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: 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
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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.” We will never know if Russia’s prolonged hackathon of American citizens definitively changed the outcome of the election. But what is certain is that the ballots cast by Americans—not Russian malware—gave Trump enough electoral votes to win the election. And voters did not make those choices in a vacuum. The media coverage of the doxxed DNC emails and the proliferation of fake news stories changed the information we considered when making our electoral choices. That is the art of information warfare.