THREAD: There’s a reason Russian disinformation campaigns often center on dated allegations of sexual violence or sexual deviancy. The association of those claims with your name taint every story about you, even the positive ones.
2. Debunking those allegations well enough to stop coverage of them is extremely hard. They do not go away so long as someone who can impact the news cycle wants to mention them. That’s why it’s a favorite tactic in the Russian play book.
3. Back when Michael McFaul was Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, Putin engineered a propaganda campaign that he was a pedophile who was trying to overthrow the Russian regime.
4. And it’s not just sexual-based innuendos. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny was accused of associating with people who prepare ethnic cleansing and view Hitler as their guru with photoshopped pictures as “proof”.
5. Here’s Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum describing the Russian smear campaign against her. washingtonpost.com/opinions/globa…
6. Here’s an article about the smear campaign against former US ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. washingtonpost.com/technology/201…
7. Here’s a report about the smear campaign against the former Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė: medium.com/dfrlab/grybaus…
8. Here’s a honey trap story that was added to ongoing smear campaigns against Russian opposition figures: rferl.org/a/Sex_Video_Co…
9. A story about Russia fabricating a sex video to target a US diplomat: telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews…
10. A smear campaign with accusations of sexual harassment against St. Petersburg opposition leader Boris Vishnevsky: themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/02/st-…
11. Another honey trap campaign in Russia is described here: theatlantic.com/international/…
12. In Sex, Politics, and Putin, Valerie Sterling describes a smear campaign to paint an opposition leader as being “unmanned” for supposedly being raped in prison. 
13. The point of all this is to remind everyone that Russian operations against Biden *are active* and probably have been for a year. nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/…
14. We know from studies conducted on those active measures that Russian ops focus on wedge issues like race and gender. brennancenter.org/our-work/analy…
15. They will co-opt messaging platforms and issue advocacy to get attention and spread their filth. And we have seen that people on the left and right *will* signal boost it. Some of them mean well and others are cynically using every weapon at hand to push their own agenda.
16. There is a term of art for people who unwittingly signal boost these carefully crafted smear campaigns: useful idiots. I’m making a list of them in my head and choosing to ignore them the rest of the cycle.
17. It’s not easy because I quite like some of them. But the Russian government is very good at this. They’ve had plenty of practice with it going back to the early Soviet era.
18. My advice to all us is to point out early and often that these Russian measures are active and ongoing. Be critical. Be careful. And vote Dems in November. We are not defending ourselves and our election systems while the GOP is in charge and we need to. END
19. This deserves a fuller analysis because I think it’s interesting. Very few people with the ability to drive media coverage mention it. What Russian ops do is generate *pressure* on influencers to say it.
20. The difference with the allegation against Biden is instructive. There were times when it *almost* died off but it got boosted again and again by bad faith actors or useful idiots.
21. When a new accusation against Trump appeared there’d be at most a news cycle’s worth of coverage but then... distraction! And the pressure to keep talking about would disappear. Because there was no relentless coordinated effort to give it energy.
22. In many ways, the Trump allegations show two things. One - how effective an aggressive gaslighting/deflecting campaign from the accused can be. Two - the normal life cycle of a story that isn’t being coordinated by a professional disinformation campaign.
23. In contrast, Russian disinformation ops have a very fertile field of anti-establishment cultures on the right and left in the US to promote its ugly brand of attack politics. Many politicians use them to signal boost their brand and to cultivate “authenticity”.
24. AOC jumping in to drive another round of coverage on the Reade allegations is a perfect example of this. There’s *no* one on the right performing this service on the Trump allegations.
In contrast to what AOC did, it’s very important that things like *this* continue to happen. Also, check out the whole thread for a break down of many of the problematic aspects of the Reade allegations.
