Thread by @RVAwonk

Something that you have to understand about Russian interference is that it’s highly unlikely that they would actually try to manipulate votes or vote tallies. Why? Because they know they can achieve the same or even better outcomes by manipulating voters instead. 🧵

I wrote about this 5 years ago.

As I said then, changing the vote count in one election would yield limited returns. But convincing voters to doubt the legitimacy of election outcomes for the foreseeable future? That’s a return on investment.

bylinetimes.com/2019/07/26/rus…

There is a strange tendency to talk about Russian interference as if the impact must either be direct — i.e. changing vote totals — or nonexistent. But that’s not the reality of how influence and information operations work, which is through subtle & indirect effects.

Consider, for example, our discourse around contentious issues, like transgender rights, immigration, abortion, and similar issues. How did we get to a point where anyone who even asks questions is eligible to be canceled and labeled as a bigot (L) or a Marxist extremist (R)?

I bet most of you can’t really trace how we got to this point. I also bet most of you aren’t entirely comfortable being here. It’s *almost* as if some outside influence shaped how Americans engage with these issues by exaggerating the extremes & erasing the middle ground.

By manipulating our discourse, it becomes very easy to manipulate public perceptions. Social norms can be skewed; unpopular positions can be made to look popular; perceived support for a candidate can be artificially inflated; extreme positions can become normalized; etc.

Over time, you could even convince political candidates & parties to adopt new positions, enforce new ideological purity tests, reject reasonable compromises, ostracize those who don’t conform, etc — decisions that would unknowingly be based on externally-manipulated perceptions.

In other words, you could entirely change the issues that drive people to the polls and convince people to vote for certain candidates and not others. These effects may be indirect, but this is exactly how you influence an election without touching a single voting machine.

Until we start seeing how this happens & recognize the subtle ways in which influence operations exert their effects — and stop allowing ourselves to be used as conduits — we‘ll remain highly vulnerable targets and should expect Russia and others to continue exploiting that.