Russia: If at first you succeed, try, try again F
ollowing their alleged success in getting Donald J. Trump elected president of the United States, the Russians are said to be using their tried-anduntrue gimmicks to interfere in America’s next presidential election and, possibly, another chilling system.
Mark Scott, writing for Politico, said the Russian operatives are using a sneakier, more sophisticated version of their 2016 playbook to undermine the US presidential election on Nov. 3.
Kremlin-backed operatives are flooding social media with fake accounts and stoking racial divisions around topics like Black Lives Matter.
With millions of US readers online, articles in state-owned Russian media seek to damage Joe Biden’s appeal among progressives and echo President Donald Trump’s unsupported claims about voting fraud.
Microsoft revealed last week, that Russian state-backed hackers are waging cyberattacks against political parties, campaigns, consultants and others tied to the US elections — using more elaborate deceptions than in 2016.
So far, the 2020 race hasn’t featured any obvious repeats of the mass hacking and dumping of confidential documents that undermined Hillary Clinton at key moments during the campaign four years ago.
US intelligence agencies later blamed that breach on a covert Kremlin effort to torpedo the Democratic nominee and help Trump win.
But security researchers, former intelligence officials and lawmakers now worry that the Russians may still have a hand they haven’t played.
“One thing we know that happened in 2016 was Russia, particularly with misinformation and disinformation, tried to exacerbate those divisions that we see play out in real time in America,” Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) told an audience at a cybersecurity conferenced last week. “I’m very, very concerned in these last 50plus days whether Russia could try to exacerbate those kinds of racial divisions again.”
In some ways, Russia’s job is easier than it was in 2016. American, Chinese and Iranian copycats are now pumping out falsehoods likely to seed the same divisions and doubts about the legitimacy of the election, often mimicking tactics first deployed by the Kremlin.
Scott wrote that the biggest threat this year may be Americans, themselves. Many have embraced a deluge of fringe ideas and misinformation to a degree that may dwarf those foreign efforts.
Extremists in the United States have adopted much of Moscow’s online strategy, including creating fake online personas to pump out falsehoods.
Case in point: The QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges a plot by elite pedophiles and the “deepstate” to overthrow Trump, has gone so mainstream it’s poised to send adherents to Congress.