It strains credulity

A touch too much paranoia in this post and it reaches some conclusions with which I dissent, but its factual architecture is useful. From Mass Media’s Russia Hysteria Is Openly Acknowledging The Power Of Propaganda by Caitlin Johnstone.

“So now the question becomes: how did Russia know to target African American voters, and especially in certain key states,” asked popular #Resistance pundit Amy Siskind in response to a New York Times article claiming Russian social media trolls targeted Sanders supporters and Black voters during the 2016 election.

[snip]

This whole story is unbelievably idiotic. Not just because it’s based on a report by a private cybersecurity company that was founded by an NSA veteran, a company which would have every incentive to bend its findings in the most sensational way possible to attract clients with a viral new “bombshell” story about Russian election meddling. Not just because it infantilizes voters by implying that a smattering of cutesy memes deprived them of independent agency and caused the failure of Hillary Clinton’s historically awful presidential campaign. Not just because of the sleazy gaslighting element inherent in a narrative which insinuates that a populace meant to elect a different candidate but got confused. By far the dumbest thing about this story is the implicit suggestion that only Russian propaganda was at play during the 2016 election, and no other propaganda.

It’s often claimed that the dastardly Russians had a $1.2 million monthly budget for US social media influence in the lead-up to the 2016 election, but that’s false. As Aaron Maté noted back in February, this figure actually covers the Russian troll farm’s total operating budget, which was for “domestic audiences within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in various countries, including the United States.” So the actual monthly budget was some thousands of dollars, and most of the troll farm’s posts weren’t even about the election. Contrast that with Hillary Clinton’s $1.2 billion campaign budget and the untold billions of dollars worth of free mass media coverage she received, and even if everything we’re being told about Russia’s “influence campaign” is completely true, that’s a microscopic drop in the bucket.

FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver, a fairly reliable establishment loyalist, tweeted today about the new Russia report saying “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.”

“For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on… 5,000 tweets? That’s **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day,” Silver continued.

For all the fearmongering we see in the mass media about “Russian propaganda”, propaganda from Russia actually constitutes an almost nonexistent percentage of the media westerners consume which is designed to influence the way they think, act and vote. You can go your whole life without ever encountering any propaganda that was cooked up by the Kremlin, yet every day you are surrounded by screens, billboards and literature aimed at manipulating you into supporting the corporatist oligarchy that rules the nation you live in. The only reason anyone thinks Russian psyops have any kind of meaningful influence on people’s minds is because the mass media have been shrieking about it day in and day out for two years without ever contrasting it with the rest of the propaganda they consume.

The original claim that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian state always struck me as highly implausible and the absence of any evidence since then makes me even more confident in that assessment. Two years of desperate searching by both the Special Prosecutor and the entirety of the press and there is nothing to show for it except some minor process charges against tangential characters for issues unrelated to Russia.

"There's no there there" to quote Gertrude Stein. Or more colloquially, "Where's the beef" from Wendy's.

Just as "anthropogenic global warming" morphed, motte and bailey style, into the more defensible "climate change", so has "Russian Collusion" morphed into "Russian Influence".

The Russian Influence claim is a more defensible motte because the Russians (and most our major allies) have always been trying to influence America, during election years and during off-years. They have been doing it explicitly through government statements, ambassadorial interviews, etc. as well as through more nefarious and subterranean campaigns. Just as we do with their elections.

What was Radio Free Europe but an entirely above-board exercise in getting an American worldview to the Soviet Citizenry.

I am not making a moral equivalency, just a functional one. I am fine that we thought RFE was a good strategy for undermining the Soviet Union by fostering a hunger for freedom and democracy. I am simply observing that there is nothing new going on that hasn't been going on for decades. The strategies to achieve influence and the mechanisms to execute that strategy shift, but the goals remain the same.

And while communication masters are deeply informed and the techniques keep getting refined, the effectiveness also remains deeply unproven. We know some campaigns work in some circumstances but it all comes back to the old consumer product adage "I know half my ad budget is wasted, I just don't know which half."

If the fostering of postmodernism, critical theory, social justice theory, etc. among public intellectuals was a deliberate Gramscian campaign by the Soviets, then that has been one of the most consequential campaigns ever. It is possible that it was deliberate, it is possible that it was opportunistic, and it is possible that it was just coincidental to what was happening anyway. If deliberate, then that has got to count as one of the most successful influence campaigns of all time.

But in terms of anything special about the 2016 campaign, this is all a red herring. The number of ads were minuscule and from all the reporting I have seen, it was for mixed purposes and no measurable effect.

And as Johnstone points out, it was all a tiny drop in the bucket of all the campaign messaging going on from the parties, the candidates, the incumbent, the other foreign entities with a stake in American politics, from the vested interests in the US, etc.

The premise only has plausibility to the extent that anything is possible but in terms of evidence - there's nothing there again.

And the theory of Russian ad purchases doesn't address one of the more notable outcomes of the election - the candidate who spent less money, had more media and establishment opposition (even from his own nominal party) and who made a materially lower ad buy is the candidate who one. It strains credulity, under those circumstances, to claim a toothpick of ad purchases in a Sequoiadendron giganteum of wood accounts for the outcome.

So why are we still talking about Russian Collusion and Russian Influence? Probably because the candidate of the mainstream media did not win and the press is still adjusting to an inconceivable reality - they don't know as much as they think they know, they are not as smart as they think they are, and they don't know America the way they think they know America. The result of the campaign was such a indictment of their competency that they would prefer to believe the unbelievable than acknowledge that bitter truth.

Or, at least, that is one possible explanation. Another possibility is that we are still talking about Russian Collusion and Russian Influence because it is one more deep psyops campaign by those devious Russians. The Russians are manipulating our press to foster a distrust of the American system of government, American institutions, and the American way of life. Implausible? You decide.