Russian meddling seemed to take silicon valley’s biggest companies by surprise in 2016. the russian effort to try to have these coordinated information operations on facebook and also the internet more broadly was not something that we were expecting it turns out similar tactics have been used for decades u.s officials have uncovered some five dozen incidents of alleged soviet forgeries around the world some of the demonstrations are encouraged even supported by the soviet union the state department has copies of other documents allegedly forged by the kgb and fed to friendly publications so what has changed it’s the platforms those stories appeared in magazines and newspapers but now social media is the primary target we use all means available to do damage to the enemy the united states was the main adversary the enemy we hated you guys jack barsky is a former spy for the soviet union he spent years living in the u.s undercover spying on america on behalf of russia back then the secret organization service a was the engine that ran the soviets disinformation operations service a was primarily staffed by people who didn’t know american society there were people who never have been to the u.s that secret group was full of kgb agents whose job it was to make false american documents and then stories based on those false documents spread a story would appear for example in a paper in india and it would be picked up by a paper in indonesia and the same piece would then get picked up by some place in eastern europe and then western europe and then it would become a quoted piece sources say the u.s invented aids sources say that the u.s is spreading disease it would snowball is the bottom line it would take let’s say four five six months for a story to take hold for the disease to show itself in those days you know it was pretty hard to disseminate this kind of information took a lot of work and you really had to focus on on who do you want to do damage to with the resources that you had nowadays it’s so much easier you know social media makes it possible today there are countless internet trolls spreading false information millions of tweets sent in the build-up to the 2016 u.s presidential election were eventually discovered to have come from the internet research agency that’s a russian troll farm and propaganda operation linked to the kremlin essentially what we see is especially from the russians is like turning up the volume on existing divisions this post-election protest outside new york’s trump tower was organized by russians on facebook by using social media russian operatives can do a lot more damage during the cold war if you were an intelligence operative and you went overseas to seed an information operation if you got caught you’d be arrested today you can do it from your home from your office in russia if you get caught your account gets suspended and you open up a new account so from a risk reward perspective the risk back in the 80s and 70s was very high the risk is very low but the reward is very high low risk high reward and the culprits can be difficult to spot hiding in plain sight where we have our guards down on social media.
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