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Russia didn’t have to lift a finger.
In the weeks leading up to the US presidential elections, federal authorities warned that Russia or other foreign countries could spread false information about the results to discredit the legitimacy of the result.
Susan Walsh / AP
Donald Trump arrives to speak at a press conference in the White House meeting room in Washington.
It turns out that the loudest megaphone for that message belonged not to Russia but to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who has announced a storm of completely discredited claims to proclaim that he, and not President-elect Joe Biden, was the rightful winner. .
The resulting chaos is consistent with the long-standing Russian interests of sowing discord in the United States and undermining the country’s democratic foundations and its position on the world stage.
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If the 2016 US elections raised concerns about foreign interference in US politics, the 2020 contest shows how Americans themselves and their leaders can be a powerful source of misinformation without other governments even having to do the job.
“For quite some time at this point, the Kremlin has essentially been able to use and amplify the content, the false, misleading and sensationalist, politically divisive content generated by political officials and the Americans themselves” instead of creating its own narratives and content, he said. former CIA officer Cindy Otis, Alethea Group vice president of analytics, who tracks disinformation.
American officials had been on high alert for foreign interference prior to November 3, especially after a presidential election four years earlier in which Russian intelligence officials hacked Democratic emails and Russian troll farms used social media to influence. in public opinion.
Public service announcements by the FBI and the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security warned of ways in which Russia or other countries could interfere again, even creating or altering post-election websites to spread false information about the results “on an attempt to discredit the election process and undermine confidence in American democratic institutions. “
Yet many of the false claims about voting, elections, and candidates in the months and weeks leading up to the elections, and in the days after, originated not from foreign actors eager to destabilize the United States, but rather from domestic groups. and Trump himself.
Nicole hester
Donald Trump supporters watch a video during a campaign event in Lansing, Michigan.
“Most of this is domestic,” said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a member of the Election Integrity Partnership, a group of leading disinformation experts who studied online disinformation related to the 2020 elections.
Stamos said that while there were some small indications of foreign interference on social media, it didn’t amount to “nothing that has been that interesting” compared to the avalanche of claims shared by Americans themselves.
Although Russian hackers had targeted state and local networks in the weeks leading up to the US elections, Election Day came and went without the dreaded attacks on voting infrastructure, and federal officials and other experts have said that there is no evidence that the voting systems were compromised or that the votes were compromised. lost or changed.
That is not to say that Russia was completely silent during the elections, or immediately afterwards. For example, English language websites that the US government has linked to Russia have expanded stories suggesting voting problems or fraud.
Intelligence officials warned in August that Russia was engaged in a concerted effort to discredit Biden and pointed to a Ukrainian MP who met with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani has been instrumental in Trump’s election attacks, arguing a court case in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and appearing at a press conference Thursday that was riddled with discredited claims, including a fictitious story that a server hosting evidence of wrongdoing in the vote was in Germany.
Jacquelyn Martin / AP
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.
Trump retweeted a post criticizing the media for not covering the press conference more aggressively. More broadly, it has helped drive the spread of inaccurate information through a disinformation machine that relies on social media, conservative radio and television media, and the amplifying power of its millions of followers.
Zignal Labs, a San Francisco media intelligence firm, identified and tracked millions of social media posts about voting by mail in the months leading up to the election and found large spikes in the immediate aftermath of several of Trump’s tweets.
One example: On July 30, Trump tweeted misinformation about mail ballots on three separate occasions, including the statement without evidence that mail ballots would be an “easy way” for foreign adversaries to interfere, calling the process a Inaccurate and fraudulent and repeating a false distinction that absent ballots are somewhat safer than mail-in ballots when both are treated the same.
Together, those three tweets were posted by other users more than 100,000 times and liked more than 430,000 times, which led to the spread of misinformation on mail-in ballots that day and helped Trump dominate the online discussion throughout. a week, according to Zignal’s analysis.
Many of the false claims seen on Election Day originated from American voters themselves, whose posts about unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud were later forwarded to millions more by Trump allies. That amplification allows isolated or misleading claims to spread more widely.
Jacquelyn Martin / AP
Supporters of US President Donald Trump listen to a speaker during a pro-Trump march in Washington.
“Grassroots activity is not talked about as much anymore,” Stamos said. “You’re talking about top-down activity that is facilitated by the ability of these people to create these audiences.”
Researchers at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University analyzed social media posts and news about voter fraud and found that “Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists. “
One of the researchers, Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler, said that when his team observed spikes in online conversations about voter fraud, they almost always followed a comment from Trump or his top allies.
Justin Levitt, an electoral law expert at Loyola Law School, said that, unlike four years ago, “now we don’t need a foreign military unit to attack us. We have a CEO who does exactly that ”and works to spread disinformation.
“It is even more dangerous this time,” he added, “than in 2016.”
Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.
