Decades of fake news; the Russian disinformation playbook; 2020 elections security concerns, and more

Russia’s public corruption, decline in rule-of-law, and increasingly oppressive government regulations have produced a poor business environment. As a consequence, the country trails the United States and China in terms of private investment, scientific research, and the number of AI start-ups. In 2018, no Russian city entered the top 20 global regional hubs for the AI sector, despite the much-hyped opening of the “Skolkovo Innovation Center” in 2010, which was designed to be Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley. Unlike Silicon Valley, Skolkovo did not spur the kind of private investments and innovation that the Kremlin had hoped for and has since fizzled out. Russia’s new venture, a “technopolis” named Era, which is set to open in the fall of 2018, now promises to be the new hub for emerging technologies, but it too is unlikely to spur Silicon Valley like innovation. It is telling that despite high-level presidential and administrative support, there is scant Russian language academic research on AI.
It is not likely that the country’s stagnant and hydrocarbon-dependent economy will do much to improve the government’s ability to ramp up investment in emerging technologies. In the longer term, Russia’s demographic crisis (Russia is projected to lose 8 percent of its population by 2050, according the UN) will likely lead to shortages in highly skilled workers, many of whom have already left Russia for better pay and opportunities elsewhere. Western sanctions on key sectors of the Russian financial sector and defense industry, which Europe and the United States imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the United States has continued to ramp up since then, put extra pressure on the Russian economy. Taken together, the economic and demographic trends signal that in the AI race, Russia will be unable to match China on government investment or compete with the United States on private sector innovation.
The Kremlin is undoubtedly aware of the country’s unfavorable position in the global AI competition, even if such an admission is unlikely to ever be made publicly. Strategically, such a wide gap between ambition and capacity means that Russia will need to invest its limited resources carefully. Currently, Moscow is pursuing investments in at least two directions: select conventional military and defense technologies where the Kremlin believes it can still hold comparative advantage over the West and high-impact, low-cost asymmetric warfare to correct the imbalance between Russia and the West in the conventional domain. The former—Russia’s development and use of AI-driven military technologies and weapons—has received significant attention.
The latter—the implications of AI for asymmetric political warfare—remains unexplored. Yet, such nonconventional tools—cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, political influence, and illicit finance—have become a central tenet of Russia’s strategy toward the West and one with which Russia has been able to project power and influence beyond its immediate neighborhood. In particular, AI has the potential to hyperpower Russia’s use of disinformation—the intentional spread of false and misleading information for the purpose of influencing politics and societies. And unlike in the conventional military space, the United States and Europe are ill-equipped to respond to AI-driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) in the information space.

Decades of fake news, courtesy of the Kremlin (Letters, New York Times)
Videos about Russia’s disinformation operations inspired one reader to draw a humorous map — “my way of shrinking my fright” — while others expressed their fears in our comments.
On Nov. 12, The Times’s opinion video desk released “Operation Infektion,” a three-part series about Russian disinformation over the years. In response, we received a drawing from a reader in Missouri, as well as many comments, which are sampled here. The drawing refers to language in the videos.

Inside the Russian disinformation playbook: Exploit tension, sow chaos (Terry Gross, WCAI)
The Russian playbook for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories is the subject of a new three-part video series on The New York Times website titled “Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation: From The Cold War To Kanye.” One episode goes back to the 1980s, when the Russians created and spread the conspiracy theory that the AIDS virus was created by the U.S. military for use as a biological weapon. The other episodes are “The Seven Commandments Of Fake News” and “The Worldwide War On Truth.” My guest, Adam Ellick, produced and co-directed the series. He’s the executive producer of opinion video at The New York Times, which is a new feature on their website.

Facebook’s ex-security chief meets with Hill lawmakers, cites concerns ahead of 2020 elections (Andrew Blake, Washington Times)
Facebook’s former head of security said he met with the House and Senate Intelligence committees Thursday to discuss protecting future elections from failures encountered during the 2016 presidential race.
Alex Stamos, the social network’s chief security officer during the 2016 election season, mentioned the meeting on Twitter while addressing renewed concerns involving his former employer’s handling of Russian disinformation operations.
“So yes, we all failed, and we need to own up to those failures to move forward,” Mr. Stamos tweeted.
“I’m in the US Capitol today meeting with HPSCI, SSCI and interested members,” he added, referring to the House of Representatives Permanently Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Selection Committee on Intelligence, respectively. “My focus is on building a good working relationship between .gov and .com and the legal frameworks we need to protect our democracy in 2020 in beyond.”

Facebook fallout ruptures Democrats’ longtime alliance with Silicon Valley (Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg, New York Times)
The alliance between Democrats and Silicon Valley has buckled and bent this year amid revelations that platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed hateful speech, Russian propaganda and conservative-leaning “fake news” to flourish.
But those tensions burst into open warfare this past week after revelations that Facebook executives had withheld evidence of Russian activity on the platform for far longer than previously disclosed, while employing a Republican-linked opposition research firm to discredit critics and the billionaire George Soros, a major Democratic Party patron.
Democrats now face a painful reckoning with longtime friends in the tech industry, relationships girded by mutual interest in issues like immigration and cemented with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

Facebook hired firm with ‘in-house fake news shop’ to combat PR crisis (Michael Cappetta, Ben Collins, and Jo Ling Kent, NBC News)
Facebook’s ties to Definers Public Affairs, first reported on Wednesday in The New York Times, sparked widespread criticism and accusations of hypocrisy.
The conservative lobbying firm that Facebook hired in the midst of an October 2017 public relations crisis about Russian disinformation included what one former employee told NBC News was an “in-house fake news shop” as part of its operations.
Facebook’s ties to the lobbying firm, Definers Public Affairs, were first reported on Wednesday in The New York Times, which detailed how the group aimed to “discredit activist protesters [of Facebook], in part by linking them to liberal financier George Soros,” who has become the subject of widespread right-wing conspiracy theories for his philanthropy work.
The report resulted in widespread criticism and accusations of hypocrisy by Facebook for its use of a lobbying firm that pushed narratives on behalf of its clients disguised as news articles. And some of the firm’s more inflammatory political ads for other clients were removed by Facebook itself for violating its advertising policies.
Definers runs a website called NTK Network, which has a verified page on Facebook with more than 120,000 followers that publishes and promotes articles about the firm’s clients as well as their competitors.
A former employee of Definers, who asked not to be identified in order to protect professional relationships, told NBC News that NTK Network was “our in-house fake news shop.” Some clients would actively pay for NTK Network’s positive coverage, which the ex-employee said would then be pushed out through Facebook in the hopes of being picked up by larger conservative media outlets such as Breitbart.

Did Facebook merely ‘deflect’ after realizing Russian disinformation? (NPR)
“Just after the elections, Mark Zuckerberg gets in front of a stage of people and says, it’s a crazy idea that Facebook played a role in influence people — influencing people ahead of elections. And at that point, the same people on the security team that have been doing this research realized that, whatever is happening at the company, it’s not making its way up to Zuckerberg” (Sheera Frenkel, New York Times)

How Hungary became a weapon of Russian disinformation (Lorant Gyori, Kyiv Post)
Despite the fact that the Hungarian government has expressed support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, and voted for the European sanctions’ regime against Russia multiple times since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Hungarian government is actively blocking the NATO-Ukraine cooperation and Ukraine’s integration into Western structures on all levels to protest the new Ukrainian language law. While Hungarian concerns are based on legitimate human rights grounds, the overt Hungarian diplomatic reaction entailing mutual diplomatic expulsions plays right into the Kremlin’s geopolitical effort to destabilize Ukraine along ethnic lines and the east-west geographical divide.

Here are the MPs that Russian trolls targeted the most (Gian Volpicelli, Wired)
Russian trolls targeted British MPs – Jeremy Corbyn more than others. But their misinformation campaign in the UK was small and about controversy, not policy

New evidence emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit (Jane Mayer, New Yorker)
The Trump strategist and controversial Big Data company communicated about raising U.S. funds for Brexit in 2015.