There is a lot to digest with regard to information sent to me by a friend regarding Russia's trolling in social media. I just finished reading the NY Times piece by Adrian Chen written in 2015. That doesn't mention Trump at all but instead describes one side of an apparent propaganda war between the U.S. and Russia. I found it quite interesting.
In response, for now, I'll just provide a couple of points regarding my understanding of the situation with regard to Trump and Russia that are related to the Russian IRA and the NY Times reporting on Russiagate.
Excerpting The New York Times’ Insidious Ongoing Disinformation Campaign on Russia & Elections, by Gareth Porter in Consortium News, 3/17/2020:
The Times service to the narrative was introduced by its February 2017 story headlined, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence.” We now know from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign that the only campaign aide who had contacts with Russian intelligence officials was Carter Page, and those had taken place years before in the context of Page’s reporting them to the CIA. The Horowitz report revealed that FBI officials had hidden that fact from the FISA Court to justify its request for surveillance of Page.
But the Times coverage of the Horowitz report in December 2019 failed to acknowledge that the calumny about Page’s Russian intelligence contacts, which it had published without question in 2017, had been an FBI deception.
Two more Times Russiagate stories in 2018 and 2019 featured spectacular claims that proved on closer examination to be grotesque distortions of fact. In September 2018 a 10,000-word story by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti sought to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.
But that turned to be an outrageously deceptive claim, because Shane and Mazzetti failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts.
Even putting aside the complete absence of a Kremlin role, the case that the Russian government sought to influence the U.S. election via a social media campaign is hard to grasp given how minuscule it was. Mueller says the IRA spent $100,000 between 2015 and 2017. Of that, just $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05% of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined -- which is itself a tiny fraction of the estimated $2 billion spent by the candidates and their supporting PACS.
The Facebook ads placed by a Russian troll farm and released on Wednesday show that the Russian propaganda campaign of 2016 didn’t favor either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, it mocked and goaded America, holding up a distorted but, in the final analysis, remarkably accurate mirror. This directly contradicts previous U.S. intelligence community assessments.
Compare that with the U.S. involvement in Ukraine in 2014:
In 2014 in Ukraine, there was also the circumstantial evidence of NED involvement. Then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation on Dec. 13, 2013, that Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” in other words to pull it away from Russia.
But there was also a smoking gun. It came in the form of the leaked telephone call between Nuland and the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in which they discussed who the new Ukrainian leader would be, weeks before the coup occurred.
If World War III Happens, You Can Thank Russiagate... A delegation of US Senators jetted off to Kiev last month in a show of grandiose solidarity, mirroring a previous trip made in December 2013 by a different group of Senators infamously led by John McCain. That earlier group endured the mild inconvenience of appearing on stage alongside an “opposition leader” who was inordinately preoccupied with the alleged threat of “organized Jewry.” For all the recent domestic frenzy over the claimed scourge of homegrown “Nazis,” most US politicians and think tankers at the time seemed conspicuously blasé about backing a government-toppling initiative largely organized by unabashed sympathizers with the actual, historical Nazis....McCain on that fateful trip was accompanied by Chris Murphy (D-CT) — then a freshman senator who now, eight years later, regularly pontificates as a point-person for the Senate Democrats on foreign policy matters. Undeterred by the embarrassment of the 2013 trip, Murphy lept at the first opportunity to make another high-profile jaunt to Ukraine during the current “crisis.” Included in his 2022 bipartisan delegation was Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who as of December was suggesting the brilliant idea of a nuclear first strike against Russia, as well as conventional US airstrikes and ground troops to “rain destruction on Russian military capability.” This, among other things, raises the question of what exactly it means anymore to “interfere” in foreign countries’ affairs. Because according to the common definition in US parlance, democracy-threatening “interference” can consist of a Russian internet marketing firm dispatching a few absurd Twitter trolls and Facebook memes to mildly toy with voters during election season. But physically going to a conflict hotzone after threatening nuclear annihilation is… par for the course?
Also, it has now been confirmed that the Steele Dossier, which was one of the first and most publicized of the Trump-Russia conspiracy allegations, was produced by agents of the Clinton campaign and then fed to the FBI and mainstream media (MSM). That the Steele Dossier was discredited was recognized by the Mueller commission and the intelligence agencies early on (but not by the MSM and Adam Schiff, Chair of House Intelligence Committee). They then shifted to other justifications for investigating Trump-Russia collusion, all of which I believe are untrue and have been silently recognized as such by the MSM (see Joseph Mifsud - George Papadopoulos, for example, which was the justification for the Mueller investigation after the Steele Dossier collapsed).
I don't doubt that there's a propaganda war ongoing, and that Russians participate vigorously and often twist the truth. Both sides clearly do it, so it's important to take the claims on all sides with a grain of salt, so to speak. Ex-CIA analyst Martin Gurri wrote a book called The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium which describes our predicament with the torrent of information available via the Internet. It's harder to coalesce around a set of shared beliefs when elite narratives can be investigated so easily and questioned so broadly. My personal take is to try to avoid nihilism -- the belief that everyone is corrupt and the truth is not knowable. I'm looking to be constructive.
Update #1 2/28/2022 (same day as original). Found this 2018 MSNBC interview with Adrian Chen noting that IRA influence exaggerated: https://twitter.com/i/status/965960691697049601 Perhaps not equivalent to Pearl Harbor.
Update #2 2/28/2022 Many have been noting how dangerous the Russiagate conspiracy theory was in that it could lead to war with Russia. Advocating cooperation with Russia has been tantamount to treason and demonization by association with Trump.
Update #3 3/3/2022 Further responses to allegations of extraordinary Russian trolling and manipulation of U.S. public opinion:
The Digital Commons study on the Russian Internet Research Agency was authored by New Knowledge. This "cybersecurity firm" has been caught faking Russian disinformation:
New Knowledge publicly stated it was tracking Russian social-media disinformation networks during the 2018 campaign. In fact, it was secretly involved in its own disinformation campaign to influence the outcome of the 2017 Alabama Senate special election. New Knowledge operatives created thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts programmed to follow GOP candidate Roy Moore to make it appear he was backed by Moscow. [ Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on 'Collusion' ]
and
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention. “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.
[ NYTimes - Secret Expermiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics ]
Regarding https://www.propublica.org/
It's account of Russian bots seems to be based upon the Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard. I'm skeptical of the this source based upon the following reports:
In 2017, I reported on a new group that brought together pro-war Democrats, long-time GOP neocons, and high officials of the U.S. security state and called itself the “Alliance for Securing Democracy.” Its Board of Directors and Advisors read like a who's who of D.C. Deep State swampery: “Jake Sullivan (national security adviser to Joe Biden and the Clinton campaign), Mike Morrell (Obama’s acting CIA director), Mike McFaul (Obama’s hawkish ambassador to Russia)" sit alongside “leading neocons such as Mike Chertoff (Bush’s homeland security secretary), Mike Rogers (the far-right, supremely hawkish former congressman who now hosts a right-wing radio show)” and, of course, Kristol himself.
This new group's primary stated goal was greater hostility toward Russia. We will, they said, “develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on Russian and other state actors’ efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions,” and also “work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.”
One of its primary "accomplishments" was the Hamilton 68 dashboard that purported to track how Russia was influencing various journalists and Twitter accounts to disseminate Kremlin propaganda, with plans “to conduct similar analyses for other platforms, including Facebook, Alphabet’s YouTube and Reddit". For a while, this dashboard was a huge success, with corporate news outlets constantly treating it as some sort of scientifically reliable measure to uncover Russian disinformation campaigns and shaping headlines around its claims. As Matt Taibbi put it back then: “More and more often now, the site’s pronouncements turn into front-page headlines.” But eventually, the preposterous fraud of its secret, obviously shoddy methodology was too glaring even for corporate outlets to keep up the scam and they began to renounce it, as I reported in 2018: ...
The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.
But even some of the people who popularized that metric now acknowledge it’s become totally overblown.
“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the narrative “overdone.”
The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.” So, not bots.
We’ll likely never know the contents of the list for sure — because the researchers decline to divulge the identity of who they are monitoring.
So I've now looked at the 3 links you sent. The one I think is accurate is the 2015 NY Times article by Adrian Chen. I can believe that Russians did the things he described (no mention of Trump), though I think we've subsequently learned, the Internet Research Agency was not a Kremlin directed operation, but rather a clickbait firm run by Putin supporters. By 2018, Chen was publicly stating that the influence of the Internet Research Agency had been overstated:
(The IRA) is essentially a social media marketing campaign with 90 people and a couple of million dollars behind it, run by people who have a bare grasp of the English language and not a full understanding of who they're targeting and what they're targeting...
Chen goes on to imply (paraphrasing) that the enormous paranoia in the media about Russian trolls is misguided and it's not that big of a deal.
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