PerspectiveAs Russia Makes 2020 Play, Democratic Campaigns Say They Are in the Dark, and Experts Fear U.S. Elections Are Vulnerable

Several Democratic presidential campaigns targeted by a Russia-based operation on Facebook’s popular Instagram app said they had been unaware of the new foreign disinformation efforts until the tech giant announced them publicly last week, raising alarms that American democracy remains vulnerable to foreign interference even after three years of investigations into the Kremlin’s attack on the 2016 election.

Isaac Stanley-Becker, Ellen Nakashima, and Tony Room write in the Washington Post that the lack of advance notice to the apparent victims of the first known Russian attempts to interfere directly in the 2020 race has heightened fears that campaigns are largely on their own when it comes to guarding against attacks from foreign interests.

Campaign officials, security experts and Democratic lawmakers said the latest material served as a warning that the Trump administration and the tech industry are still struggling to coordinate their response as threats to the U.S. political system intensify. In particular, the threats now emanate from multiple countries, including Iran and China, where malicious actors have adopted Russia’s playbook in a bid to manipulate social media to their political advantage.

Some said they were unnerved by the nature of the recent Instagram posts, which seemed to target battleground states and demonstrated a nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play in the 2020 Democratic primary race. They appeared, for instance, to stoke African American resentment of former vice president Joe Biden while tapping into themes designed to undercut Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) as well. The Russian network appeared to be relatively small and in an audience-building mode, analysts said.