The Feinstein Summary

At the beginning of yesterday’s hearings on Russian use of social media to influence the national election in the United States, Senator Feinstein laid out a summary of what she had already been briefed on before attending this session.  We have seen this information before, but it was interesting to hear it all put together in one place.

The Russians really did have quite a bit of effort going into managing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube messaging.  Facebook had 470 accounts, Twitter had 2752, and there were over 37,000 that generated some kind of election content.  Imagine the number of people that had to be employed just to keep that many accounts active.  Most of the content was incendiary, intended to spread discontent on both sides of the political spectrum, both right and left.  Of course, thousands of less thoughtful people also jumped on those bandwagons, prompted by feeds from RT news services that promoted the stories to make them more real.  The press trolls were aided by lazy press outlets who repeat “news” by any name without checking their stories.  Political groups loved it and used it for their own ends.

The only satisfaction I get from any of this is the fact that the US and Russian publics do not believe much of what their press puts out.  In Washington, we call all of this “spin”.  The reason we understand it so well is that various political parties have done exactly the same thing for so long we have grown tired of it while becoming increasingly skeptical about the sources of information.  Maybe that was the real objective of the program.