Russian Facebook Posts in US Election

We are only just finding out now the extent of Russian involvement in manipulation of public opinion about issues connected to the US national election in November.  This is not something the social media giants want investigated.  Just the thought of it leads them to censorship of content on their own platforms, something they don’t want to do, and don’t want to be seen as liable for.  “We just provide the platform for ideas” they say.  Just about every mass media has gone through this at one point so they are not unique.

What the Russians did was what they have done before in the Ukraine and elsewhere.  Funding billboards for people who don’t have television, manipulating social media, arresting journalists who don’t report their way, buying journalists who support their cause,  going after the voting infrastructure that counted votes in the national election, and funding political candidates directly.  They have done all of these things in the US national election and we have yet to discover the extent of it.  This is all part of the New Cyberwar, I described in my last book.

Newspaper stories about Spain’s treatment of Cubans twisted stories to fit a narrative that the US should be helping the Cubans overcome their oppressors.  The US sent the battleship Maine down to help out, and the Maine blew up.  Newspapers fostered the idea that the Maine was blown up by somebody - most likely Spain.  It took years to discover the real reason was linked to problems with the boilers that had blown up on other ships.  We entered a war we didn’t even want to settle a wrong that was not even legitimate.

Motion pictures and television have both had similar experiences with content, using the medium to manipulate ideas and positions on social and public policy to suit a Hollywood or New York perception of events.  Both still do it today, with television dominated by slanted views of events that have turned off viewers, left and right.

We still don’t know the extent of involvement by the Russians in the reporting of events by news media, what political causes were suppported by them, what groups were sponsored by them.  Facebook finally did a weak internal investigation only after they had said the Russians had no sponsored activity on their site.  Somebody pointed out to them the fallacy of that idea and should point to the methodology used in their current study to minimize the count of Russian sponsored ads.  Facebook treated the Russians taking out the ads like they were stupid amateurs.

Now Twitter is finding out more accounts were fake and those “thought leaders” might have been being paid for their ideas.  I don’t see newspapers doing internal investigations on writers who were paid to generate stories slanted a particular way, but that is the way the Russians work.   Money for politicians is also their stock in trade.  We don’t see people pouring through donations looking for Russian sponsored money, but you can bet it is there.  In Germany, Russian  proxies heckled senior leaders to the point that they actually complained to Mr. Putin about being harassed.  Some of those groups we saw in the US could have been from the same sources.  The Russians are not as stupid as Facebook pretends.  The social media platforms, the press, and politicians have a good bit to hide and no single Special Prosecutor is going to be able to find it all.