The Russia watchRussian bots hijack gun debate; Russia looms large ahead of 2018 midterms; Russiagate true believers, and more

Russian bots are using 2016 tactics to hijack the gun debate on Twitter (Maya Kosoff, Vanity Fair)
History is repeating itself in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting.

Florida school shooting hoax: doctored tweets and Russian bots spread false news (Mike Snider, USA Today)
In the hours after the mass shooting at a Florida high school last week, Twitter accounts linked to Russian disinformation campaigns spread fake news, doctored interviews. Russian government disinformation specialists, for example, distributed a fake “report” from the White House correspondent for the website Gateway Pundit: The faked report was headlined, “Why we need to take away white people’s guns now more than ever.”

Russian bots wasted no time trying to confuse people after the Mueller indictment and the Parkland shooting (April Glaser, Slate)
After special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 people associated with the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency with conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election, it didn’t take long for known Russian Twitter bots to try to muddy the news cycle’s waters—just as they helped do as part of the very propaganda campaign Mueller describes in his indictment.

The downsides of Mueller’s Russia indictment (Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare)
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia indictment represents “a remarkable rebuke of the president’s claims” that the Russia investigation was a “phony Democrat excuse for losing the election,” the Lawfare team concluded.  The indictment also educates the American public about the reality and scale of the Russian threat to the American political process more credibly than last year’s intelligence community report on the matter. But the Mueller indictment also has potential downsides. The downsides are not intrinsic to Mueller’s task. They are downsides for U.S. foreign relations, which are not his concern.  But they are downsides nonetheless.  (What follows is not a criticism of the Mueller indictment or the investigation.  Mueller is doing his job and doing it well.  What I describe here are costs of trying to deal with electoral interference of this sort through law enforcement institutions in our open society.)

Russia looms large as U.S. election officials prep for 2018 (Dustin Voltz, Reuters)
Ten months before the United States votes in its first major election since the 2016 presidential contest, U.S. state election officials huddled in Washington this weekend to swap strategies on dealing with an uninvited guest: Russia.