After our election, the frog bots dispatched to ‘undermine trust, create divisions, and foment chaos’ crossed the Atlantic to plague France.
When Clint Watts, a counterterrorism expert and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about Russia’s propaganda machine, it got me thinking about the messages pushing a toxic and divisive brand of white identity politics during the election. After Nov. 8, they miraculously disappeared. Was this a coincidence?
Although these tweets never changed my political opinions, I found them dispiriting. I had always assumed there was a small percentage of people on the right who held these unseemly views. But—based on what I began seeing during the 2016 election cycle—I had to reassess this estimation. The information coming across my Twitter timeline suggested there were far more of these trolls than I had thought.
The reason, I assumed, was the rise of the “alt-right,” a heretofore anemic movement that even after Trump’s win managed to attract a mere 300 followers to its Washington, D.C., conference.
Maybe this pernicious ideology had lain dormant―unenthused and unexploited―only to be awakened by Donald Trump’s candidacy—and then to recede after his victory.
There seemed to be a perfectly rational reason that Pepe the Frog disappeared from my timeline right after Election Day; in mid-November Twitter purged some high-profile alt-right accounts.
Then I heard Clint Watts on Meet the Press this Sunday, and he said that while we are focused on hacking and leaking, what Russia really did was to “create information nuclear weapons” that were spread over social media to “undermine trust, create divisions, and foment chaos.” This involved the use of bots, he said, “to create what look like armies of Americans.”
“It wasn’t till 2015 they really turned towards the U.S. election,” Watts explained.
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Therein lies the ultimate irony. Whether it was cable TV covering Trump rallies live for the ratings, websites operating as “useful idiots” by posting fake news for clickbait, or Twitter declining to take the issue of bots as seriously as they should, all of these decisions make sense in the context of the media’s profit motive. America spent decades battling the Soviet Union, in part to preserve free expression and capitalism.
Now, employing a bit of jiujitsu, Russia is turning both against us to undermine our faith in democracy.
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Great write-up by @mattklewis. Anyone who tangled with Russia's trolls will appreciate this piece: https://t.co/1sHMfPmlN5 h/t @hotairblog
— Brad Thor (@BradThor) April 5, 2017
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