Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 48

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
formation” through various channels in
order to overwhelm people and reduce
their ability to discern truth from lies.
This method, called “the firehose of
falsehood” (Paul and Matthews 2016),
runs counter to traditional means of influence,
which relies on trust, credibility,
and message synchronization. During
the months leading to the 2016 election,
“the troll army began promoting candidate
Donald Trump with increasing intensity,
so much so their computational
propaganda began to distort organic
support for Trump, making his social
media appeal appear larger than it truly
was” (Watts 2019). Once polls started
to indicate that Trump may not win,
Russia focused on spreading the idea
that voting machines were hacked and
the election was compromised—a tactic
that backfired on them when Trump
won the election. Years later, the US
still appears to be divided, with people’s
faith in elected leaders and democracy
continuing to decrease.
Disinformation is spread through
social bots, which amplify false claims,
allowing them to go viral on websites
like Twitter. This ties into the previously
mentioned “firehose of falsehood”
method because several different versions
of a story can be widely shared
until a wider audience picks it up and
amplifies its message. Twitter estimated
that there are 1.4 million Russian-linked
accounts (Watts 2019), many of which
are bots amplifying messages spread
through trolls and state-sponsored propaganda.
Bots can be used to spread
information acquired through hacking.
Twitter data provided to the US House
of Representatives showed over 36,000
Russian-linked bot accounts tweeting
about the US election, with 288 million
Russian bot tweets, and over 130,00
tweets directly linked to Russia’s Internet
Research Agency (IRA) (US House
of Representatives 2018).
Leading up to the 2016 election,
Russia used multiple methods to instigate
strife between Americans and to
spread disinformation. Another method
used was Facebook advertisements
with over 3,500 IRA advertisements
and 11.4 million Americans exposed
to those advertisements and 470 IRAowned
Facebook pages with 80,000
pieces of content created by those pages
and 126 million Americans exposed
to that organic content (US House of
Representatives 2018). These are startling
numbers that show how effective
the IRA has been in understanding and
exploiting American culture. They not
only spread disinformation, but also
exploited people’s emotions; for example,
they encouraged people to believe
that their votes did not matter so they
should vote third party or forgo voting
altogether (Thompson and Lapowsky
2018).
Russia’s attempts at creating division,
or schismogenesis, of the American
public lead to questions on how to
counter an information environment
saturated with fake news. Overall, people
are susceptible to the spread of disinformation,
with 23 percent of adults
sharing fake stories during the months
leading up to the 2016 election (Anderson
and Rainie 2017). Both older and
younger generations are susceptible for
different reasons, with older adults lack-
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