Title: How Russia hacked American voters.
Headings: Russia Didn’t Hack the U.S. Election
Russia Didn’t Hack the U.S. Election
It hacked the voters.

Content: Advertisement
Reporting has shown that Russian propaganda is likely behind the intentional spread of such stories, even when it wasn’t the originator. These stories showed up at the top of search engine results and were shared on social media sites, which have increasingly become echo chambers for our personal politics. Trump campaign officials amplified some of these stories on social media, and even traditional media outlets were fooled on occasion. Analysis since the election has shown that fake news stories outperformed real news by the end of the campaign, and most Americans, but especially Trump voters, tended to believe the fake stories to be true. Russia set out to intentionally manipulate the information that voters consumed in order to influence the decisions they made on Election Day. The goal wasn’t to change the minds of the entire populace, but seed just enough doubt in the minds of undecided and tentatively committed voters to improve Trump’s chances. Just like the phishing email that appears to be an update on the status of the Christmas gifts you ordered or warning that there’s a problem with your tax return, disinformation only has to deceive a very small percentage of the right people to be successful. Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
And we aren’t the only targets. Russia has used fake news to influence discussions concerning Sweden forming a military partnership with NATO, coupled propaganda with cyberattacks on Ukraine’s power grid, and is presently spreading disinformation in Germany to influence its politics. As the Institute for the Study of War astutely put it, Russia uses information warfare to “take advantage of pre-existing dispositions among its enemies to choose its preferred courses of action.”