* US: 39 accounts
* China: 81 accounts
* Russia: 1,633 accounts
Either Russia invests orders of magnitude more in these coordinated inauthentic behavior campaigns, or they are just that much worse at flying under the radar.
Either Russia invests orders of magnitude more in these coordinated inauthentic behavior campaigns, or they are just that much worse at flying under the radar.
for example, there may be more US campaigns targeting WeChat or Telegram or VK
At least some of Russia's operations are likely less covert and more "look what we can do". They're not _really_ trying to hide; if you're trying to produce political disruption, then "look, this political disruption was caused by semi-deniable foreign interference" makes for even more political disruption.
Remember Guccifer 2.0? That was a GRU operation, apparently unmasked because the GRU officer 'forgot' to use a VPN (thus leaving an IP address which literally belonged to the GRU in some logs). And, I mean, it's _possible_ that that's what really happened, but it seems far more likely that it was deliberate.
I have no idea. However, if you expect national intelligence agencies to only be interested in stuff that has been shown empirically, then I have some very bad news for you (to take one of the _funnier_ examples, the CIA spent nearly 20 years researching "psychic remote viewing", ie magic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project).
That said, you'd expect that this would work (the double-whammy disruption, that is, not the magician-spies).
Take the "Guccifer 2.0" example, for instance. "Guccifer 2.0", that is the Russian military intelligence agency, stole and leaked emails from the DNC, causing political disruption. It was then revealed, in pretty short succession, that Trump lackey Roger Stone had been in communication with "Guccifer 2.0", and that "Guccifer 2.0" was a GRU officer. This caused further political disruption, and didn't obviously cost Russia anything, so, really, why would they _not_ reveal it?
And it does seem to be a trend; it's not like this is the only example of Russia saying "we totally deny these claims [wink]".
Stargate: wow! With that kind of return on investment on $20 M, psychic readings for $10 a pop sound like a bargain in comparison. At worst, the readers are good at reading some signals hiding in plain sight and prompting some self reflection.
What exactly are you implying?
As a consequence, their samples would represent the dumbest/simplest psyops, rather than a random sampling of all psyops.
In the same way that tax auditors tend to "find" a lot of basic tax fraud, but almost no sophisticated, structured, high income tax fraud.
You can use a single extremely influential account or a swarm of small ones to reach equivalents levels of influence.
https://heavy.com/news/2017/10/roy-moore-alabama-twitter-rus...
https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/26/reid-hoffman-apologizes-...
Or, combination thereof.
China's strategy has been to use its massive workforce and economy, buying US debt, investing (and thus buying out) infrastructure in developing nations and becoming an integral part of the supply chain for most of Western industry.
Russia's strategy has primarily been to create a neverending stream of disinformation, misinformation and half-truths. Instead of creating a false narrative, it creates tens or hundreds of them without fully committing to any of them so the "objective truth" just becomes one of many possible truths and any minor factual mistake leads people to "question the narrative". Opposition groups in foreign countries are funded, but only to an extent that provides a cover of plausible deniability for them. Individuals are assinated in the most blatantly obvious way but with full denial of any involvement. Internal opposition is jailed with selectively enforced laws that seem relevant enough to be plausible but seem to be based on bogus evidence the deeper you dig. Russia's goal is not to get you to believe a lie, Russia's goal is to get you to question reality itself.
Basically, for the US and China disinformation is just another weapon in the arsenal. For Russia it's just what Russia does.
PS: The invasion of Ukraine is a bit of a counterexample to this but given how much it is dragging out, that just demonstrates how bad they are at solving conflicts "the American way".
Of course you could make the argument that all countries use all of these techniques to exert influence. The annexation of Crimea was as much a military operation as it was a disinformation campaign. The US is a vital part of the supply chain for many of its allies. China infamously engages in information warfare even against its own population. But what I'm arguing is what each country's primary weapon of choice is. And for Russia it's to attack the concept of reality itself.
Whereas, the US and China are probably just establishing the account networks.