Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Ebola Begets tRump Twitter Twats

How Russia's New Defense Doctrine Is Like Fox News:

...All of this is what brings us to Russia's dramatically expanded reliance not only on cyber-warfare but also disruption campaigns and psy-ops style operations. All great powers have always done this to a degree. But they've become central for Russia, not just a playing at the margins with the intelligence agencies and covert operations but at the forefront of defense strategy. If you haven't read it, you simply must this year old article by Adrian Chen on 'The Agency.' It is a truly fascinating, bewildering story of an agency in St Petersburg, Russia, part of the Russian military intelligence complex dedicated to spreading rumors, disinformation and trolling across the Internet, particularly in Europe and the United States. It ranges from planting random rumors in the US - an Ebola outbreak, a refinery natural disaster - to weird Twitter trolling you wouldn't imagine a great power would have any focus on. Some of it sounds less threatening than simply bizarre. In a recent interview Chen noted that a list of Russian controlled twitter accounts responsible for spreading false rumors about Ebola outbreaks in the US have now transformed into "Trump supporter" accounts. Think about that...

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