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Russia's Social Media Propaganda Was Hiding in Plain Sight
A common misconception about Donald Trump’s rise to presidential power — as well as the role Russia-backed social media allegedly played in getting him there — is that no one saw it coming. In reality, scholars, activists, and regular social media users had warned that platforms seemed to becoming weaponized for political purposes in a way that felt new and dangerous. The hearings on Russian disinformation over the past two days are a bitter coda to a symphony of discontent to which tech gurus responded slowly.
They do not have that option anymore. But the bigger question is why they ever thought they did.
Since 2014, women have begged Twitter to stop the mass harassment typified by misogynist campaigns like Gamergate. Several protagonists accused of participating in the harassment, like former Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos, were tied to the Trump campaign. Also in 2014, black women on Twitter noticed a spate of accounts posing as hostile black users and outed the fakers under the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing. Three years later, researchers have confirmed such attempts were part of a Russian propaganda operation intended to exacerbate racial tension.
On Monday, Clint Watts, a former FBI Special Agent and social media researcher who has frequently testified in front of Congress about Russian interference allegations, confirmed that 2014 was indeed “a dry run” in which Russia mapped the social media landscape and saw how it could be manipulated. Far from being surprising, Watts’ comments likely felt like confirmation, not revelation, to many female and non-white social media users.
This is not to say that most harassers and trolls were Russian — online abuse is very much a domestic crisis as well. But had Twitter and other networks acted quicker to curb abuse and impersonation in general, any outside manipulation that did occur might have been less effective. (In October, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged to 'take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.')
They do not have that option anymore. But the bigger question is why they ever thought they did.
Since 2014, women have begged Twitter to stop the mass harassment typified by misogynist campaigns like Gamergate. Several protagonists accused of participating in the harassment, like former Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos, were tied to the Trump campaign. Also in 2014, black women on Twitter noticed a spate of accounts posing as hostile black users and outed the fakers under the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing. Three years later, researchers have confirmed such attempts were part of a Russian propaganda operation intended to exacerbate racial tension.
On Monday, Clint Watts, a former FBI Special Agent and social media researcher who has frequently testified in front of Congress about Russian interference allegations, confirmed that 2014 was indeed “a dry run” in which Russia mapped the social media landscape and saw how it could be manipulated. Far from being surprising, Watts’ comments likely felt like confirmation, not revelation, to many female and non-white social media users.
This is not to say that most harassers and trolls were Russian — online abuse is very much a domestic crisis as well. But had Twitter and other networks acted quicker to curb abuse and impersonation in general, any outside manipulation that did occur might have been less effective. (In October, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged to 'take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.')
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/russia-s-social-media-propaganda-was-hiding-plain-sight-ncna816886
