the times | Tuesday July 21 2020 1GM 29Comment
Our weird politics can’t all be blamed on Russia
It’s obviously important to root out meddling foreign powers but pointing the finger at villains won’t turn back the clock
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826“Russian interference in Brexit has
become a mythical mantra for
hardcore Remainers as they sought
to try to discredit the result in any
way they could.” It may be painful
but recalcitrant Remainers should
take the point. Short perhaps of
identifying a few million fabricated
voters, there is no amount of
meddling or hacking or outright
cheating by Russia or anybody else
that will ever put the clock back.
Brexiteers, meanwhile, should
endeavour not to use winning as an
excuse to close their eyes. The
response of Alyn Smith, the SNP’s
foreign affairs spokesman, is
instructive, particularly as it seems
likely that any independence
referendum meddling veered
towards the cybernattish. In the
context of everything known to have
been happening elsewhere, he said,
“it would be absurd if Scottish
discourse was not being influenced
by external forces”.
With activists seeing Reds under
their beds, and rivals acting like bots
for fun, and security guards acting
the same because they can’t help it,
real malign interference will always
be hard to spot. And afterwards,
when political battles have been won
or lost, it will always be perilously
hard to make the case that it even
mattered. That only goes to show,
though, why it matters so much.able to turn it all off and go back.
Obviously, this is nonsense. For
one thing, while it is possible to
influence people, it is not possible to
uninfluence them. Change a voter’s
mind and their mind is changed.
Sure, perhaps the game was rigged.
Perhaps a campaign spent more
targeting that voter than the rules
allowed, or perhaps hacked data was
used, or perhaps the government
sent them an iffy leaflet, or perhaps a
high proportion of the stories they
saw retweeted were retweeted by
somebody called Dmitri sitting in an
office block in St Petersburg.
Still, so what? Whatever the
reason, those voters now think what
they think, and if you ask them the
same question again they’ll give you
the same answer. There is no going
back. It’s not just that the damage
has been done. It’s more that if it was
done to you then it feels both
offensive and ludicrous for anybody
to suggest it was even damage at all.
Witness, for example, the Brexiteer
Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen,
who this weekend said in response to
the report he hasn’t read yet: “Too
often we have seen that Remainers
cannot accept defeat and have
repeatedly used any means possible
to attempt to undermine and
discredit the result.” Or, if you prefer,
try the lovely Leave.EU backer and
noted Russophile Arron Banks:subversion of our institutions and
processes”.
Yet it must also be a report about
the ease with which shadowy voices
swoop into our national
conversation, and about successive
governments’ failure to care. Last
week, Dominic Raab declared that
Russia had tried to help Jeremy
Corbyn during the 2019 election by
anonymously pushing out leaked
documents about Brexit negotiations.
It is Johnson, not Corbyn, who ought
to be embarrassed about that. He’s
the one who at the time opted not to
release a report about exactly that.If it feels like a damp squib, the
main reason will be because the
expectations are so high. You could
feel it this weekend, as speculative
stories suggested that we were soon
to learn definitively of Russian
efforts in all sorts of areas. As if, were
it not for Vladimir Putin, the Age of
Quite Alarming Populism wouldn’t
have happened, and we’d just have
had Sir Paul McCartney playing Hey
Jude at the 2012 Olympics opening
ceremony for ever. And as if, when
this becomes proven, we’ll just beB
ack in the 2019 election,
when Brexit was still an issue
and pandemics weren’t, and
the prime minister could still
make a whole day’s headlines
by hiding in a fridge, a few eagle-eyed
hacks and enthusiasts reckoned
they’d uncovered a conspiracy. On
Facebook, you see, user replies to
posts by the Conservative Party had
gone decidedly fishy.
At first, scores of them just said
“brilliant Boris”, with startling, if
suspiciously bland, unanimity. Then,
in waves, they started to look like
programming gone wrong, saying
things such as “//brilliant”
&name=”Boris”. code:syntatx/error/”.
There were hundreds of them,
scrolling down the page, like some
mad robot having a fit.
“Haha!” some people thought. “It’s
Dominic Cummings! Or the Russians!
Or both! Their evil plan to mislead
the public by means of automated
internet bots has been revealed!”
Only, it wasn’t. Instead, thephenomenon was traced back to
pro-Johnson humans who were,
individually but together, simply
pretending to sound like pro-Johnson
bots for fun. Because, as one post on
the Facebook page Fight4Brexit put
it, “it’s driving Remainers crazy”.
We all know by now that
automated internet voices — bots —
can sound like people. For those who
research online disinformation,
though, a greater problem can be the
extent to which people sometimes
sound like bots. Usually, they don’t
even mean to. Some call this the “bot
or pensioner” conundrum, which is
funny, if not all that fair on some
pensioners. In 2017, one news website
confidently identified a Twitter user
called @Didgery77332 as a Russian
bot on the basis of its all-day
tweeting, “horrific use of English”
and “pro-Russian posture”. Further
investigation revealed a bored
security guard in Glasgow who just
wasn’t very good at spelling.
This week, probably, the
government will finally publish the
intelligence and security committee’s
report into Russian interference in
British democracy, which has been
sitting neglected in a drawer since
March last year. It will, of course, be
about more than just bots and the
internet. Edward Lucas, who
contributed, wrote on these pages
yesterday about “the penetration andBrexiteers shouldn’t use
winning as an excuse
to close their eyes
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