After a botched assassination attempt of Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, the Kremlin spread dozens of false stories in a highly coordinated effort to sow confusion. It worked.
“Intelligence agencies have tracked at least a half-dozen such distortion campaigns since 2014, each aimed, officials say, at undermining Western and international investigative bodies and making it harder for ordinary citizens to separate fact from falsehood. They say such disinformation operations are now an integral part of Russia’s arsenal — both foreign policy tool and asymmetrical weapon, one that Western institutions and technology companies are struggling to counter. ‘Dismissing it as fake news misses the point,’ said a Western security official who requested anonymity in discussing ongoing investigations into the Russian campaign. ‘It’s about undermining key pillars of democracy and the rule of law.’ ...
“The disinformation campaigns now emanating from Russia are of a different breed, said intelligence officials and analysts. Engineered for the social media age, they fling up swarms of falsehoods, concocted theories and red herrings, intended not so much to persuade people but to bewilder them. ‘The mission seems to be to confuse, to muddy the waters,’ said Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian-television producer and author of ‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a memoir that describes the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate the news. The ultimate aim, he said, is to foster an environment in which ‘people begin giving up on the facts.’ ...
“There is a daily churn of false or distorted reports that seem designed to exploit the divisions in Western society and politics, especially on issues such as race, violence and sexual rights, and that are pushed by droves of operatives posing as ordinary citizens on social media accounts. While many of the individual stories are easily debunked, the campaigns have had a discernible impact, as measured by opinion polls and, occasionally, public statements by Western politicians casting doubt on the findings of the intelligence agencies of their own governments. ... Results such as these have encouraged what private groups say is a massive and ever-increasing investment by Moscow, which has placed numerous news outlets fully or partly on its payroll and operates at least one troll factory in which scores of employees disseminate pro-Kremlin messages using thousands of fake social media accounts. ...
“‘The strategy is to spread as many versions of events as possible and don’t worry that they sometimes contradict themselves,’ [former E.U. investigator Jakub] Kalensky said. ‘It’s not the purpose to persuade someone with one version of events. The goal for Russia is achieve a state in which the average media consumer says, “There are too many versions of events, and I’ll never know the truth.”’”
In case you were wondering: Yes, Trump has been a big help:
“Just as often, the stream flows in the opposite direction. False stories that first appear on obscure conservative news sites become fodder for Russian TV talk shows. Since the start of the Trump era, Russian channels regularly echo the U.S. president’s allegations about an American ‘deep state’ and his depictions of the mainstream media as ‘fake news.’ ... ‘As for who to believe, who you can’t believe, can you believe at all?” [Vladimir] Putin mused, before answering his own questions: ‘You can’t believe anyone.’”
