Russia's Secret Weapon? America's Idiocracy

[DonViejo]

What the Russian security services have done very deftly is tap into pre-existing pathologies in our society and encourage them, as an enabler might do a drug addict or alcoholic.

Michael Weiss

12.24.18 9:16 PM ET

When, exactly, does an unemployed coal miner in Lackawanna already wary of immigrants and the “mainstream media” become convinced that his interests are best served by voting for Trump over Clinton? Will a Pizza-gate ad purchased in rubles or an “Obama Created ISIS” meme cooked up in St. Petersburg be his tipping point, or just more proof that his original prejudices were correct all along?

At what point does a millennial democratic socialist in Detroit decide to skip voting altogether to put the finishing touches on her long-awaited Jacobin essay about the Zionist hegemony encoded in Seinfeld? Is it before or after spending 20 minutes reading Sputnik’s slippery summary of Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs executives? I doubt even Nate Silver would be able to tell you.

What the Russian security services have deftly done, and will continue to do, is tap into pre-existing pathologies in our society and encourage them, as an enabler might do to a drug addict or alcoholic. The extent to which active measures work is the extent to which our society is already falling apart, which is the only conclusion to draw from two recent Senate-commissioned studies into Russian disinformation and propaganda efforts online immediately before and after the last U.S. presidential election.

I doubt that anyone in the SVR or GRU can say with any certainty whether their interference operation made all the difference in the election. Plausible deniability thus worked in two ways. The first, of course, is the initial denial of having done anything nefarious at all. The second, and more effective, is to subtly hint that even if Putin’s spies and trolls bore a hole through American democracy, they still have no idea if their efforts made the crucial difference. So how can Americans possibly claim to know that it did? (Built into this deniability is the added benefit of seeing the U.S. media and political establishments frame nearly every domestic problem as a Russian-born conspiracy, thus giving Putin the kind of omnipotence none of his best-paid propagandists ever could.)

One can calculate forum posts on Facebook or bots on Twitter—which is to say, one can quantify the exposure of active measures—but one can’t really measure their impact without getting inside the head of everyone exposed to them, and then cross-referencing that group with voters in the three swing states who really did determine Trump’s presidency. Even then there is no way to be sure that Russia installed a real estate developer in the White House, because human psychology isn’t quite so amenable to big-data analysis.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-secret-weapon-americas-idiocracy?ref=home

[anarch]

1. I believe I've used the term "weaponized dumbasses" to describe what the Russian effort created

I stand by that. The Russian Active Measures program during the 2016 U.S. election cycle was possibly the most successful intelligence/social engineering effort in history--certainly if you judge it by its impact on U.S. global power, and really on the integrity of the nation and its political system across the board. I truly believe the damage done to America on 11/9 will have much worse and more lasting negative impacts on the nation than the 9/11 attacks (which were also a very successful operation, objectively speaking).

[oasis]

2. Deploracracy.