On the other hand, politicians have been trying to manipulate voters for centuries - it seems like a new danger that foreign governments are now trying to manipulate voters.
>it seems like a new danger that foreign governments are now trying to manipulate voters
This is not a new thing. Take for example, Poland historically used to elect a monarch. Various European powers would try to influence who was elected. In 1733, this famously culminated in the War of the Polish Succession.
It isn’t new at all. Foreign countries have been doing it since the invention of democracy.
You can see this very vividly demonstrated in any classical histories, like Thucydides, all the way up through history, with all types of elections, from actual every-single-citizen democracies to the just-the-Electors HRE.
This is also true in American history from the very beginning, when French interests, for example, worked against Adams. Or more famously, when the British strongly intervened to ensure the re-election of FDR.
Simply put, there’s no foreign country in world history that wasn’t or isn’t interfering in domestic elections they have any kind of interest in. It would be very foolish not to. It’s a game that has gone on since the invention of democracy and will always go on, because every incentive is aligned with it and there are no norms against it.
In general, you have to be very careful when people claim something is new and unprecedented. Sometimes they just don’t know and lack the necessary context, but often they’re constructing a narrative that relies on historical innocence/ignorance of relatively mundane detail. This has been a major problem with our news media that has been getting worse for decades: they don’t do the very important job of putting things into historical or even a current cultural context. Instead, they create narratives that are easy, get people fired up and consuming more news, and often inadvertently (or sometimes advertently) serve a partisan purpose.
This is not a new thing. Take for example, Poland historically used to elect a monarch. Various European powers would try to influence who was elected. In 1733, this famously culminated in the War of the Polish Succession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Polish_Succession
Going back even further, Persia would back different Greek politicians.
This game of influencing foreign elections is a game that has been played for centuries, and is likely not going away any time soon.