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POLITICSgovernment,” says Watts. A Joe Biden administra-
tion, he says, is far more likely to inflict sanctions
on Russia than Trump ever was.
Russia can afford to lie low because Trump and
the Republicans require less help spewing the false,
inflammatory accusations needed to stoke fear and
anger, says Watts. “The American-made disinforma-
tion now is voluminous,” he says. “All the Russians
have to do is look for opportunities to amplify it.”
Disinformation played a big role in the 2016
election and is a major reason many Americans—
mostly Democrats—felt that the election wasn’t
entirely legitimate. This year the level of disinfor-
mation could be as bad or worse. Facebook recently
took down 100 Trump-supporting political disin-
formation accounts linked to just one source: con-
victed Trump ally Roger Stone. There are probably
a lot more where that came from. Facebook has
been reluctant to take action against phony politi-
cal posts, leaving the platform rife with bogus “evi-
dence” of Joe Biden’s dementia and corruption, and
wild conspiracy theories linking Biden and other
Democrats to child-sex rings and world takeovers.
“They don’t want to be regulated, so they pander to
the White House,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said
of Facebook in May.
Stoking up the base with scary tales isn’t just effec-
tive campaigning. It has also become good business
for a slew of fly-by-night U.S. entrepreneurs who
operate political-disinformation websites. “It’s easy
and profitable to put up a series of websites, load
them with politically sensitive, fallacious informa-
tion, drive traffic there and make money off of pay-
per-click ads,” says Cindy Otis, a former C.I.A. analyst
who specializes in disinformation, and author of
the forthcoming book True or False: A CIA Analyst’s
Guide to Spotting Fake News. (Feiwel & Friends).
The coming avalanche of political disinformation
is going to have a bigger effect on this election than
on past contests, says Wharton’s Yildirim. That’s
because the pandemic is shutting down other key
types of campaigning while driving up our depen-
dence on social media and other online sources of
information. “Typically in an election year, there’s a
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