We Need to Talk About Talking About Russian Trolls
The Times looks under the bed and finds another Red
In my journalism days you couldn’t just march into an editor’s office and announce: You know that thing? I think the Russians had something to do with it. There were rules. (This was not ‘Nam, Smokey.) In these before-times, one rule was that you had to at least sound like you disbelieved tales of Russian influence, because tales of Russian influence were for kooks, spooks and defense contractors, and journalists were supposed to be none of these.
Now it’s different. Sometimes you feel like today’s journalists are afraid to tell their editors they didn’t find the pernicious influence of the Kremlin in one phenomenon or another that brings discomfort to the preferred set. Johnson, people can’t possibly hate the movie Green Book this much. Look harder. There is a perverse Occam’s Razor happening here, where the efforts of Russian internet trolls are adduced as the simplest explanation for any adverse result in our politics, or at least the ones that bug the wrong (meaning, right) people.
It is no mystery where all of this came from. It originated in a bifurcated media narrative that emerged around Donald Trump’s election as President in 2016. One branch of the narrative held that the winning candidate was favored by Russia, and had even “colluded” with the Russians to (I guess) get himself elected. The other branch contended that Russia had interfered in the election, and that this interference had, with Trump’s victory, yielded success. The first branch has just about rotted off. (One terrific irony of the so-called Trump Dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, is that if it hadn’t turned out to be a fraud, it would have been a product of … collusion with Russia.) The second branch just seems to keep growing.
Which brings us to the question: What happened to the Women’s March? (No, not the new one.) One minute it was there, as the new vanguard of #Resistance to the Trump Satyricon, and then *poof*. Originally timed to coincide with the inauguration it brought millions of women into the streets in a demonstration of force and unity, and with a pledge to make things very unpleasant for the incoming administration. Millions of dollars were raised. There were fawning profiles of its leaders. Condé Nast even published a book. But within a couple of years it all was collapsing, amid charges of anti-Semitism, poor organization and financial mismanagement.
Among those at the center of all this, but not especially crucial, was a longtime Palestinian-American activist named Linda Sarsour. It is just about axiomatic nowadays that you are not an important person if you can stake out provocative public positions and no one hates your guts for it. By that measure, Sarsour was an important person. She had been fighting for Arab-American civil rights and Palestinian causes for about 15 years before joining the board of the Women’s March in late 2016. She made plenty of enemies.
Jewish groups and supporters of Israel were especially scathing. Sarsour has described herself as an anti-Zionist, and says she supports a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is to say she prefers Israel no longer exist as the Jewish State. She is also an ardent backer of the BDS movement (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions), which aims to make Israel a global pariah in hopes this will impact the fortunes of Palestinians, but which critics say is heavily infused with anti-Semitism.
These views, and the way she often expresses them — a combination of soul-sister righteousness and outer-borough moxie — has attracted plenty of attention across the years. “Linda Sarsour Is a Brooklyn Homegirl in a Hijab,” read a memorable Times headline on a profile written about her in 2015, more than a year before she joined the leadership of the Women’s March. Back in 2011 she began feuding with several conservative feminists, including Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had criticized elements of Islamic law and tradition. Things got nasty.
Sarsour was hardly the only controversialist in the group. Former members of the organizing committee have described intense sessions where co-chairs Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, in particular, made accusations about the alleged role of Jews in various historical injustices, and described their distrust of “white women” more generally. (Mallory’s association with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam became an especial source of grief.) It quickly became evident that not everyone was pulling in the same direction. Visions and agendas clashed. Rivalries grew. The resignations began. The leadership group dissolved. (The best and most comprehensive account of all this appeared in Tablet in December 2018, and is also linked above. Highly recommended.)
In any case, if Sarsour’s background doesn’t look like the sort of things that might inspire a backlash from Trump Nation, even before she helped flood the capital and other major cities with millions of hellcats, campus crusaders and election rejectionists, maybe you don’t live here, and maybe you’re never online, and maybe you think unicorn dust comes from actual unicorns.
Or maybe you work at the Times. Just the other week the Paper of Record published an autopsy of the Women’s March — actually, more of a counter-factual — which basically asks the question: What if things were pretty much on track with the movement until Russian trolls zeroed in on Linda Sarsour?
More than 4,000 miles away [from Washington, DC, a site of the protests], organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans….
Over the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Ms. Sarsour, whose activism made her a lightning rod for Mr. Trump’s base and also for some of his most ardent opposition.
One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Ms. Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.
The article is headlined, “How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step,” with a subhead that reads, “As American feminists came together in 2017 to protest Donald Trump, Russia’s disinformation machine set about deepening the divides among them.”
I’m not going to even bother laying out the argument the article attempts to make here, because if you really are prepared to believe the thesis, the Times didn’t need to write it out for you anyway. It was just something you knew in your bones, like the existence of ghosts.
But let’s have some numbers, for perspective. Roughly 500 million tweets are sent every single day. Over 18 months, that comes to about 279 billion tweets. Of these, 2,642 of the messages, or 0.0000000095 of the total (rounding up) — fewer than five messages per day, spread across 152 fake Twitter accounts — were about Linda Sarsour. This is what amounted to the Russian troll operation’s “sustained effort” at “discrediting the [Women’s March] movement.”
“It is maddeningly difficult to say with any certainty what effect Russian influence operations have had on the United States, because when they took hold they piggybacked on real social divisions. Once pumped into American discourse, the Russian trace vanishes, like water that has been added to a swimming pool,” the reporter acknowledges in a “to be sure” graf for the ages.
It continues:
This creates a conundrum for disinformation specialists, many of whom say the impact of Russian interventions has been overblown. After the 2016 presidential election, blaming unwelcome outcomes on Russia became “the emotional way out,” said Thomas Rid, author of “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.”
“It’s playing a trick on you,” said Dr. Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “You become a useful idiot if you ignore effective info ops. But also if you talk it up by telling a story, if you make it more powerful than it is. It’s a trick.”
The divisions within the Women’s March existed already.
Yet by the reckoning of the Times, this troll activity still may have helped create an (unfair?) impression that Linda Sarsour was an especially provocative Muslim activist with some pretty controversial ideas and associations, which then led to discord in the movement, enough so that it was eventually not possible for the Women’s March to continue down its path.
I’m not sure which is more hilarious: that the Times thinks some mean tweets about Sarsour from a handful of fake Twitter accounts may have brought down the Women’s March; or that the Times thinks people on Twitter, that sewer of disordered discourse, needed the help of Russian trolls to hate Linda Sarsour.
Maybe this newsletter is going to cause a road accident in Tajikistan. I don’t know.
The wonder of all this is that the Times could have written the same (dumb) story without dragging the Russians into the picture, just by highlighting nutty commentary about Sarsour and the Women’s March on Twitter, and surrounding it with a lot of readership code about the “alt-right” and “anti-Muslim extremists” and the like while hand-wringing about Twitter’s failure to “act” to curb alleged “disinformation.”
But that’s just not the done thing now. The game now, as it has been since the arrival of the Screaming Carrot Demon and the 2016 election, is to treat just about any awkward social or political outcome for the left, starting with Trump’s election, as Red Menace redux. Only this time, the people who are buying it and selling it — two groups, but indistinguishable — are the same folks who had previously dismissed the threat as a figment of right-wing fantasy, an excuse for serial depredations abroad and for violations of civil liberties at home.
Kids, it really was not too long ago that if someone called a sitting member of Congress was a Russian stooge or one of the Kremlin’s "useful idiots," she’d get a gentle pat on the head and a reminder that the Cold War was now done with so it was time to no longer be a Commie-baiting paranoiac. Rachel Maddow wasn’t even on TV, or wasn’t known. And the good liberals of America’s newsrooms still shook a collective fist at the memory of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare.
All it took to upend this condition was a humiliating loss to a walking, breathing dumpster fire in one presidential election, and ever since then the press has been looking for a Red under every bed and wondering who’s doing the Kremlin’s bidding, wittingly or unwittingly.
A little history is in order here. The introduction of Russia as an all-purpose bête noire in our domestic politics didn’t begin with Hillary Clinton’s election defeat (though that didn’t help). It actually originated earlier, in the need to shore up candidate Clinton’s image as a tormentor — not an accidental helpmate — of Putin’s.
The line on Clinton, promoted successfully in the media in 2016, was that she had been a thorn in the side of the Russian leader. But this wasn’t exactly true. Previously, as Secretary of State, Clinton had been the author of the infamous “reset” of relations with the Putin government, a change in tone and also strategy that saw the incoming Obama administration pull back from commitments to American allies in Eastern Europe, among other measures. This may have seemed like a good (or defensible) idea at the time. The assumption in the new administration was that a better relationship with Russia was possible if we reduced support for regional allies, or at least seemed to listen to Russian concerns. But the shift in approach looked exceptionally naïve once Russia invaded and then annexed Ukrainian Crimea in 2014.
The need to obscure this blot on candidate Clinton’s cv produced the imperative to cast her opponents — first Sanders, then Trump — as the real appeasers and even beneficiaries of Putin’s Russia. The press corps, no friend of Clinton’s but certainly no fan of her rivals, was eager to be convinced. And so began the weekly drip of stories, sourced to nameless Obama administration officials and intelligence specialists, that not only were the Russians trying to “disrupt” our election, but the overriding goal of this effort was to prevent Clinton from winning. (This was usually formulated as an effort to “elect Trump” — as if a Clinton presidency was what Putin really feared most of all.)
When Trump won, Democrats and the press searched for a way to explain the unexplainable, and settled on the message that the vote was “hacked,” the election was stolen, and Trump was therefore an “illegitimate” President. (Look, if you had just lost an election to a toxic clown, you’d probably be hunting for excuses, too. And no, dear reader, election “denialism” didn’t begin in 2020 or even for that matter in 2016.) Since there has never been any evidence that Russia managed to actually affect the tallies of voting machines, this turned out mostly to be an argument that Russia effectively meme’d us into a Trump presidency by flooding Twitter and Facebook with deceptive messaging.
And now, here we are. Six years on from the 2016 election, still trying to prove the Russians were pulling the strings, somehow, with social-media posts. Like an awkward native social movement led by a problematic harridan crew can’t fall apart without a boost from the Kremlin.
Well. As a patriot, I am convinced Americans are still capable of extraordinary feats of managerial incompetence and institutional collapse with nary a whisper from an unfriendly government, let alone the one in Moscow (however brutally they meme us). And when it comes to fomenting mistrust and division, I’d put our homegrown army of bug-eyed, sex-starved, rage-addicted trolls up against any on the planet. They work while we sleep. The Times is looking for culprits? Heck, our own Presidents denounce critics as “enemies of the people” and “semi-Fascist.” A well-known author just published a book that accuses political opponents of “psychosis.”
Who needs Russians?