Thread by @wiczipedia

Let’s unpack this, shall we? Buckle up.

1. Dispensing with the most important thing first:

-Voting by mail is safe and secure.
-Several states, including Republican-led Colorado, voted by mail pre-pandemic. It does not lead to fraud.
-States have ballot-tracking measures in place; counterfeiting a ballot is hard.

2. China, Russia, and Iran are all attempting to influence our political discourse right now.

So are domestic disinformers (including by paying troll farms staffed with minors).

Disinformation is a detriment to democracy no matter where it's coming from.

3. Recognizing that's not what the President wants to hear, let's take a look at what we know about Chinese and Russian influence operations...

Both China and Russia use all levers -- government, non-government, criminal, state-run media -- to exercise influence.

(You can read a brief history of Chinese and Russian influence operations in this paper I co-authored for the US Army War College Quarterly, Parameters: press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol…)

4. Where Russia and China differ is their strategies' ultimate goals:

China is interested in promoting a positive image of China and undermining those countries that endanger that image.

Russia is not politically scrupulous. It is happy to support ideologies that are polar opposites (see, for instance, agitation on behalf of both BLM and gun rights activists in 2016) toward the goal of furthering discord and undermining the democratic system.

Here's a little excerpt from my book where I describe the difference between Soviet propaganda and today's Russian influence efforts. You could make a similar comparison between Chinese and Russian goals.

(links to buy my book: wiczipedia.com)

5. In terms of tactics, Russia is much more advanced. When China has tried to mount large, inauthentic campaigns (including around the Hong Kong protests), they've been pretty sloppy and easy to spot. Over the past few months, China has relied on overt accounts...

...including government officials and state-run media to get its messages out.

It works, to a certain extent, but it is clunkier than what Russia does, and how Russia has adapted since 2016. Gone are the days of bots and trolls. Welcome to the age of information laundering.

6. We cannot hope to win the fight against disinformation when our own elected officials are:

-undermining the threat
-spreading it themselves, leaving us more vulnerable to whatever foreign adversary wants to manipulate our polarization to their own benefit

7. And just in case you didn't get it the first time:

There is no basis whatsoever to the conspiracy theory that Russia or China could mass-forge mail in ballots to manipulate the results of our election.

I've observed elections in Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. Ballot forgeries don't even happen there. Do you know why? Because that would be very dumb and incredibly easy to spot.

The more insidious and more common manpulations? Abuse of administrative resources (things like, I don't know, using government property for campaign events...just spitballing!!!) and manipulation of media access to sway the discourse and ultimately the results.

PHEW. That's all. Whole lotta nonsense in that one tweet.

I hate going to bed mad, so here, do something positive and check your voter information/register, and make a plan to vote!

vote411.org

Mea culpa- elections in CO run by Dems, I was thinking of Utah! Sorry! 🤦🏻‍♀️

(Cough edit button cough cough)