The Russia watchRussia’s war on Western notion of truth; deepfakes & disinformation war; Russia’s Jill Stein strategy, and more
• Russia helped Donald Trump win by creating phony “Grow a Spine, Vote Jill Stein” social media campaign
• Russians launched pro-Jill Stein social media blitz to help Trump win election, reports say
• The Russian effort to divert votes to Jill Stein was more extensive than previously thought
• Trump silent on Russian efforts to influence African Americans, millennials and other left-leaning groups
• Deepfakes and the new disinformation war. The coming age of post-truth geopolitics
• The inner workings of Vladimir Putin’s state
• Inside a former Russian spy’s info wars course. Today’s lesson — the nerve agent poisonings in the U.K.
• Agents of doubt: How a powerful Russian propaganda machine chips away at Western notions of truth
• Schiff will use subpoena powers if Trump quashes final Mueller report
Russia helped Donald Trump win by creating phony “Grow a Spine, Vote Jill Stein” social media campaign (Jonathan Vankin, Inquisitr)
Russian disinformation specialists working for the Internet Research Agency promoted the Jill Stein presidential campaign as a way of helping Donald Trump much more aggressively than previously believed.
Russians launched pro-Jill Stein social media blitz to help Trump win election, reports say(Jim Young, Reuters, NBC News)
Building support for Stein was one of a “roster of themes” the Moscow-sanctioned internet trolls “turned to repeatedly,” report says.
The Russian effort to divert votes to Jill Stein was more extensive than previously thought (Adam Peck. ThinkProgress)
More than a thousand tweets were sent about the Green Party candidate by Russian operatives looking to help Donald Trump.
Trump silent on Russian efforts to influence African Americans, millennials and other left-leaning groups (Eugene Scott, Washington Post)
This week began with more news about Russia’s manipulation of social media to mislead the American public, but the latest reports claim that those efforts continued even after the election of President Trump.
Trump’s failure to address — or even comment — on the latest findings is a reminder to Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike of his lack of will to take a strong stance against the country that is considered one of the nation’s greatest security threats.
Deepfakes and the new disinformation war. The coming age of post-truth geopolitics (Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron, Foreign Affairs)The authors, the director of the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of law at the University of Maryland write:
· “Thanks to the rise of ‘deepfakes’—highly realistic and difficult-to-detect digital manipulations of audio or video—it is becoming easier than ever to portray someone saying or doing something he or she never said or did.”
· “Over the last decade, more and more people have begun to get their information from social media platforms … [S]ocial media [will be] fertile ground for circulating deepfakes, with potentially explosive implications for politics. Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election … already demonstrated how easily disinformation can be injected into the social media bloodstream. … Deepfakes will also exacerbate the disinformation wars that increasingly disrupt domestic politics in the United States and elsewhere.”
