THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 27
the power of social media to transform
the politics of the United States.” By way
of illustration, Weiner discusses a con-
spiracy theory, propagated by the I.R.A.
in 2015, that U.S. military exercises in
Texas that year were part of an Obama
Administration plot to confiscate guns
in the state. As the meme circulated,
the governor of Texas spoke ominously
of the exercises; so did Senator Ted
Cruz. “The IRA had gotten into the
heads of some powerful politicians—
and millions of voters,” Weiner writes.
He warns that the success of Russia’s
stealth and subversion “may determine
if America will endure.”
The challenge in making sense of
disinformation operations is disentan-
gling intent from impact. Prigozhin’s
trolls may have aspired to distort Amer-
ican politics and upend American soci-
ety, but to what extent did they succeed?
The 2016 theft of Democratic National
Committee e-mails by Russian mili-
tary-intelligence hackers, and their sub-
sequent dissemination via WikiLeaks,
seem to have had an effect on the elec-
torate, even if that effect is hard to mea-
sure. What I.R.A. trolls managed to
achieve, however, was more diffuse, and
considerably less significant. In 2016,
they inflamed hot spots of American
discourse, then ran away when the fire
began; their priority appeared to be scor-
ing points with bosses and paymasters
in Russia as much as influencing actual
votes in the United States. Russian dis-
information—and the cynical, distorted
world view it entrains—is a problem,
but the nature of the problem may not
be quite what we imagine.
Jankowicz describes the manic hunt
for inauthentic online activity as a game
of whack-a-troll. Although taking down
fake accounts and fact-checking their
content is basic online hygiene, the effect
can be limited. A 2017 Yale study found
that labelling Facebook content “dis-
puted” increased the share of users who
judged it to be false by less than four per
cent. And, in focussing on the tactics of
the aggressors, we may be overlooking
our weaknesses as victims. “Unless we
mitigate our own political polarization,
our own internal issues, we will continue
to be an easy target for any malign actor,”
Jankowicz writes. When the American
public is full of fear, hate, distrust, and
exhaustion, it’s not hard for some trolls—
whether in St. Petersburg or in the White
House—to stir up those emotions into
something even more poisonous.W
hat if, to borrow an old horror-
movie trope, the call is coming
from inside the house? Not long ago, I
spoke with Aric Toler, a researcher at
Bellingcat, an investigative outlet that
tracks Russian intelligence operations.
Bellingcat identified the Russian mili-
tary unit that provided the anti-aircraft
missile launcher that downed Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, in 2014,
and uncovered the identities of the Rus-
sian operatives who poisoned Sergei Skri-
pal, a former Russian spy, in 2018. Toler
is worried that Americans’ sense of danger
has been misdirected. In April, in a Bell-
ingcat column titled “How (Not) to Re-
port on Russian Disinformation,” Toler
took issue with a piece in the Times that
had compiled a number of examples to
show how “Putin has spread misinfor-
mation on issues of personal health for
more than a decade.” The article devoted
several paragraphs to an obscure Web
site called the Russophile, which, Toler
pointed out, has virtually no audience.
“It’s an issue of scale,” he told me. Rus-
sian-produced disinformation certainly
exists; this spring, at the outset of the
COVID-19 pandemic, Russia-linked social-
media accounts promoted a theory that
the virus was a bioweapon invented by
the U.S. Army in order to damage China.
But compared with, say, Fox News pundits
like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity,
let alone Trump himself, the perceived
menace of Russian trolls far outweighs
their actual reach. How audible, let alone
consequential, are Russian efforts to boost
claims that mail-in voting leads to fraud
when the President regularly blares the
thesis at deafening volumes?
“The effect of one Trump press con-
ference or tweet in shaping opinions,
even behaviors, can be monumental,”
Toler said. In April, after Trump sug-
gested that disinfectant could be injected
into the body to treat covid-19, health
officials in several states reported spikes
in calls to poison-control hotlines. A
single such center in North Texas re-
ported receiving nearly fifty calls about
bleach ingestion in the first three weeks
of August alone. “The most a few thou-
sand Russian-directed bot accounts
might achieve,” Toler added, “is to get aTwitter hashtag trending for a few hours.”
There’s nothing inherently foreign
about the rise and spread of disinforma-
tion. Using the Russian word dezinfor-
matsia doesn’t make the practice any
different from homegrown falsehoods
spread online by Americans targeting
other Americans. What else to call the
hoax circulated by members of a Face-
book group in Klamath Falls, Oregon, a
few days after the police killing of George
Floyd? They warned that Antifa activists
were about to descend on the town, and
two hundred people came out with guns
and bulletproof vests to do battle with
what turned out to be a phantom threat.
In July, the Times, citing U.S. intelli-
gence assessments, reported that a num-
ber of Russia-linked Web sites had been
pushing misleading or false stories about
the coronavirus. The three sites in ques-
tion had a few thousand online follow-
ers among them—not wholly inconse-
quential, but crickets compared with
fourteen million views for a video that
Trump retweeted the day the Times ran
its story. In the video, a number of fringe
doctors standing on the steps of the Su-
preme Court make the false claim that
neither masks nor shutdowns are needed
to fight the pandemic. If Russian oper-
atives had tried to insert such a meme
into the American discourse, there would
be rightful outrage over how Putin was
trying to kill us.
In many cases, the media response to
Russian accounts has the effect of mag-
nifying their reach far beyond anything
they could achieve by themselves. One
tweet cited by the Times in April has
amassed a grand total of one retweet and
two likes. As Toler put it, “The tiny whim-
per of disinformation is transformed into
something far louder and more danger-
ous.” And instilling that sense of danger
is precisely the goal of disinformation.
Media organizations are not the only
culprits when it comes to focussing on
the wrong threat, or inflating the dan-
ger such threats pose. In early June, amid
the rise of nationwide protests after
George Floyd’s death, Susan Rice, the
former U.N. Ambassador and national-
security adviser in the Obama Admin-
istration, spoke on CNN about her sus-
picions that “foreign actors” were trying
to hijack the protests to increase tensions,
adding, “This is right out of the Russian
playbook.” The appeal of the narrative