Save the Date

A conversation with Chris Zappone

Chris Zappone will be joining us next Tuesday, April 9 (or Wednesday April 10, if you’re in Australia), at 9:00 pm Paris time to discuss Dark Shining Moment, his podcast about the first people to detect Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The Zoom link is below. If you haven’t listened to it yet, here’s the trailer:

Here’s the timezone wizard.

New York: Tue Apr 9, 15:00 / 3:00 pm
Sydney: Wed Apr 10, 05:00 / 5:00 am
Istanbul: Tue Apr 9, 22:00 / 10:00 pm
Dubai: Tue Apr 9, 23:00 / 11:00 pm
San Francisco: Tue Apr 9, 12:00 / 12:00 pm
Delhi: Wed Apr 10, 00:30 / 12:30 am

All of our subscribers are warmly invited, and if you’re not a subscriber, this would be a good incentive to become one, wouldn’t it?

A generous reader recently donated a subscription, so if you’re having a bad month, or you’re a student, or you live in a country where the currency’s in the tank (that would be you, Turkish friends), drop me a note. I’ll give it to the first person in need to ask. And by the way, donating subscriptions is a wonderful thing to do. I love giving them away. People love receiving them. No one writes to ask for them unless they badly want to read CG. Anyone who badly wants to read CG is by definition interesting, so we’re always glad to have them as readers. If you feel like donating a subscription, it would make my day and the recipient’s.

---

Chris Zappone says:

My hope with Dark Shining Moment has been to tell a story that makes sense of the chaos that the world witnessed in one decisive year. Everyone loves a suspense-driven thriller: and this is one whose outcome affected us all. I wanted it to have a democratic sensibility so I interviewed real-world eyewitnesses from different backgrounds.

Did you know that in 2016, Russian bots on Twitter were responsible for some 19 percent of all tweets related to the election? I did not.

For those of you who’d like to prepare for this discussion by doing a bit of reading—which of course I recommend—here are key sources, interesting studies, and some recent news, too:

• Russian meddling in the United States: The historical context of the Mueller Report

• CIA/FBI/NSA Assessment: Russia’s influence campaign targeting the 2016 US presidential election

• Obama team was warned in 2014 about Russian interference

• Obama fails to fight Putin’s propaganda machine

• The Mueller Report (If you’ve never read it, do yourself a favor. Of all the documents published this century, this is the one you should least trust anyone else to read on your behalf.)

• Senate Select Intelligence Committee: Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 US Election Report, Volumes I-V (This too rewards reading.)

• Committee to Investigate Russia (links to key documents and videos of hearings)

• The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018

• The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency

• White House says there’s no need for new Russia sanctions

• Reduced trolling on Russian holidays and daily US Presidential election odds (This is a clever way of assessing the impact of Russia’s intervention.)

• In claiming that the Trump-Russia story was nothing more than a sensation-driven media witch hunt, the revisionists downplay and distort a very ugly story.

• New evidence shows how Russia’s election interference has gotten more brazen. The Kremlin-linked operation behind 2016 election meddling is using similar tactics for 2020, plus some new ones.

• Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections

• Russian interference in the US Presidential elections in 2016 and 2020 as an attempt to implement a revolution-like information warfare scheme

• Poland, Czech Republic warn of Russian interference ahead of European elections. A Moscow-backed network, “Voice of Europe,” was busted by Prague earlier this week. The site reportedly paid MEPs to spread pro-Russian propaganda.

• A year of disinformation: Russia and China’s influence campaigns during the war in Ukraine

• Russian interference unnerves Europe as elections near

• Russia’s 2024 election interference has already begun. Moscow is spreading disinformation about Joe Biden and other Democrats to lessen US military aid to Ukraine and US support for NATO.

This is worth reading, too:

Deception, disinformation, and strategic communications: How one interagency group made a major difference:

This study explains how one part-time interagency committee established in the 1980s to counter Soviet disinformation effectively accomplished its mission. Interagency committees are commonly criticized as ineffective, but the Active Measures Working Group is a notable exception. The group successfully established and executed US policy on responding to Soviet disinformation. It exposed some Soviet covert operations and raised the political cost of others by sensitizing foreign and domestic audiences to how they were being duped. The group’s work encouraged allies and made the Soviet Union pay a price for disinformation that reverberated all the way to the top of the Soviet political apparatus. It became the US Government’s body of expertise on disinformation and was highly regarded in both Congress and the executive branch.

The working group also changed the way the United States and Soviet Union viewed disinformation. With constant prodding from the group, the majority position in the US national security bureaucracy moved from believing that Soviet disinformation was inconsequential to believing it was deleterious to US interests—and on occasion could mean the difference in which side prevailed in closely contested foreign policy issues. The working group pursued a sustained campaign to expose Soviet disinformation and helped convince Mikhail Gorbachev that such operations against the United States were counterproductive.

The working group was also efficient. It had a disproportionate impact that far exceeded the costs of manning the group, producing its reports, and disseminating its information overseas. The group exposed Soviet disinformation at little cost to the United States, but negated much of the effort mounted by the large Soviet bureaucracy that produced the multibillion-dollar Soviet disinformation effort. Over time, the working group’s activities drove Soviet costs for disinformation production up even further and helped bankrupt the country.

See you on Tuesday!