Russian bots: sowing discord in the West?

Vladimir Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee, said Robert Service in The Guardian. The Russian president regards global politics as a “zero-sum contest”: he delights in seeing other nations weakened by internal disagreements and in sowing discord between Western allies. Hence the Kremlin’s meddling in last year’s US election – and, it now appears, in Britain’s decision to leave the EU. Researchers in America and Wales have found evidence that hundreds of Twitter “bots” created by the Internet Research Agency (a Kremlin-backed cyberoffensive unit) tweeted 45,000 times about Brexit in the three days before the vote. Theresa May, in her recent Mansion House speech, accused Putin of planting fake news and attempting to “sow discord in the West”. “I have a very simple message for Russia,” she declared. “We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed.”

“Subversion, disinformation, forgery, political warfare, media manipulation and foreign election rigging.” None of this is new, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. On the contrary, they were all skills taught by the KGB (Putin’s alma mater) during and after the Cold War. Then, as now, the rest of the world often swallowed Russian “fake news” whole. In 1985, for example, the KGB “cooked up” an absurd story that the HIV virus had been created in a US army lab as a weapon. This lie appeared as a major story in 40 countries and on the front page of the Sunday Express. The Kremlin’s intentions were the same as they are now: to undermine democratic trust in Western societies. But now, thanks to social media, it can spread lies further and faster than ever.

Time for a reality check, said Alexey Kovalev in The Guardian. A different research project by an academic at the Oxford Internet Institute found that Kremlin-linked Twitter accounts posted only about 400 Brexit-related tweets – out of a total of 22.6 million on the subject – over the referendum. As she concluded: “That is an infinitesimal fraction.” In any case, a recent poll found that only 1% of Britons use Twitter as their main news source. So, which is more likely to have swung the vote: a Brexit hashtag retweeted by a handful of bots or Leave’s campaign bus? “What’s more divisive, a hundred Russian trolls or a Daily Mail front page?” Brexit was “Britain’s own doing, for better or worse”. Blaming Putin only feeds his ego, making him look like a “super villain”, while undermining democratic trust in Britain. We may as well be working for the Kremlin.