Facebook and Google have been falling over themselves in the past few weeks, trying to figure out how to solve their fake news problem. Now the scope of their challenges are coming into view: a new report from two groups of independent researchers suggests that the two platforms were leveraged by propagandists, funded by the Russian government, to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election by filling Americans’ news feeds with false stories intended to sow distrust of democracy.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute and PropOrNot, a nonpartisan group of researchers, independently provided reports to The Washington Post that detailed a sophisticated, multi-pronged disinformation campaign designed to propagate two specific messages: first, that Hillary Clinton was deathly ill and was secretly plotting to turn America into a plutocracy run by “shadowy financiers”; and second, that the world was on the brink of a war with Russia. The groups traced 200 of the biggest fake news websites to the Russian government, as well as a group of botnets and human “trolls”, which planted stories and reached at least 15 million Americans. (For a sense of scale, more than 135 million people voted in 2016. Clinton appears likely to win the popular vote by more than two million ballots despite decisively losing the electoral college.)
These messages would have presumably turned unwitting and undecided voters towards Donald Trump, who painted himself as a financially independent outsider who openly wanted to reset relations with Vladimir Putin, a controversial and bellicose international figure whom Trump has nevertheless praised as a “great man”. While it is unclear whether Putin specifically hoped to facilitate Trump's election, Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that the campaign served a broader, long-term purpose. “They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” he told the Post. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
Regardless of Putin’s putative interest in destabilizing the governments of opposing countries, he and Trump have a mutual affinity for authoritarianism, and for each other, though Trump is the more publicly effusive of the two. He has not only praised Putin’s governing style and his 82 percent approval rating; he has also openly asked the Russian government to give him a hand during the election by hacking Clinton’s emails. Putin, in turn, once called Trump “talented without doubt". Trump subsequently admitted to the human frailty of liking someone who liked him. “If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him,” he once told NBC News.
The report, combined with new efforts to get Clinton to challenge the results of the election in three swing states where she lost narrowly, will undoubtedly renew questions as to whether Trump will be influenced by the Russians, and whether he could even draw any sort of hard line in their relationship, particularly in Syria, Europe, and in the fight against ISIS. Then again, if the Russians were working to get Trump elected, they might not have to work hard to influence an inexperienced man who appears to want a bromantic relationship with Putin. And if their largest goal was to erode faith in the U.S. government, the next four years will be a fascinating case study.
