Title: The surprise Mueller indictment tells us how we've been wrong about Russian trolls - The Washington Post
Headings: The surprise Mueller indictment tells us how we've been wrong about Russian trolls
The surprise Mueller indictment tells us how we've been wrong about Russian trolls
Henry Farrell
Russian operations probably did not change voters’ minds
That does not mean Russian activities were not important
Russia has weaponized “flooding” against the U.S.
This has implications for what comes next

Content: Even massive TV advertising campaigns appear to have only tiny effects on people’s decisions over who to vote for. Social media posts, buried among a multitude of other such posts, are likely to have even less. That does not mean Russian activities were not important
To understand what Russia has been doing abroad, you need to understand what it has been doing at home. Political scientists such as Margaret Roberts and Josh Tucker of the Monkey Cage have documented how Chinese and Russian leaders discovered a new way of dealing with inconvenient voices in their own society. Rather than just trying to censor them, they have increasingly looked to drown them in a flood of other perspectives, arguments, claims, counterclaims and nonsense. AD
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American libertarians like to say the best antidote to bad speech is good speech. What Russian and Chinese rulers have discovered is that the best antidote to good speech is bad speech — and lots of it. In a description by Adrian Chen, a journalist who has done extensive research on the Internet Research Agency, the consequence of Russian activities against their own public “was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.” What Roberts describes as “flooding” tactics make it more or less impossible to conduct ordinary democratic conversation and argument. Russia has weaponized “flooding” against the U.S.
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This is what lay behind Russian trolling tactics.