Paul Robinson — False flag confession

According to the report revealed by the New York Times, New Knowledge admits that:

We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.

The New York Times states that this plan ‘involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.’ These ‘Russian accounts’ were, however, nothing of the sort; they were false flags, designed to make it look as though the Russians were backing Mr Moore, thereby discrediting him and energizing his Democratic opponents. The ruse worked. American media picked up on the story that Russian social media bots were campaigning on behalf of Roy Moore, and spread the lie further. The New York Post, for instance, published an article entitled ‘Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers’. As it turns out, this headline was inadvertently true – the Russian Twitter followers were indeed ‘fake’, just not in the way that the Post understood it.…

To summarise, what we have here are some Americans pretending to be Russians pretending to be Americans, with the aim of smearing a political candidate with what they knew to be a false accusation. And yet we are meant to trust these same people as neutral reporters on the matter of Russian ‘meddling’ in American democracy. It strikes me that they have something of a credibility problem.

There is, of course, a lot of nonsense on social media, some of it just the outpourings of deluded individuals, and some of it the automated products of so-called ‘troll factories’. Unfortunately, the lead in combatting this (in my mind, much exaggerated) problem has been taken by highly partisan actors who are themselves less than trustworthy. New Knowledge is one example. The Integrity Initiative in the UK is another. So too are the numerous reports about Russian information warfare produced by organizations such as the Institute of Modern Russia and the Centre for European Policy Analysis, as well as the books churned out by Luke Harding, Timothy Snyder, and others, all of whom spread fear of Russian disinformation while presenting a very odd version of reality themselves. In the case of New Knowledge, they even admit to deliberately deceiving American voters. As so often, those claiming to protect us against external enemies in fact threaten us more than the alleged enemies themselves.

The era of "truthiness" (h/t Stephen Colbert) is upon us. Or it's corollary, "gaslighting." Heaven help us when truth evaporates.

Irrussianality
False flag confession
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa