That kind of false engagement is also a problem (for advertisers, genuine fans etc) but doesn't shape elections and thus come with policy consequences.
Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
This is the pattern with all Russian influence operations; they’re always implied to be ominously large and end up being laughably small.
American political polarization had nothing to do with the Russians; this is just the refrain of frustrated Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ill-conceived policy. Israel has always had far more sway over American politics.
The problem in particular is not only the scale but that this propaganda is not solely directed at altering US policy towards Russia, it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country. If the US is fighting itself then it isn't fighting Russia after all.
Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing.
> it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country.
That is likely one of Russia’s goals; it is not likely that the Russians were the origin of these political cleavages. This was the problem with the entire Russian influence narrative; it was a post-hoc rationalization for why exceptionally bad ideas like diversity and multiculturalism were rejected by a subset of the population. In essence: “If they hadn’t been exposed to these Facebook posts, they never would have had these illiberal ideas put into their heads.”
It was also impossible to take seriously because most of the elected officials promoting it were receiving campaign contributions from AIPAC.
"For the most part, the people who run troll farms have financial rather than political motives; they post whatever receives the most engagement, with little regard to the actual content"
BuzzFeed News investigation "didn't find concrete evidence of a connection" and "Facebook said its investigations hadn't turned up a connection between the IRA and Macedonian troll farms either"
I've been in touch with tech people in Eastern Europe. Grey zone warfare is very real in their countries.
> A 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found that at least one member of the Russian IRA, indicted for alleged interference in the 2016 US election, had also visited Macedonia around the emergence of its first troll farms, though it didn’t find concrete evidence of a connection. (Facebook said its investigations hadn’t turned up a connection between the IRA and Macedonian troll farms either.)
Further, the article supports the point I was making:
> For the most part, the people who run troll farms have financial rather than political motives; they post whatever receives the most engagement, with little regard to the actual content. But because misinformation, clickbait, and politically divisive content is more likely to receive high engagement (as Facebook’s own internal analyses acknowledge), troll farms gravitate to posting more of it over time, the report says.
This isn’t evidence of a concerted influence campaign. It’s not even clear what the article means when it refers to these outfits as troll farms. What I imagine when I hear the phrase is a professionalized state-backed outfit with a specific mandate to influence public opinion in a target country; this isn’t what is being described in the article.
There’s evidence that Russia engaged in these kinds of influence campaigns during the 2016 election, but I’ve never seen evidence that they were particularly effective at it.
Maybe it wasn't your intent, but your comment makes it sound like this was an issue with only a single side of the political spectrum. However...
https://www.businessinsider.com/russians-organized-pro-anti-...
> The Russians weaponized social media to organize political rallies, both in support of and against certain candidates, according to the indictment. Although the Russians organized some rallies in opposition to Trump's candidacy, most were supportive.
Not to mention the recent exposure of the funding source of the fine folks over at Tenet Media.
That's what the Russians do. It's too difficult to improve their own country, their own lives, and their own prospects, so they focus on the next-best strategy for the acquisition of power, which is dragging everybody else down to their level.
I know of a few defectors who ended up there; one was an American that went by the name of “Texas,” while another one was a Canadian who moved there to be a farmer in hopes of protecting his family from what he saw as degenerate values being propagated by the Canadian education system. Texas was supposedly murdered by Russian soldiers while operating with Kremlin-aligned militias in the Donbas region. The Canadian is still living in Russia and has a YouTube channel.
I suspected a regular rotation of Kremlin agents were on /pol/ during the Syrian Civil War. Russian sentiment was generally far more positive prior to the invasion. It’s possible this was all organic and just collapsed as people saw what they did to Ukraine; I really have no idea.
Frog Twitter for their part pivoted on Russia quite quickly in the early 2020s, around the time Thiel was buying out podcasts.
On the other hand there's hundreds of thousands of diaspora Russians, and they're very pro russian. Richard Spencer's ex wife is a good example of this. Overall this is a much bigger impact than the dozen converts or a few thousand half hearted Harper's.
Obviously before the war Russia was less publicly objectionable. In Syria everyone just hated ISIS.
The /pol/ effect is nostalgia for worlds that no longer exist and we're not personally experienced. It's political flavored nostalgia instead of Pokémon collecting.
In terms of American twitter Russiagate and making Russia a red/blue partisan issue has been the most disastrous. It's simple contrarianism.
What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?
They’re grifters; their interest in American politics is commercial. Indians were targeting Trump supporters with fake news for ad revenue as early as 2015; this is a continuation of that model.
It’s possible the Russians have contracted influence campaigns out to Indian and Israeli firms, but the simpler explanation is just that India is continuing its long and storied history of using telecomm networks to scam unwitting boomers while Israel is continuing its long and storied history of being the worst greatest ally of all time.
See exhibit 8 and such: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl
Or 10 which specifically talks about Twitter https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl