The 2020 race is hardly underway, and already candidates are being targeted with the same techniques Russia employed in the 2016 and 2018 cycles. According to Politico, which confirmed its findings with digital experts, a “sustained and ongoing” disinformation campaign has begun in earnest, targeting top Democrats including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Beto O’Rourke. It’s not clear whether Russia is behind this latest round of election meddling, but per Politico, “there are clear signs of a coordinated effort of undetermined size that shares similar characteristics with the computational propaganda attacks launched by online trolls at Russia’s Internet Research Agency.”
“It looks like the 2020 presidential primary is going to be the next battleground to divide and confuse Americans,” said Brett Horvath, co-founder of Guardians.ai, a tech company that aims to protect pro-democracy groups from online meddling. “As it relates to information warfare in the 2020 cycle, we’re not on the verge of it—we’re already in the third inning.”
According to the analysis, the latest disinformation campaign reportedly consists of a familiar cocktail of memes, hashtags, and misleading portrayals of candidates’ positions. The aim, it seems, is to exploit and exacerbate divisions between Americans; as in 2016, many of the posts specifically play on race. Harris, Politico notes, has been the subject of “racist and sexist stereotypes” in tweets sensationalizing her relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Another popular false story claimed Warren had a blackface doll in the background of an Instagram live stream she conducted on New Year’s Eve. And O’Rourke was the subject of a tweet from a suspicious account that claimed he had used racist language in a voicemail in the 1990s.
Some of the same accounts involved in the latest disinformation campaign were also involved in meddling efforts in last year’s midterms: “We can conclusively state that a large group of suspicious accounts that were active in one of the largest influence operations of the 2018 cycle is now engaged in sustained and ongoing activity for the 2020 cycle,” Horvath said. The difference, according to Horvath, is that the latest campaign appears to be even more sophisticated.
That unknown actors—what former Barack Obama digital director Teddy Goff called a “hodgepodge” that could include Russia, North Korea, and Iran—are continuing their efforts to interfere in American elections should come as no surprise. Donald Trump, who benefitted from Russian interference in 2016, has long resisted holding Moscow accountable for its intervention. He’s been reluctant to sanction the Kremlin, and repeatedly backed Vladimir Putin’s denials. What’s more, he and his allies have appeared to make little to no effort to learn from what happened in 2016 to ensure the security of future elections. As my colleague Nick Bilton reported last summer, Russia is once again looking to “drive a wedge deeper and deeper into the United States, pitting Americans against Americans, breaking the system from within.” And under a president who has helped further those divisions, it seems the nation is as vulnerable as ever.
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