin’s troll farm is but one arm of Russia’s efforts to turn election results in their favor. While Prigozhin invests millions of dollars (money he obtained by “winning” rigged state tenders in Russia) the Russian government spends many, many millions of dollars more directly, by funding international propaganda platforms like RT and Sputnik. The troll farm, and the influence of that troll farm, isn’t the beginning and end of Russia’s interference in the affairs of other countries, it is just one part of a multi-facetted operation.
The excuses cooked up to attempt to portray Russian interference in the United States and elsewhere are disingenuous, and can only be believed by people looking to justify an existing deeply held conviction, these excuses don’t stand up to any objective or rational look at the facts.
The first stories that flew out of the keyboards of Russian propaganda operatives and the mouths of American conservatives alike was that no actual votes had been changed. Technically this is based in truth, like all good propaganda, but it referred to the then belief that no direct vote manipulation (as in, physically or electronically changing votes cast or recorded) had taken place. That’s not the point. Were the minds and decisions of people in the United States affected by this operation? Yes.
Further attempts to downplay the Russian influence operation included things like, “the Internet Research Agency (the legal name for the troll farm) only spent $100,000 on buying ads in the election period. That’s nothing, right? Taken alone in isolation, maybe, added to the other elements of the operation, no, we are not looking at “nothing.” Another dismissal came in the form of “he’s a private citizen! Therefore this isn’t a Kremlin operation!” again, technically this is based in fact, in reality Prigozhin is anything but a private citizen, he’s close to Putin, has earned his fortune because of that relationship, and it is highly unlikely he is deploying his well-developed resources on a private whim.
The effectiveness of the troll farm operation is also being deceptively downplayed by “leaking” former employees claiming that the things they came up with were so ridiculous that no one could believe them. Apologists for this line of thinking, literal useful idiots, may say things like “because millions are never spent by Russian oligarchs for dumb reasons” but the reality is that the reasons for these operations, from a Russian perspective, are far from “dumb.” While Russian oligarchs certainly do blow cash on the most insane things, putting $1.2 million dollars in salaries on top of $100,000 in ad spending is just not something someone does for no reason.
Russia’s aim, broadly, is to sow discord in democratic countries, be they established or emerging, for the simple reason that a democratic Russia (you know, where an informed electorate has an option to freely choose from an open competition for votes that would be counted fairly) equals an end to Vladimir Putin’s corrupt and brutal regime.
When you have managed to ensnare the mind of an angry and bitter conspiracy theory loving person like Lt. General Mike Flynn, and have him share your propaganda and fake news stories because he simply believes them to be true, it becomes impossible to argue that these stories had “no influence” on people’s thinking, and therefore votes. Can we measure how many people were influenced by Flynn? No, that would be almost impossible. Can you deny that he had any influence? No, because that would be ridiculous.
The result of all of this is that Facebook now admits that 146 million people in the US were reached by this operation. This isn’t now about one single person standing up and saying they knowingly changed their voting intention because they were exposed to these ads and trolls, it is a question of trying to figure out how many people unknowingly changed their voting intention as a result of this very highly coordinated and sophisticated operation which took advantage of every social media platform in the world, not just Facebook.
Back to Ukraine’s experience. The foundation for war in Ukraine was laid by inflammatory propaganda portraying the Ukrainian armed forces as Nazis and fascists. This language was deliberately used to bring war to Ukraine’s previously peaceful eastern regions, and paint the invading Russian armed forces (conscript, mercenary, contract soldier or “volunteer”) as the good guys. The idea of extremists being predominant in Ukrainian society goes all the way back to the earliest attempts to delegitimize Ukraine’s revolution, it continued through the annexation of Crimea, and it is largely responsible for the deaths of 10,000 people as a result of the war in eastern Ukraine.
Thousands dead. Thousands more injured. More than a million displaced. These are the direct effects of Russia’s propaganda activities. Their influence should not be played down or underestimated: The news, Twitter personae and Facebook groups might be fake, but the threat is real.
