I can see how certain aspects of US politics are interesting to russian botnets (assuming they too are politically controlled to some extent, which I think is safe to say). Foreign policy is very much dependent on who is president, and US foregin policy is amatter of billions of dollars for Russia.
But gun laws? What's the reasoning behind that? It doesn't add up. On the contrary, it would rather seem like some group in the US (Say a large gun rights organization of some form) would buy these services from the russians. The Russian twitter troll factories don't work for free, and in this case there doesn't seem to be a reason why Russia would pay for this?
Edit: another poster pointed out: there is one thing russia would gain from and that's political division and instability. Next up: pay someone to have a very public and very late abortion, for example.
Its absolutely to sow division and partisanship. Other analyses of Russian-bot propaganda during the presidential campaign showed that while the majority of content was targeted at conservative leaning positions, there was pro-Clinton content as well.
Russia certainly was hoping for a weak-on-Russia Trump to win the election, but just as important to their aims is to create discord in American domestic politics. If a country is entirely preoccupied with issues and perceived enemies at home, they won't have the focus or political willpower to interfere with Russian plans on an international stage.
One interesting piece of that puzzle is the book Foundations of Geopolitics from 1997 [1] by Aleksandr Dugin. It is basically a collection of strategies on foreign politics through intelligence arms of the government. There's no properly translated copy of the book available unfortunately, but there are excerpts [2]:
* Ukraine should be annexed by Russia..
* The United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe.
* Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
I really don't think potential motivations are very mysterious if the Russian state is actually doing this of their own accord.
Like you said, sowing political discord in general over hot-button issues is a benefit.
But if they're really trying to tip the scales in favor of the pro-gun lobby then that makes sense too. Riling up the pro-gun voters is a way of meddling in the 2018 elections with a pro-Republican/Trump bias that we already saw in 2016.
In addition, it's conceivable that Russia believes that more permissive gun laws will help destabilize America.
Do you figure pro/anti-gun twitter posts from actual users are less likely to result in us being at each others throats? Really seems like pissing in the ocean.
No. It is an asymmetric strategy. One "side" wants chaos more than the other. That other is in fact all those interested basic democratic stability. The construct of "sides" is created artificially by these tactics in order to divide.
"Political division" has been pretty clearly shown: "Newly released Facebook ads revealed Wednesday show that two Russian-linked Facebook groups organized opposing protests last year at the same time outside an Islamic center in Houston."
More likely this story is designed to undermine natural pro-gun sentiment amongst U.S. Citizens who we can now dismiss as being influenced by Russian Twitter bots. This is the same tactic used to explain Trump's victory in the election.
Certainly it's about sowing discord... but don't kid yourself, the US does the exact same thing to Russia on any controversial issue there. And don't think the US wasn't bringing its influence to bear during Russian elections. This is all same-old-same-old that's been going on for years.
US elections are at least superficially free and fair. Imho leaders that don’t hold fair elections also give up the expectation of other nations keeping out of them.
So while there is certainly back-and-forth here, I can’t see any moral issues with anyone meddling in Russian elections. It’s likely even necessary if the current regime is to be changed (which I think will be harder than in 1990).
The US obviously also meddle with more or less acceptable means in countries that do have free and fair elections but that’s a different topic.
Yep, the very foundational election of new Russia’s first real president - Yeltsin was fully sponsored by US and resulted in a disaster for the country that it’s still recovering from.
Note that while the headline says the bots are "pro-gun", the article says the bots flood Twitter with messages on both sides of an issue like this. The idea supposedly being to encourage political discord in general.
From everything I've read, it sounds like there's reasonable certainty, but that's admittedly anecdotal on my part and comes from mostly secondary sources.
I've read a small selection of the IC reports and declassified info as well that at least support the general tendency of the Kremlin to operate this way as of late.
As an aside, this is a site set up that tracks known Kremlin Internet Research Agency accounts and bots activity:
This area is rather murky. There is a lot of assumptions here. Not even clear these bots are working for Kremlin or for interests of other parties who are hiring them.
I always get a little skeptical about articles like this, and the motivation behind them. Are there Russian bots - perhaps, but they tend to sow discord. It wouldn't surprise me if some fraction of the anti-gun tweets are also bot driven.
But at the same time, I have gun owning friends, and they tend to circle the wagons when something like this happens. With 1 in 3 adults in the US owning a firearm, it doesn't take very many of them for there to be a lot of tweets against gun control.
To put their reaction in perspective, realize that since fame appears to be a motive in these shootings, the easiest way to stop this would likely be to pass a law to prevent the media from covering mass shootings, or at least the names and life stories of the shooters. And I think a lot of reactions here would be "we can't do that!", because of the first amendment.
That's how a lot of people feel about the second amendment.
There will come a time when we will disconnect the international and intercontinental internet connections until we've figured out how to keep democracy functioning in a connected world.
It may get to the point where activities such as these will be classed right along with acts of war, I have no idea what the solution is but clearly the downsides of our early days attempt at creating a 'hive mind' are starting to weigh pretty heavily.
Critical thinking. Teach critical thinking and information literacy. Teach students how to make an argument. Stop trying to teach people 'facts' as an equivalent to teaching understanding.
Work to reduce the number of people (i.e., conservatives) who seek an purely objective world view that makes them comfortable and is actually reinforced by facts that disprove their beliefs.
I, as a STEM educator, blame a lot of all of this on the reification of STEM education and the devaluing of liberal arts and humanities.
That's a bit of a short-cut there, it's not just conservatives that do this.
Also, keep in mind that the web (not the internet) was created with a completely different goal in mind, to connect organizations and individuals in a relatively friendly setting.
The potential for hostile applications wasn't even on the radar back then and if it had been I'm pretty sure some of the foundation stones would have been laid differently.
So now you get this weird mix of open societies connected in a very open fashion to outright dictatorships with the additional asymmetries of English being a pre-requisite for trade all over the world and thus a ready and cheap to deploy workforce aided by bots to sow dissention and to drive a wedge between folks in the remainder of the world.
What is sad - and that's why I picked out that fragment - is that once the ball is rolling we will then happily take over beating on that wedge.
agreed, and to an extent apologies for the cheapshot, but there is an underlying and important point.
Conservative ideology (holding 'traditional' values and being resistant to change) is ideologically rooted in a non-critical conflation of societal normativity and one's own subjective reality with a shared objective reality. It doesn't mean they uniquely suffer from this problem but it does make them much more susceptible to it. It also makes them, as a group, less prepared to counter it.
Its the same reason the Nazi's were so much more effective than Occupy wall street. In the later, internal dialogues and disagreement is tolerated and even valued to a much larger extent. In the former, its seen as lacking in purity and results in compliance, departure, or expulsion.
> ts the same reason the Nazi's were so much more effective than Occupy wall street. In the later, internal dialogues and disagreement is tolerated and even valued to a much larger extent. In the former, its seen as lacking in purity and results in compliance, departure, or expulsion.
There's a link to 'nice people finish last' in there somewhere.
Democracy depends on connection, and the free exchange of ideas among an intelligent and informed populace, even in the presence of falsehood and rumor.
The problem here is not democracy being unable to weather the internet, any more than television, newspapers or radio, but of society trading healthy skepticism for cynicism, encouraging disengagement from the political process and failing to raise the electorate democracy needs.
> Democracy depends on connection, and the free exchange of ideas among an intelligent and informed populace, even in the presence of falsehood and rumor.
That works as long as there are ways to ascertain what is rumor and falsehood and what is fact. As soon as that is impossible the S/N ratio drops to the point where you have a net negative making it much harder to engage in critical thinking. That's why the bot army operators don't really care which side of a particular argument they are taking, all they care about is - just like any other ad network, ironically - engagement so that there are less braincycles left over to think about the stuff that really matters.
> The problem here is not democracy being unable to weather the internet, any more than television, newspapers or radio
Television, newspapers or radio as a rule were not - RT excepted - usually under the control of ideological or actual enemies. And when they were - such as Radio Free Europe - the powers that be tried what they could to control the message. So now we are starting to see what happens when there is no way to control the message at all and individuals can be targeted with messages that are tailor made to excite and enrage them about subjects they care deeply about.
> but of society trading healthy skepticism for cynicism, encouraging disengagement from the political process and failing to raise the electorate democracy needs.
I'd love to live in that place but I haven't found it yet. For the most part people are not at all happy to have to expend time to get educated about subjects they care about, they prefer to have their opinion pre-chewed and in short to repeat soundbites, preferably short enough to be made into bumper stickers.
Not sure how you can disconnect the internet. Basically would involve disconnecting all comms. Lest someone uses a modem. Then what about long distance RF?
China is a pretty good example of what can be done just short of disconnecting, and as annoying as that is they are doing this because they are well aware of what could happen if they allowed free communications.
They're on the wrong side of the line as far as I'm concerned but in the end the goals are roughly the same: prevent outside influences from destabilizing the country to the point where the whole thing might collapse.
Open societies are probably (I hope) less vulnerable to this sort of thing than closed ones but it would be a huge mistake to think that we are immune to it.
If I were a left wing group, trying to sow dislike of guns, this is exactly what I would do. Fits with the trump/russian thing, and looks kooky to explain. Why would russians care about our gun laws?
> Didn't Twitter delete all the Russian bots like two weeks ago ?
Twitter has no interest in making it clear just how many of its “users” are actually bots. Politically motivated bots even more so.
Moreover, they’ve shown no interest in making it more difficult to create new bots. They probably had news accounts before Twitter even finished deleting the old ones.
But gun laws? What's the reasoning behind that? It doesn't add up. On the contrary, it would rather seem like some group in the US (Say a large gun rights organization of some form) would buy these services from the russians. The Russian twitter troll factories don't work for free, and in this case there doesn't seem to be a reason why Russia would pay for this?
Edit: another poster pointed out: there is one thing russia would gain from and that's political division and instability. Next up: pay someone to have a very public and very late abortion, for example.