26 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
Our responses to disinformation may amplify the fears that it means to stoke.
ANNALS OFPOLITICS
BELIEVE IT OR NOT
How concerned should we be about online Russian manipulations?
BYJOSHUAYAFFA
ILLUSTRATION BY WENKAI MAO
I
n the summer of 2017, Nina Janko-
wicz, a twenty-eight-year-old Amer-
ican, was working in Kyiv as a commu-
nications adviser to Ukraine’s foreign
ministry as part of a yearlong Fulbright
fellowship. Jankowicz had an interest
in digital diplomacy and in countering
disinformation that was matched by a
passion for musical theatre: in Wash-
ington, D.C., where she lived for sev-
eral years before moving to Ukraine,
she played Sally in “You’re a Good Man,
Charlie Brown” and Audrey in “Little
Shop of Horrors.”
So when she came across a Face-
book page for a White House protest
that called on “resistance activists, show-
tune lovers, and karaoke fans,” her cu-
riosity was piqued. She later spoke with
Ryan Clayton, a progressive organizer
involved in the protest. On July 4th, a
man dressed in a waistcoat and a tri-
cornered hat kicked things off. “Hear
ye, hear ye, citizens,” he said, ringing a
bell. “Resist the rule of the treasonous
King Donald!” Protesters waving Amer-
ican flags performed musical numbers
calling for Trump’s impeachment, in-
cluding “Do You Hear the People Sing?,”
the anthem from “Les Misérables.”
Clayton told Jankowicz that he was
impressed with the turnout. He sus-
pected that it had something to do with
a last-minute Facebook message from
a user named Helen Christopherson,
who offered to pitch in cash to buy ads
in exchange for administrator access
to the event page. “I got like $80 on my
ad account so we can reach like 10000
people in DC or so,” the message read.
“That would be Massive!” In fact, Chris-
topherson’s ad spend reached as many
as fifty-eight thousand people in the
D.C. area.
It wasn’t until October of the follow-
ing year that Jankowicz began to con-
sider how the success of the protest
might fit into a broader pattern. As part
of congressional inquiries into Russian
interference in the 2016 Presidential
election, Democrats on the House In-
telligence Committee made public a
number of ad purchases by the Inter-
net Research Agency, the so-called “troll
factory” in St. Petersburg. The I.R.A.
was staffed by hundreds of young Rus-
sians who carried out social-media cam-
paigns under false identities. “Helen
Christopherson” was a Facebook alias
used by one of them. In “How to Lose
the Information War,” a persuasive new
book on disinformation as a geopolit-
ical strategy, Jankowicz writes, “In an
entirely unexpected collision of my two
great loves, it seemed that Russia had
weaponized show tunes.”
The I.R.A. was financed by Yevgeny
Prigozhin, a businessman who has pros-
pered by carrying out unsavory tasks that
the Kremlin wants done but prefers not
to do itself, like hiring Internet trolls or
deploying mercenary soldiers. (In the
early two-thousands, his catering com-
pany hosted official dinners, earning him
the nickname Putin’s Chef.) According
to the Mueller report, released in April,
2019, I.R.A.-created groups and accounts
“reached tens of millions of U.S. per-
sons.” Belting out show tunes in front
of the White House was perhaps more
comedic than subversive, but it’s a tell-
ing example of the I.R.A.’s modus ope-
randi: the troll factory found “authentic,
local voices,” as Jankowicz puts it, to fur-
ther the Russian state’s “goal of foment-
ing large-scale distrust in government
and democracy.”
Since the 2016 election, the spectre
of Russia’s online meddling has become
amplified by our own anxiety. In “The
Folly and the Glory,” Tim Weiner, the
author of histories of the C.I.A. and
the F.B.I., argues that Russia “deployed
