The Trump administration’s game of Russian roulette took an interesting turn during Thursday’s public Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
According to two members of the committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), upwards of a thousand Russian trolls were hired by the Kremlin to generate anti-Hillary Clinton fake news stories targeting battleground states to swing the outcome of the election in these areas.
Senator Warner said:
“We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports […] that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.”
While he stressed that investigators were still trying to determine which specific areas had been affected, Warner said the trolls were believed to have been targeting the pivotal states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — three states that, against all odds, fell to Donald Trump by a razor thin margin (less than 2%.)
These three states then became the target of a failed recount effort by Green presidential candidate Jill Stein, who had raised over $7m to fund the operation.
The trolls, Warner said, were deliberately peddling rumors about Clinton being “sick” and “taking money from whoever for some source” in the waning days of the election.
While researching Russia’s paid “army of trolls” for an in-depth exposé published in 2015 in the New York Times , journalist Adrian Chen also found that a significant portion of these trolls were in fact being paid by the Kremlin to pass as American supporters and spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
A report published earlier this week by researchers at the University of Oxford seems to confirm, at least part of, the theory that disinformation has become a tactical weapon of choice.
Researchers found that, in the lead up to the election, what they call “junk news” (conspiratorial and sensationalist content, including links to stories originating from Russia) largely outperformed “professional news” on Twitter in the battleground state of Michigan. They also found that Trump-related hashtags were used more than twice as often as Clinton-related hashtags by Twitter users in this state.
The Senate Intelligence Committee will now determine whether the Trump campaign could have coordinated the hiring of these trolls with Russian partners.
Deliberately spreading false information with a intent to deceive, a tactic known as “dezinformatsiya,” has been a tradecraft of both the KGB and the CIA since the Cold War days. Campaigns of disinformation were just one of many “active measures” historically employed by the Russians to weave discord into the political fabric of perceived enemy states.
But, according to former Russian intelligence officer Sergey Tretyakov, little has changed since the 1980s: Russia is still doing everything it can to disrupt American political processes. The only difference? The terrain of the ideological battle has now shifted to the dark corridors of cyber space.
In recent years, Twitter bots have emerged as the ultimate propaganda pawns, capable of bolstering support for specific candidates, disseminating lies and meddling with public affairs.
During the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, a former FBI special agent specializing in terrorism and online influence, Clinton Watts, told investigators that Russian bots still tweet “heavily” at the notably gullible President Trump when they know he is online in order to “push conspiracy theories.”
Committee Chairman Richard Burr, meanwhile, warned that other nations should also brace themselves for outside interference, as bots were becoming more rogue and shameless in their attempts to sway elections in Europe.
“We feel part of our responsibility is to educate the world” he said.
A CBS poll published on Wednesday revealed that half of Americans now believe the Russians interfered in the election to help Donald Trump win.
