How Russia Found a Disinformation Haven in America

Rawi Abdelal, Galit Goldstein

Security, Americas

There is no good solution to the election-meddling efforts foreign countries are making via social-media platforms. Policymakers should expect that tech sector regulatory proposals will be far from adequate.

Americans continue to discuss Russia’s information operations efforts in the wrong way. We have wasted time debating whether “Russia” or “Russians”—the government or government-connected individuals—meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Mueller Report definitively established that the Russians, both through the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and the Internet Research Agency (IRA), undertook information operations campaigns. This has been reasonably clear for a long time—even when excluding evidence put forward by government sources, for the benefit of the paranoid. Some on America’s Left and in the Center have been unable to drop the idea that President Donald Trump could not have won without foreign help. Likewise, the American Right has been unable to drop the idea that there is a “deep state” Leftist media conspiracy bent on undermining a democratically elected president. And for now, we will leave aside critiquing the collective shock that foreign “meddling” could influence elections in the United States, a nation that has worked to promote its interests, in small or large ways, in many elections around the world—including every election conducted in post–Soviet Russia.

Framing the disinformation issue through this debate misses the point. The goal of the information operations campaigns was not simply to elect Donald Trump president. Nor was it only to polarize American politics further. The point was, rather, to continue undermining America’s ability to agree on the true and not-true.

Russia’s strategy hinged on the fact that it is nearly impossible for people stuck in alternate realities with competing, incompatible truth claims to undertake civil discourse. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her colleagues did not, in fact, organize a pedophilic, Satanic, human trafficking operation in the basement of a DC pizza parlor. Trump did not, in fact, conspire with the Kremlin to deliver an unexpected electoral result because he had been compromised by the video capture of salacious activities in Moscow hotel rooms. Things were much simpler than that. And yet, one can find people on either end of the political spectrum who are still convinced that these false stories are true. It is difficult for these Americans to engage in rational conversation together.

How Americans Earned the Right to Their Own Facts