In 2016, Russia caught America off guard and successfully interfered in the U.S. presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But the question still stands, can it happen again?
“Russia is always looking to divide the West, [and] they’re always looking to undermine American democracy,” James Brent, a San Jose State political science professor, said. “Most people would say that they found a useful tool to do that in Donald Trump.”
Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election successfully flooded American media with disinformation extensively posted on social media platforms, according to a Sept. 20 American Progress article, an independent non-partisan policy institute.
In the same article, it stated the Russian government spent more than $1 million per month in the last few months on creating and pushing online propaganda before the 2016 election.
SJSU political science professor Kristina Mitchell said Russia’s spread of disinformation on social media platforms affected the election.
“Russia did interfere with the election by producing a lot of misinformation targeted toward people in the United States, with the intention of getting them to vote for Donald Trump over (then-presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton,” Mitchell said. “Hillary Clinton was an unpopular candidate [and] Trump was such a wild card. Social media had become [such] a massive part of elections that the ingredients were all there to make misinformation and election interference really easy for people from other countries.”
Along with hefty monthly expenditures during the last months leading to the election, the Russian government established online networks of bots and trolls and consulted with outside analysts to increase their reach and efficacy.
They also published disinformation in online publications and paid unaffiliated content producers to publish speeches by the Kremlin, which is Russia’s executive branch that deals with foreign affairs, according to the American Progress article.
The unaffiliated content producers were most likely the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company that created thousands of social media accounts to pose as Americans supporting radical political groups.
A U.S. Senate Intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election was released to the public on July 25, 2019.
The report stated that the Internet Research Agency influenced the 2016 presidential election by supporting Donald Trump and harming Hillary Clinton’s chances at the direction of the Kremlin.
On Facebook alone, the Kremlin’s propaganda reached at least 126 million users, according to an Sept. 2 American Progress article.
An April 24, 2019, NPR article confirmed this number as well, adding that about 1.4 million people may have been in contact with accounts from the Internet Research Agency on Twitter.
Matthew Record, an SJSU political science professor, said social media companies act shocked when they find out election interference could be happening on their platforms.
“The people who were the slowest to realize and the most aggressive in their ignorance were definitely the social media networks,” Record said. “That purposeful ignorance is what allowed these things to metastasize to this extent.”
Mitchell agreed and said social media companies could have prevented the magnitude in which misinformation was spread on their sites in 2016.
“I definitely think that social media companies knew this was happening and could have stopped it, but I think it’s very costly to do so,” Mitchell said. “I don’t think they really had much of an incentive to do so for that reason. And of course, it’s possible that people like Mark Zuckerberg might have wanted the misinformation. Maybe he perceived that a Trump presidency would be better for him, but then maybe not.”
While spreading disinformation on social media platforms, Russian government hackers also hacked into Clinton and her campaign party’s emails and distributed private information.
According to a July 13, 2018 article by The Washington Post, the Russian government hacked into 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee and released them to WikiLeaks, which is an online whistle-blowing organization led by Julian Assange.
At the same time, it hacked into 76 emails that were used by the Clinton campaign. These emails were published on WikiLeaks weekly in the month of October in 2016, according to The Washington Post article.
In November 2016, WikiLeaks sent out a statement on its website saying that in recent months it received pressure to stop publishing the Clinton campaign’s emails.
This was a hard blow to the Clinton campaign as the leaked emails led some voters to distrust her campaign.
“If you’re someone who is starting with the belief that Hillary Clinton is corrupt and you see a headline of some news story that confirms that she is corrupt, your initial reaction is to believe it and share it,” Mitchell said.
With everything that happened with foreign interference during the 2016 election, there has been speculation of foreign nations trying to interfere with the upcoming 2020 election.
“Russian interference really took two forms last time around: one with social media disinformation and the other was the WikiLeaks and scandal about Hillary’s emails,” said SJSU political science professor James Brent. “We don’t have Hillary’s emails this time around, but we do have the social media aspect. The Russian state media has been issuing false talking points about Joe Biden, and the Trump campaign has been spreading that. I think it’s already happening, it is happening.”
According to a Sept. 1 New York Times article, the FBI have warned social media companies that the Kremlin, who interfered in the 2016 election, is again trying to interfere with the 2020 election. They are using a network of fake accounts and a website set up to look like a left-wing news site.
The article also states that the agency is trying to repeat what it did four years ago to Clinton and push voters away from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Political science professor Kristina Mitchell believes that there is still foreign interference going on this election, just not as intense as in 2016 because Americans are getting better at recognizing fake news.
“I think that the fake news and the interference campaign just hasn’t been quite as important this round as it was in the previous election,” Mitchell said. “Maybe some of us are wiser to it and maybe some of us already believe it, so it’s not quite as active.”
According to a Sept. 1, article by The New York Times, the Russian government is trying harder to hide interference, but is still getting caught by social media companies.
These companies like Facebook or Twitter have introduced new measures to help curb misinformation, increase transparency and try to bolster the integrity of the democratic process this time around, according to an Oct. 18, ABC News article.
Political science professor Record agreed that this election seems to have less interference by outside governments and more disinformation coming from ourselves, especially in the White House and political news outlets.
“With [talking about] Russian [interference] I don’t think it’s necessary [happening] when Trump’s in the White House. I think we’re seeing less of it, or we’re seeing the same amount of it and it just matters less because the most effective propaganda is coming from the most powerful person in the world,” Record said. “I think the greatest form of misinformation in the electorate right now is Donald Trump himself.”
