Russian Trolling and US Propaganda

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.

and

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.

and

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.

and

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.

A Healthy Attitude in a Dying Empire

I've been dismayed by the recent events in Ukraine, where I believe the United States is in the process of getting outsmarted once again by Russia.  As a U.S. citizen, this is disturbing and I want to shout out our folly to all my friends and family and community.  But that would jeopardize many of my personal relationships, and I've been persuaded by my friend Steve Randy Waldman to pursue a more positive and focused path -- Dreams and kindness are all we have: 

Nothing is broken in the world without something else being born. Any creature’s death at the very least yields a corpse, which yields succor for some other’s hungry mouth, or soil upon which new life may grow. If we do slip the chain of our outworn institutions, perhaps it triggers civil war, famine, holocaust, or autocracy. But it is also possible that we jump to something hopeful, a revision of our constitutional order that is more capable, more democratic, both...

Much of what I do as a writer is propose speculative blue-sky social arrangements, on the theory that with the passage of time or in a time of crisis things that once seemed ridiculous or unthinkable become possible, even inevitable. Please consider joining me. It’s fun! There has never been a better time to imagine and promote any of the huge variety of arrangements that would be more virtuous and functional than our own, but that for reasons of practicality and inertia seem unachievable. We need to build a portfolio of dreams, each one unlikely, but from which some few will perhaps draw us away from cataclysm and destruction as familiarities unravel...

Unmediated, outside of the temptations of commerce, the humans are mostly remarkably good to one another. It’s people being awful that goes viral on the apps, but those videos are absurdly unrepresentative. When our imaginations and conversations are dominated by salacious, mediated events, we become tempted to override our own gentleness, to prosecute cruelties in the service of an imagined cause with little connection to actual humans here and now. The result is rarely just. If we do start killing one another en masse, the killers will be electric with self-righteousness. Don’t be. Be kind.

So that's my message today.  Thanks Steve! 

Men's Groups, Proud Boys, & Demented Warmongers

I'm rereading the article on the extreme men's group.  A few excerpts:

Most men suffer in silence, Keuilian wrote, because they feel disconnected from their larger purpose in life. They gorge themselves on distraction: TV, social media, food, booze, pornography. These vices lead men further astray, jeopardizing their income, marriage, family, and sense of self-worth....  Schmidt is a work in progress, he knows that. Thanks to The Project, he’s trying. But if not for meeting these men, he swears, he’d still be shuffling through life like a zombie, rotting away, dead inside and out. Now he acts like a real man, driven, strong, family-oriented, just like The Project leaders he admires....   Earlier this year, British researchers analyzed data from the 2018 BBC Loneliness Experiment, a survey of 55,000 people around the globe, and discovered that young men living in individualistic cultures were those most vulnerable to loneliness. Likewise, a 2017 study reported that young men aged 18 to 30 from the US, UK, and Mexico said that ideally they’d like to spend most of their time with friends or a romantic partner, but in actuality, the majority spent their free time on their own. When feeling sad or depressed, men from the study most often sought help from their mother or romantic partner...  Suddenly, I understood what Keith Schmidt and all the other Project graduates kept telling me about brotherhood.

“True masculinity is showing love, showing compassion, showing all these things that are traditionally not spoken of as masculinity,” Schmidt told me. “And I think that scares some people.” 

So this seems healthy (if overly expensive).  I'd worry more if the men were finding community via the demonization of others.  

I don't know much about Proud Boys -- All the articles on the web seem to be warning that they are bad.  I can't find anything from the Proud Boys themselves.  They seem to be thoroughly marginalized in our culture. From the NYTimes 9/25/2021:

 As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.

The recipient was his F.B.I. handler...  As more and more Proud Boys have been arrested in connection with the attack, the group has been increasingly plunged into an atmosphere of suspicion about the presence of informants in their ranks.  The dark mood started three weeks after the riot when it suddenly emerged that Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader, had himself worked as a F.B.I. informant well before he joined the Proud Boys.

 

So I think we can rest easy about the possibility of groups like Proud Boys taking over our government.

I do worry about a bi-partisan propaganda campaign aimed at demonizing Russia. My view is that the same group that led us into the disaster in Iraq in 2003 (and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, etc.) is calling the shots and demonizing anyone who speaks out against their latest demented warmongering.  We're rushing headlong into another losing war.  I'm trying to figure out how I should deal with this unpleasant situation, but haven't yet had time to write down my thoughts.