As the November Election Approaches, Are Newsrooms Ready for Guccifer 3.0?

https://niemanreports.org/articles/as-the-november-election-approaches-are-newsrooms-ready-for-guccifer-3-0/

Excerpt:

As experts and lawmakers have unraveled the web of deception Moscow spun around the 2016 election and continues to spin around this year’s vote, they have revealed a wide range of techniques Russia and others have used to exploit the credibility of journalists in the U.S. and other democracies. These included creating trolls, whose social media posts were quoted in dozens of news outlets and erroneously held up as authentic American voices; fabricating freelance “journalists” who seeded Russian narratives into a variety of publications worldwide in a bid to launder those narratives and give them greater credibility; offering journalists hacked emails from the World Anti-Doping Agency in a bid to frame what the hackers called “Anglo-Saxon nations” as power-hungry competitors using clean sport as a pretext for banning Russia from the 2018 Olympic Games; and leaking documents on everything from U.S. politics to secret U.K.-U.S. trade talks, resulting in a flurry of coverage about Russia’s chosen topics on the eve of its adversaries’ national elections.

The documents from the U.K.-U.S. trade talks, which surfaced in the run-up to Britain’s December 2019 election, were leaked by a long-running Russian information campaign called Secondary Infektion — a reference to a Cold War disinformation campaign run by the KGB that aimed to spread the belief that the U.S. government had purposely created HIV/AIDS — whose reach was little understood until very recently. In a June report, top social media analysis firm Graphika revealed for the first time the extent of the operation, which published more than 2,500 pieces of content across 300 platforms from 2014 to 2020, much of it designed to exacerbate tensions between the U.S. and its allies. The operation relied heavily on forged documents, impersonating everyone from prominent U.S. senators to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

To be sure, the CIA has meddled in many countries’ domestic politics, from orchestrating the 1953 coup d’état that ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister to planting stories in the Nicaraguan press that undermined the Sandinista government leading up to the 1990 election, paving the way for the opposition’s victory. Scholars and former agents argue, however, that interventions designed to support democratic opposition groups in their fight against authoritarianism are not morally equivalent to the foreign meddling of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sought to boost Russia’s power by undermining his opponents at home and abroad — and just secured the public’s support to stay in office until 2036.

Some have criticized journalists for being too quick suspect a Russian boogeymen is lurking behind every tweet, thereby exaggerating the influence of foreign disinformation campaigns and absolving elected officials, journalists, and voters of responsibility for the course of American politics. But the point is not that Russia has swept in and begun playing Americans like so many marionettes against their better judgment. Rather, their meddling has cast a fog over American politics and raised doubts about whether the democratic system can be trusted to work properly. Seen in this light, journalists’ suspicions are proof of the efficacy of Russia’s strategy, which is now yielding dividends far beyond the initial investment.