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: Certainly, Russian trolls wanted to discredit the candidates whom they detested. However, they did not seek to change Americans’ minds, but to create enough doubt, confusion and paranoia to destabilize democracy. The Mueller investigation documents this clearly. As the indictments describe it, “By in or around May 2014, the ORGANIZATION’s strategy included interfering with the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” with the stated goal of “spread [ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.” By spreading rumors, flooding the zone with disinformation, stirring up protests and counterprotests, and otherwise creating confusion, Russia wanted to gravely weaken the U.S. political system. AD
Many people believe Russian trolls did not expect Trump to be elected president. However, they wanted a United States that was sufficiently divided against itself that a President Hillary Clinton would have difficulty in governing, let alone taking decisive action abroad. This may also explain why Russian actors both spread rumors that Clinton was guilty of vote fraud and probed the vulnerabilities of online U.S. electoral records. Their likely intentions were not to fix the vote but to create enough paranoia over the possibility that the vote had been fixed that a President Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy would have been seriously damaged. As an expert report concludes about this kind of attack, “simply put, the attacker might not care who wins;