Russians Meddling in Everything

Reuters says the Russians interfered with the Brexit vote in the UK by publishing through social media, various stories by fake users of Twitter and Facebook.  The UK government is in the process of looking at that right now.  The British papers, all citing a London Times article showing research by Swansea and U of California, are saying the Russians had upwards of 150,000 Twitter accounts going at the same time, publishing both “exit” and “stay” positions, but mostly favoring exit.    My US readers would find this similar to the Russian influence in our own election.

We should have the idea now that the Russians are meddling in almost every foreign policy issue they are interested in.  They use social media to cause trouble, stir up interest and plan events.  Then, they write about those events in their press outlets like Sputnik and RT.  Yesterday, we heard RT is going to be required to register as an agent of a foreign government.  The prodding of government officials actually was said to come from the Washington Post, that bastion of “free speech”.  That is going to cause a stink because it carves out new territory in the definition of what representing a foreign interest actually means.  More about this later.  The Chinese press is just as active in doing both writing favorable articles and influencing what other press outlets say about issues important to them.  If we are going to do it to one, we should be doing it to all foreign press outlets that are operated by national governments.  There are a lot of those.

Today, BBC is reporting that the Russians are trying to drum up support for a law making any foreign press outlier in Russia register as a foreign agent.    That sounds like the kind of thing they would want to publish.