Molly McKew, a longtime adviser to former Soviet republics on information warfare, has been arguing for years that Russia was at war with the West and that the primary battlefield was the information space and cyberspace
. The assumption now is that if it is a Russian thing, it is a Russian thing and we’re going to treat it as a state action that we need to counter, particularly in a time of war.Do you give credence to the idea that Putin has held cyberattacks back as a deterrent to greater American involvement in Ukraine?It definitely could be. But I think I don’t think cyber is something Putin actually understands in great detail or spends a lot of time thinking about.
Those of us who work on this stuff have been trying to highlight frustration with the decisions that the Obama administration was making in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The best thing you could do about the Russian election interference is just tell people that it’s happening, because it takes away so much of the power of disinformation. By keeping it secret, it actually made the impact a lot worse.
Authority matters. Having authority amplified through media can effectively defuse the attempted rumor-based conspiracies on the internet. There’s a reason that Russians and others on the far right and the far left spend so much effort trying to keep their big verified, established accounts. Those matter as hubs of distribution. The more of those you can take off the board, the better.
There’s a lot of this in the United States, certainly as things have gotten wackier and crazier. So there’s plenty going on, and I feel like the Russians understand that. The past decade or so, from 2011 to 2021, will have been this strange anomaly in history in terms of how online disinformation works with very little observation, right? And very little control. And that will change. But whether that changes enough or fast enough, I don’t know.
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