Modern Wisdom - #210 - Nina Jankowicz - Russian Election Meddling & Fake News

Episode Date: August 15, 2020

Nina Jankowicz is a writer and an analyst for Central and Eastern Europe. Expect to learn whether Russia are meddling in our elections, why Moscow cares, how the predecessor to BLM was controlled by a Russian agency, how Russia recruits local citizens to be vehicles for misinformation, the impact of bot farms and much more... Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy How To Lose The Information War - https://amzn.to/2XLq6LL  Follow Nina on Twitter - https://twitter.com/wiczipedia Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello comrades, welcome back to modern wisdom. My guest today is Nina Jankowicz and we're talking about Russia's election meddling and their fake news misinformation, disinformation campaign, which I didn't, I just thought was like an internet rumour and turns out is this hugely sophisticated campaign, which has been going on for years and years and is utilizing local actors and citizens of individual countries to cause all sorts of havoc. This really did blow my mind, so yeah get ready for this one. But for now it's time to find out about Russia's misinformation, bot farm, psycho, internet, war.

We need to janko it. Is Russia listening to this podcast? Oh wow, probably. Oh fuck! You know, I sent a couple copies of my book to friends and journalists in Moscow and they never arrived, so I only assumed that they're at least listening to some of the podcast appearances I've made. Bloody hell. So where do we start?

Let's, let's lay the land for people who don't know the, what the IRA, oh, I think that the IRA is like the terrorist cell in, in Ireland. Yeah, I get that a lot. Yeah, what do you mean the IRA? Are they getting involved? They were quite militant. I didn't think they were getting involved in internet troll. So like that's bot farms and Russia. Like what's going on at the moment?

Sure. Well, at the moment, nothing is very different from what it was in 2016. There are nations that are interfering. Russia is one of them. It uses a variety of tactics to do this, including this Internet Research Agency, which is this infamous troll farm that exists in St. Petersburg, Russia. It's handed up by an oligarch, pre-gusion, his last name, who also owns some catering companies, and he also does fake army people for hire that he sent to the Central African Republic in a bunch of other places. But he's known as Putin's chef

because of his catering businesses. Then he also set up this troll farm where they have a couple hundred people working and we know this thanks to great reporting from Russians and folks who were whistleblowers at the IRA. And basically their job is to influence the discourse of a bunch of countries. Two main targets have been, of course, the United States

and Ukraine, especially after the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. And Ukraine was kind of the IRA's laboratory, that's where they tested a lot of the tactics. And at the same time, we're trying them out here in the United States. We know that they bought $100,000 worth of Facebook ads in 2016. That was able to slip under the rug, but we've gotten a little bit wiser. I hope at least the social media firms are looking for that sort of manipulation, but Russia doesn't stop, right? We've given them no real cost.

We've imposed no cost to make them really disengage from this activity. And certainly the UK hasn't either. The Russia report just came out last week. And we learned that the UK government has kind of dropped the ball on this issue. And as a result, you know, bad actors be they Russia or China or Iran or Venezuela, they are manipulating our discourse using the loopholes in the fabric of the internet and social media and exploiting our very openness and democracy, which kind of is, I think, you know, it's one of our weaknesses. It's both our strength and our weakness. The fact that we are open and transparent means that they can get in

the discourse. The fact that we have, you know, the First Amendment here in the United States and we want to value freedom of speech and of expression. We're very hesitant to touch any of that kind of pernicious, spurious content that might be online. And as a result, we are seeing our own societal fishers turned on their heads and manipulated in order to drive us against one another and decrease engagement in the democratic process. And we're only 98 days away from an election right now

here in the States. Fucking hell. It's just, it just, it doesn't sound good. It's the synopsis is, it doesn't sound very good. Okay, so we have professional catfish, fake news, bot farm disinformation, misinformation, that is far more sophisticated than anyone could have imagined coming out of a country that looks like it's only just discovered the wheel, but actually

is crazy sophisticated and also a place to the fact that it feels like this sort of backwards bludgeoning fool is kind of like tumbling through the world circuit and actually is really, really adept at this stuff. It's happening from multiple different countries. The how is varied and we're going to get into that. The what is nuanced and we're going to get into that. And the result is fractured to society, people not believing in diplomacy and democracy and increasing polls to either end, which tear at the fabric of the middle. Yes, yes, that's exactly right.

That's because I read the book. I read the book and then I was able to just tell you what you wrote. And now I sound like I'm an expert on it. So where do we begin? Is it the what they're doing? Is it the how they're doing it? I think the how they're doing it is more instructive actually. So I had a little bit of a tip with my publisher about the subtitle of the book.

They really wanted it to be Russia Fake News in the future of conflict, which you will see that it did end up that way. But I pushed back against fake news being in the subtitle, because while it is a signpost to most normal people who don't think about this for their job, like I do, it's a misnomer. Most disinformation, many of the information operations that have been most effective both coming from Russia and the domestic stuff that we're dealing with isn't about cut and dry fakes.

It's not about a fake article about something Hillary Clinton did or something Trump did. It's stuff that plays on our emotions. That's the currency of disinformation. And Russia is very adapted identifying that. So they look for fishers in our society. And in the United States, we have many of them. That is by virtue of the fact that we are a large country.

We have a lot of cleavages in our society, ethnic, racial, economic that can be exploited. And certainly our discourses become more and more polarized. And they just identify those hot button issues and kind of poke at them from either side of the spectrum. And that's the second misconception, right? A lot of people think, okay, you know, Russia wanted the UK to leave the European Union, Russia wanted Trump to be in the White House, because that's beneficial to Russia. Both of those things are true, but that doesn't mean that they

were only kind of agitating on behalf of those causes. They were agitating on both sides of the spectrum. So pro-leave, pro-lum, remain, pro-Trump, pro-Clinton. Well, they really didn't ever do any pro-Clinton stuff, but they did do pro-Sanders and pro-Jillstein. And the idea, again, is to just let the zone with information so much that people disengage, they get people who are engaged to turn against one another. And all of that benefits Moscow Moscow because it means that our

democracies are in shambles that we're not able to reach consensus, which is one of the most important things about politics and creating a functioning government. It means that government is less responsive and that's great for Putin. He can point to that to say to Russians, you know, is that the sort of democracy you want? Is that why you're on the streets right now? No, you want something stable, you want order. And that's what I'm giving you here in Russia. It also means that, you know, Russia's status is definitely increased in the world. Is there a time since 2016 where the United States hasn't been

going on and on about Russia every day? There's at least one Russia-related disinformation article, not to mention all the other stuff that they've been doing, which of course we've been kind of ignoring, right? Because we're so concerned with this, we're so concerned with what's going on at home. All of that's great for Putin. How do we define or how do we identify the difference between Russian or Malignant malign actor instantiated news which is making people

not want to engage with the discourse and Domestic based news because it seems like the tactics that Russia's using here which is divisive Encouraging people to disengage with talking online and stuff like that. Seems like we're doing a pretty good job of that ourselves, and the fact that I can say that sentence makes me think, where's the line? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's actually one of the main points of the book.

So I went out and did this reporting in five countries in central and Eastern Europe, thinking like, okay, I'm going to write a lot about Russian disinformation. But really, the main point is that you can't fight Russian disinformation or Chinese disinformation or what have you if you're not addressing domestic disinformation as well. We need to understand that disinformation no matter its vector is a threat to democracy. And that's something that we've really not not gotten to here in the United States. I think there is a disincentive to tell the truth in our politics lately. If you are telling the truth, you are absolutely on the back foot compared to the people who

are using the Russian playbook on their own citizens. And we've seen a lot of that here. There are other countries in the book I talk about, namely Poland, where that has been playing out. You couldn't have a country that understands the Russian threat more than Poland. And yet, they're doing so little to address it because they're kind of enveloped in the domestic disinformation scheme at home, and you can't have it both ways, you just can't. And that's where kind of the regulation question comes into play.

Nobody's really answered that question yet. But really, the rules need to apply to everybody, no matter the vector of that disinformation. This sounds, and some people listening maybe thinking that this just sounds like crazy conspiracy theory. Right, let's get our tinfoil hats out, Nina's chatting again. What are some of the explicit examples that you came up with, all your favorite examples from the book on some of the times that stuff has occurred due to Russia's input? Sure, so my favorite one for a couple of reasons. One, it demonstrates that it's not just a Republican thing, disinformation here in the United States,

it can be a liberal thing too, so that's one reason it's great. It also happened after the 2016 elections, so interference still going on, even after these revelations came to light. And three, it shows the fact that, well, actually four things. Let me edit myself. So four things.

So three, it shows the fact that homegrown actors are used in these campaigns a lot. And four, it shows that it has a real life impact when we move out of the offline space. So, IRL is the kids would say, right? This is the story of Ryan Clayton and Americans take action. And the July 4th, 2017, Les Miserables flash mob that they held in front of the White House. So, I was in October of 2018 actually coming home from the UK, I got off a transatlantic flight and turned my phone on as I was making my way through customs in Washington.

And I got a flurry of text messages about a new part of the Mueller investigation, the Russian investigation that had just been unsealed. It was a criminal complaint detailing how the IRA operated, how they made their money, how they spent it. And in that complaint, they detailed a few instances where the IRA was spending money on events in the DC area across the country. One of them was a musical theater showtunes flash mob.

And it's really funny that that was included in there because I had seen ads for this event. I do theater in my spare time, which I don't have a lot of anymore, but I had been served this ad. It was like come dress up like colonists on on July 4th and sing lay miss and demand Trump's impeachment from the White House. Like I remembered this ad. So I got really excited and I started reaching out to all my theater friends and being like, I actually was out of the country at that point in 2017, but I was like, did you guys go to this?

Cause I remembered people posting about it, couldn't find any of my friends who went, but there were videos online. And so I reached out to the guy, this guy Ryan Clayton, he's in his 30s, he's kind of a hipster, he's a progressive activist, and found him in the videos and said, Ryan, did you know that the internet research agency bought $80 worth

of ads in order to turn more people out to your protests? And I think his response was, holy shit, thank you for letting us know. They had no idea. And they weren't explicitly mentioned in the complaint. They were kind of referred to as like organization one or something like that. But then I met him later for coffee. And he told me all about his background as a progressive activist. And he's the one that said what you were referencing before. You know, it's not about a specific worldview.

It's about pulling at the fabric of society on the sides so that it rips down the middle. And I just think this is such a great example of the fact that, you know, Russia doesn't create this stuff. It often uses local conduits. It happens in real life, it has a real life impact. He thinks that was one of the most successful protests because of those ads. They were so well targeted. And, you know, it kept going after 2016. It's just staggering to me. So, it's not like Russia ascending over spies, or there's a bunch of Russians taking off their little sort of fuzz hats and then donning, like, hippie elephant pants and going

outside of the White House. Well, we don't know that for sure. The internet research agency did send a couple of employees over to do kind of a reconnaissance mission. And I think 2014 or 2015, but no, it's not like FSB agents are coming from the Russian embassy. Just saying relay me is outside. They're actually, yeah, which is the best part.

You should watch the videos they're really really inspiring. But yeah it's it's more about using people who are already expressing these viewpoints, identifying them and amplifying them. And that's what's still happening today, right? You know we've gotten a little bit better at detecting those fake ads. Facebook doesn't allow those for the most part to be bought anymore. But Russia continues its information laundering using those authentic local voices to deliver or amplify a divisive message, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly. There was a CNN investigation in March that broke the fact that the internet research agency had contracted

with PR firms in Ghana and Nigeria to spread its messaging, kind of pro-black lives matter messaging in the United States. So they have that conduit, but that's one of the witting examples. We have unwitting examples all the time of, you know, fringe outlets, unknowingly amplifying Russian narratives or Russian-based content, that sort of thing, or narratives on unfriend outlets that deliberately take stuff from RT and Sputnik or other Russian propaganda sources.

So it's complicated. And then there's money involved as well. Elicit finance and how networks of organizations and political parties are supporting all of those narratives to lend credence to them and they're supported by the Russian government. It's like the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I suppose, unfortunately. And if you as someone on one side of the aisle permits something, some disinformation or misinformation to go ahead, because you know that it's going to damage the person that's on the other side of the aisle, you're kind of, you are a little bit complicit. Have you got any idea if and if so how much they've been involved over the last few months? Has there been any rumors about how much

they've got involved in the recent Black Lives Matter protests and stuff like that? Well, it's hard to track these campaigns in real time, especially because the platforms don't give us back-end access. So what we do have is based on Twitter, which everybody knows that Twitter is not real life, and Facebook, you know, we kind of have to do guesswork. So it's hard to identify this stuff in real time, and they're not creating those same fake accounts the way that they used to. All of that being said, if you look at the kind of overt

propaganda that Russia puts out on our teen sputnik and similar outlets like Rupply, which is a subsidiary of RT, there's a whole bunch of smaller video outlets that Russia uses. They've certainly taken a really critical view of the US during these protests, which like, honestly, we deserve it. We have been harassing and beating protesters and journalists and it's hard to think about how we have to like

stand on when it comes to talking about human rights abuses and things like that when that sort of thing is happening here. And that's perfect for Russia. It's ready made disinformation. is happening here, and that's perfect for Russia. It's ready-made disinformation. In terms of broader campaigns that have been going on, it, again, really hard to track, but we do know that Senate and House Democrats have been demanding a briefing from the FBI related to foreign interference in the 2020 election, and the intelligence community just last week released

an assessment that said it was basically a warning to American citizens saying, a bunch of different actors are trying to influence the election. Russia is one of them, China is one of them, but we're really concerned about Russia, especially related to cyber issues. We know that Russia, for instance, is hacking vaccine trials for COVID-19. But the Senate and House Democrats say that that wasn't enough.

And we need more detail about the types of campaigns that are going on. So Americans know what to look out for and what information to trust, frankly. Of course, that gets really politicized again, because any discussion of Russian interference is automatically viewed as an indictment of Trump's legitimacy. And that's really, really unfortunate. No one is, OK, people are claiming that Trump is not a legitimate president. I am not one of them.

I just want to make sure that we are protecting our discourse and that people have the tools they need to navigate the information environment wherein it's not a political issue for me right now. Talk me through the life of an IRA agent. How many people do you work with? What you turn up to work, you sit down at your desk, you learn about, what do you do? Do you read a bit about America? Come up with a funny meme about Donald Trump, send it out, spend a bit of like boost the post and then leave it.

Like what are they doing? Talk me through what they, how many people work there and where it out, spend a bit of boost the post, and then leave it like, what are they doing? Talk me through how many people work there and where it is and stuff. Yeah, I don't know if we have an updated number about how many work there anymore. It used to be a couple hundred. They since moved their headquarters and we don't know where they are anymore. I mean, maybe somebody in the intelligence community does,

but I don't know. And they have these different departments. The America department is a lot of former journalists, especially young people who have good knowledge of English. They have good knowledge of American culture, which is, frankly, a lot of Russians. They have law and order reruns constantly on in Russia, for instance.

They consume a lot of American culture. I think they're consuming a little bit of American media watching the trends and the information space. They have some guidance about issues that they should be pressing and what candidates they should be supporting and what they should be kind of denigrating. But ultimately, I would describe the approach as spaghetti at the wall. They are throwing spaghetti at the wall. They are throwing spaghetti at the wall. All they are seeing what sticks,

and then they are continually throwing that same sticky piece of pasta at that same spot on the wall because they know it works. And social media allows them to do that. So anybody who's ever bought a Facebook out or promoted anything on Twitter or Google understands the level of targeting data you have, you can really A, B test things to see what is resonating with people, and it's just a ready-made kind of disinformation laser gun.

But they have to figure out what works first. And so if you look through the Russian ads from 2016 that the House Democrats released in 2018, it's not necessarily all like bang on super successful engaging content. Some of it's really weird. And that's because they were testing things, right? Some of them have no engagement at all. It's just totally out of left field. And I think that's what's really interesting about it. The other interesting thing is that they understand that you can't just hit people over the head with false or misleading information right away.

You kind of have to earn their trust, because people are still, even today, I think, a little bit skeptical of new information they encounter online. And so the campaigns look like community building. Originally, they start with content that's, if we're talking about the Black Lives Matter movement, content that is about black history

or like positive contributions of Black Americans to society. And then after a couple of months, if not a couple of years of that, it moves on to stuff that is a little bit more political. So asking people to change their profile picture in support of a cause, asking them to sign an online petition, asking them to turn up in real life to a protest.

And it's really ingenious the way that that works. They've also identified, as I mentioned before, different activists who are passionate, legitimate activists and looking for just some extra support. So if somebody comes to you and says, I want to buy you some ads for your protest, as Ryan Clayton from Americans Take Action told me, he was like, well, as long as they're not politicians

for killing puppies, then like, yeah, I'm going to take your money because it's important to me to get my cause across. And I think that's the sort of thing that's happening. And especially because Facebook in particular is using groups now as such an important part of its platform in a way to engage users. That is where we're seeing a lot of this really, really scary information being shared because there's less oversight there and these are closed spaces. oversight there and these are closed spaces. God, I just keep on thinking that how much of the stuff that I see online is created by some fellow sat in the IRA.

What are some of the ads that they ran during 2016 that were either some of the ones that were effective and some of the hilarious ones that were ineffective. Can you remember any of those? Yeah, my favorite one is this golden retriever who I love dogs. I have a dog. He's actually quite famous. He was on an NPR once National Public Radio here in DC. Yeah, he howls along to the theme song of one of their evening news shows. So he's a famous dog. This other dog, perhaps not so famous, this dog didn't do that well in the ads. He's a golden retriever. He's kind of sat in a little field.

His paws are crossed. He's got a red and white star bandana on and he's holding a little American flag between his paws. Obviously, this was Photoshopped. And it says on the picture, like if you think it's gonna be a great week, which I probably wouldn't like that

because I don't know if you if you wouldn't like that you don't have a soul. Exactly right? Or you hate America. Which like fine fine maybe maybe you don't think the dog should be holding a flag. Maybe that's animal abuse I'm not sure But so that was one of their kind of more positive ads. It was shared on the Being Patriotic Facebook page. There were other ones that were about Beyonce. It was like, you know, trying to come for Queen Bay, as we call her. Kind of, I don't know, career-assizing her. There was like a dance-off post about Beyonce. There were some things that encouraged, again, on the being patriotic page

that encouraged Trump supporters to dress their kids up in Make America Great Again gear and take pictures of them. And then they were gonna, there was a contest and whoever got the most likes would, I forget what the thing was, but that scares me because it's using kids and they're putting their images on the internet. What else was there?

There was this duo of two black guys in Russia who made content for YouTube. This never took off. They basically just made content targeted at the American black community. And it was just basically talking about police brutality and stuff like that, but they weren't, they weren't from America. They were from, I forget which African country, living in Russia clearly targeting black Americans. And it just, it's never really getting back.

One of the slightly less subtle approaches that they went for there. Yeah, exactly. I am Demetra. I mean, Daniel, and this is like... Yeah. They just weren't well produced. I mean, there's something to say for Infotainment, which Russia is really good at. And if you are interested in this, I would recommend Peter Pomeransev's book, Nothing is

True and Everything is Possible. He worked as a TV producer in Russia in the 90s, which was a crazy time to be in Russia. And he talks about all these slickly produced things that they're so good at. This was not one of them. It doesn't seem like it. It also seems like they've read Gary Vaynerchuk's Jab Jab Jab Right Hook, where it's like, oh, I just keep on giving you some of this. It's a dog. It's just a dog with a bandana and this and this. And then we just sign this petition. The thing that makes me feel the most uncomfortable is when it

starts to move from virtual to a reality, like when people are going and doing a thing. Yeah. You know, you feel like there's a boundary, some sort of sphere within which things can happen. And as long as it's on the internet, it kind of doesn't matter when it gets into the real world. Was it, did Russia have the biggest black-to-visst Facebook page before, they were bigger than Black Lives Matter and it was Russia. Exactly right. Yeah, Black TV was the name of the page and it had more Facebook followers

than Black Lives Matter. And the race component of all of Russia's engagement was probably the strongest and most successful component. On both sides of the coin, both the racist and the anti-racist side of the coin, but particularly targeted at Black Americans and trying to get them to disengage and not come out to vote. What does it say that the biggest Black activist page on the internet wasn't domestically owned. Russia had control over an increasingly divisive inflammatory topic. It's not surprising actually. Russia has been really good at using race for the stuff for decades. In fact, they don't have any black people. How do they even know how race

works? Well, actually, Russia has 100 different ethnicities. Russians will tell you this on the side. None of them are black. They do have some Muslims, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But during the Soviet Union, in fact, one of the big elements of Soviet propaganda was that there was no racism in the Soviet Union and that black Americans should feel

comfortable to travel to the Soviet Union, where they would be treated as equals. It was one of their main calling cards. And I took a Soviet film class my first year of undergrad, and we watched this movie called Circus. And you can find this online. I can send it to you as well to include in the show notes. But the end of this movie, basically,

this American Circus performer comes to Russia on a tour. There's this evil guy who's kind of her manager. He finds out that she has a black baby and this is she thinks this is gonna be a huge scandal. He thinks it's gonna ruin her career and it turns out at the end that this you know corneacopia of Soviet peoples in front of which she's performing just except the baby and the ending of the film is them passing the baby around singing him a lullaby in all of their like native languages and native garb their ethnic garb Which I mean that

There's a there's a lot of ethnic problems in in Russia and the former so it's face a lot of racism against people who are Not visibly white. So it's and I've had black friends who have encountered a lot of this as well. So it's BS, hogwash, but they're very good at using this and very practiced it using this in the American context. And of course, like, again, it's not something that they really have to create. America has an endemic racism problem. And unfortunately, there are people who don't want to admit that. And so they're a prime target.

And then the people who are, you know, passionately fighting for social justice and racial justice are also targets for the reasons that we discussed before because they're actively working and really want to get something done here. It must feel as an activist of a worthy cause in your mind that's just doing your thing and I just learned some stuff online, man, and I read this blog post and watched this video and now I'm out here doing my bit for the cause. Like to find out that that cause was falsely created by someone from a country on the opposite side of the planet. I don't know what that says in a meta ethics term for what the truth is that that person believes in. Does that push them closer to a truth that they wouldn't have known otherwise. Is it unfair to tell someone something that

makes them act in a way when you're not from the country and you have a different... Do you know what I mean? Like you can get kind of quite abstract with thinking about whether it's justified or not to further a cause which at its essence might have veracity and truth, but isn't being done for the right reasons? Does that make sense? Yeah, so I think the difference is, Russia's not creating this stuff, it's exploiting it. So I don't blame the activists at all, right?

I think they are doing their intentions are pure and nobody should take action against them for unknowingly engaging in this stuff. They have no, no, and no one really has to their credit. I think it's worth educating activists and kind of members of civil society about the fact that you can't trust everybody you meet on the internet.

Actually, I think this is worthwhile for everybody to understand, especially those of us who are active in like Facebook groups and stuff. You know, I give the example a lot that just because you're in a group of local moms doesn't mean that everybody there is actually a local mom. And if you've not met them or been on the phone with them in person, like face to face or in person, like on the audio, geez, I can't talk. Then, you know, you have reason to believe that they aren't who they say they are. And in fact, a lot of the activists who were being manipulated by Russia, they tried to

get them on the phone and they could never get anybody on the phone and they kind of just gave up and were like, all right, like whatever we're doing this action, we're doing this rally, it is what it is. And I think that's a red flag these days and we just have to be careful about it. And there are going to be people who are going to care about that on both sides of the spectrum. They're just going to say, I'm fine with taking that money. I don't care. I'm still, this is what I believe in.

And that's where we need some regulation. There are rules about foreign money in elections. There are going to be, I hope I hope soon rules about foreign influence online related to political issues and and everybody needs to kind of increase their awareness of the fact that There are people manipulating the the online discourse across the spectrum inside and outside of our borders Why did the Russians want Trump in office? Well, they hate Clinton They really really know Loads of people hated her. Well, it was kind of personal with Putin and

Clinton. He saw her as personally responsible for a protests that happened in 2012 that were probably the biggest check on his legitimacy in office that he had ever faced. He saw those protests as funded by the United States and organized by the United States, even though they weren't. So, and she was pretty tough on him. And I was clear that her administration was gonna be tough on him. Trump, on the other hand, has a soft spot for authoritarians,

had publicly questioned whether Crimea should be part of Ukraine or part of Russia, just, you know, cliff notes, it's part of Ukraine. Like it's Ukraine's sovereign territory for anyone wondering, and we don't allow countries to just rewrite borders anymore. He has a lot of connections to Russian organized crime. He, a lot of the tenants in his condos and his buildings were Russian oligarchs still are because he's not divested himself from from any of those holdings. So I think in short Putin knew he would be easy to manipulate and I think that's proven true. We've not imposed any costs and he significant

costs on the Russian regime for the things that they've done not only in regard to disinformation, but vis-a-vis Ukraine, vis-a-vis Syria, there's any number of things we could have been harsher on. And for some reason, Trump has kind of just allowed that stuff to happen without any check or even worse. His administration has imposed costs in other parts of government, be it the State Department or Treasury imposing sanctions on certain Russians, and then Trump has come in and kind of undercut a lot of that.

He's just created this kind of incongruity between what his administration does and then the things he says to Putin. And he talks to Putin on the phone all the time. We never get readouts from what those calls say beyond like very, very broad things. And, you know, he's been publicly very positive about his relationship with Putin. He jokes with Putin about election interference. He wags his finger and says, don't you meddle in our elections?

Which I don't know, that's not the warning that I as an American citizen want to see Trump giving Putin. And there's nothing I want more than for us to have great relations with Russia, probably under a different leader, right? I love the Russian people, I lived there, I love many Russians, a lot of them were at my wedding,

right? It's not about Rousseff-Fobia, it's about rules of the international order and like democratic and human rights norms that we seem to have abandoned for reasons that I can't fully explain unless I were able to get into Trump's brain. Yeah, I understand. It seems at the moment listening to a lot of stuff

that comes from Joe Rogan's podcast, also Ben Shapiro's stuff. I've got Chris Voss from the FBI. I've got him on soon. And some of the stuff that I've heard him talk about, it seems like China is like, China's the hot new girl in school to be worried about as an international power.

And it almost feels a little bit to me like, Russia was the old fear for a long time, right? Cold War, then that kind of gets out, it gets affected across, then the USSR kind of break War, then that kind of gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out, it gets out the planet. And then the UK government, only last month, said that they're going to roll back the integration of 5G towers that are being provided by China because of concerns for security and stuff like that. So are you, are you team Russia for who we need to be more worried about? I think we can be worried about both at once. And that's actually what makes it a

much more difficult challenge right when you've got multiple very strong adversaries in the international arena that are both screwing with you in different ways. I think that's that's a really challenging scenario. How do you distinguish the two? What's the what's the relative roles that they're both playing? Sure with the caveat that I am you, all of my background is in Russia and Russian studies, and I just read about China, but the way that I understand it is, China has always practiced disinformation on propaganda to some extent.

With the online stuff, they've just started to dip their toes into the type of things that Russia has been doing. And still, the goal of Chinese disinformation isn't necessarily to pull the fabric of society apart, like we were talking about before. It's to promote China as a world power. It's to promote the Chinese kind of narrative, the Chinese view of the world, and of course to denigrate the United States and other Western

powers. Russia has its own kind of masochistic unscrupulous goals that differ in that way. And then in terms of tactics, Russia's gotten really good at the manipulation of those fishers, whereas China is still just using kind of overt propaganda and that's the most successful thing for them. So they're using diplomatic accounts, state-run propaganda channels, overt messengers to send a coordinated message across many different information environments in the West and elsewhere. And if they're using fake accounts, they've not done a very good job of it. So there have been some analyses of like how China during the first wave of Hong

Kong protests, how China was trying to influence the rhetoric and dialogue about what was going on there. And it was all really heavy handed stuff that just, I mean, I think nobody really bought into it. I wouldn't put it past them that they're going to get better at it. And they do use disinformation really, of course, very effectively on their domestic population. They have what's called the Tencent Army, which is this Army full of commenters who comment on public posts, on blogs and like we chat and things like that,

that's like pro CCP propaganda. So if those folks spoke other languages and were unleashed on the world, we'd have ourselves a problem. But for some reason, they've not done that yet. And I think part of that's because they have kind of a technical leg up and certainly an economic leg up in ways that Russia doesn't.

They don't need to engage in that sort of cheap, easy return on investment stuff because they have so many levers in diplomatic and economic negotiations that Russia, certainly in the economic realm, does not. So that's where I see the difference. And I think there, again, both problems for coming at us in different vectors. And we're going to need people in government who understand both of these countries.

We're going to need people who understand the tools and tactics that they're using. And people who are willing to look at the problems that both of these nations are exploiting at home, whether that's US economic insecurity or our societal issues and strengthen the domestic situation, which it sounds like the UK is moving in the right direction with that. With China, hopefully the Russia report will kind of give you a kick in the pants with

regard to Russia, although I have to say, if any of my colleagues who I've worked with across British government are listening, I do think that you guys are more with it than the US government is, and you've done a lot of good work in terms of holding the tech companies accountable And you've also done good work in in Europe supporting governments and Organizations that are countering Russian disinformation. So it's not all bad How much of it is a top-down problem? How much of it is policy makers need to steam in and say right you need to show policy makers need to steam in and say, right, you need to show national certified identification to start a Twitter or Facebook account.

Or you need. Do you know what's a solution here from a policy side? Well, I will say that I think one thing the Russia report shows is that it was successful administrations and governments in the UK that kind of dropped the ball. So successive rather not successful. Successive administrations that dropped the ball. And here in the United States we certainly have a leadership problem. Trump doesn't want to recognize that this is a problem. That recognition, whether it's coming from UK Prime Minister, US President, is key to

shoring up the resources that are necessary to create a policy response. And neither of our governments have done that side of the fact early yet. Every country that I look at in the book who at least has that clear assessment is able to get more done than both of our governments have. So that's the first thing. The policy response without getting too boring and wonky really has to be whole of government. And that's a term that's thrown around a lot.

And I think when most national security people say whole of government, they kind of just mean, we need that recognition from the top. And we're going to have some meetings about it. When I say whole of government, I mean, it really needs to include the parts of government that you don't normally think of as part of the national security apparatus. Like we have a Department of Education who deals with schools. They need to be in the

room because we need to be teaching kids, media literacy, digital literacy, how to recognize when they're being emotionally manipulated, all these things. Some countries have like a Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Sport, Ministry of Youth, all of those going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to

be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going in journalism as a public good and in the United States we spend $3 per person per year on our public broadcasting corporation. I'm gonna say as much as you can criticize the BBC, it is nowhere near as fucked as America's presses. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like the last few months have been a complete shit show. Well, and you know, in times of crisis, I think it's something around 60% of brits still trust the BBC as a source of information in crisis. And I can't think of a single source that Americans would trust to that extent. And that's a problem. That's that

vacuum is exactly what disinformation is attacking. So I hope that there is someday a government that understands that we need to heal ourselves at home to deal with these problems. That means good governance. It means investing in education, it means investing in journalism, and empowering the parts of government that deal with people on a regular basis, local and state governments, again, those kind of citizen-oriented parts of government, like the Department of Education. And we've not gotten there yet. And then there's a regulatory question that, you know, Congress has completely dropped the ball in terms of the social media regulation we need. And also campaign finance reform, which is never going to fully be solved

because it benefits those in power to not reform campaign finance. But these are all the things that, you know, really need a good hard look. And I'm hoping that when people go to the ballot box in November, or as it were, I suppose, mail their ballots in, that we will all be thinking about that and how we need a renewed commitment to truth in this country, because ultimately, without that volition, without that political will and government, we can't do very much. And then there's no point in me getting out of bed in the morning.

There's something about the divisive narrative that I've been increasingly hearing, obviously, like 2020 is just mental. Like Trump got impeached this year, which was 75 years ago. Yeah. Trump got impeached this year, which was 75 years ago. Yeah. So it got impede this year.

Target King happened this year, you know, like the big shit. It's so divisive, like it's never been as mental for me as a Brit to voyeuristically watch the slow motion car crash that is American press. But there is some extra factor of fear that gets layered over the top of all of that when you realize that that might not be due to the volition of the people who were actually writing the stories, or that the stories were being written about stuff which was contrived, like purposefully created by bad state actor,

but by out of state actors who want this to be the outcome. This is like, I don't know, this is like finding out the monster injury or bed isn't what you need to worry about because the bed is the monster. You know, oh, for oh, oh, oh, like do you know, I mean like you you thought it was just this and then it turns out it's like like the sequel the sequel to the horror movie is actually where it's like it's all Russia, so I don't know I mean What's the long game like what's the what's the long game? Like what's the, what's the, the

real kind of end result here? Obviously, it's, it would appear, China is raise ourselves up to look like a stronger superpower. Russia is terror the people, other countries down so that we relatively look stronger. Again, as you've identified, it would appear that that's because Russia probably has to appreciate its own glass ceiling. It can't pretend to be a global superpower when it comes to the tech game, like no one's buying Russian iPhones. So what is the end goal for Russia then, other than just to make America look a bit shit? Well, again, I think that has domestic implications for Putin's grip on power. It's always been about, you know, the comparative exercise between Russia and the West and what

an authoritarian system can offer versus the unpredictability of democracy. If you look at the Arab Spring, if you look at what happened in Ukraine, you're on my dawn in 2013, 2014, or even if you go back further to the revolutions that happened in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s. That's always been the biggest threat to Putin, something that he's always been feared if he was... I love the way that you say Putin. It's my Russian estimate.

We can say Putin, but that just makes me sound like I'm from New Jersey, which I am. Putin. I try not to, you know, if you get me cursing, then I really start to sound like I'm from New Jersey. So, we won't do that here. But, yes, so that all benefits good old Vlad Putin. And I think that's the long game. It's to maintain his grip on power. And then, you know, also, it puff up, puff up Russia, which benefits him as well. And I just think it's really important, especially because, you know, more actors are entering the disinformation game now that the Russian playbook has been opened for everyone to see, and you know, this playbook has been used by advertisers and PR people for ages, right?

We just need to again turn inward. The more that we can heal the fishers in our society, provide good governance, create a resilient society, one that is skeptical, but in a healthy way that's using information to create better governance, teaching civics really important, then we're going to be more resilient. If you look at nations like Sweden and Finland and Estonia, they've invested in these things, and they're all smaller and more homogeneous nations than the UK or the US, but our countries are also extremely innovative. We're good at this stuff. If we invest in it, we just have to recognize it.

And not just play what I call whack a troll all the time and think that we can just remove bad accounts, remove bad content. And that will fact check our way out of this crisis of truth and trust. Ultimately, it's about us. It's about all of us. And we all have to do our part. it's about us, it's about all of us, and we all have to do our part. I don't know. I really, I really feel like there's a lot of deceleration that needs to be done before you can even reverse the direction of what's going on at the moment, which is sad,

right? Like you write this book, not knowing that 2020 is going to be this slow motion pilot. And then, and the, the parting note is, let's remember our similarities, not our differences, let's fix the fishes, let's come together and force policymakers, use our votes, et cetera, et cetera. And what you don't know is the, like, tectonic plate-sized chasm is going to split straight through the middle of the country. There's going to be- And it's going to be about wearing face masks. And it's going to be about, yeah, amongst many, many, many other things. Yeah, there needs to be a real change, I think, of, of tact, especially given the fact

that there's people out there who really do want the country, the West, generally, to fall to pieces. I wonder whether there is a part of the fact that Russia has been the bad guy for so long, and the way that popular media portrays that, that we've almost caricatured put into that, like, oh, better not be meddling in any of our elections again, Vlad, and you know, it's that classic, like almost a sort of a meta character

about what Russia is. That is making us kind of forget that they're genuinely able to do malicious stuff, whereas I think that might be the reason that China feels natively a little bit more scary because it's a newer threat. We were used to Russia, we know where to put them. They're in the Russia box, like Vladwars the big fluffy hat, and he rides a horse with

his top off, and that's what he does. But we don't know about China, and yet that is exactly the sort of wolf in sheep's clothing, like you don't need to worry about us situation that Russia would want, to be able to really do a lot of damage. Yeah, I think it's partly that, and partly just that our conception of Russia is grounded in this cold warrior thought process. As a young woman in the Russia field, there's nothing that makes me more annoyed than to walk into a room or as it were like a zoom call with a bunch of people who have really interesting experience but have never used a Facebook account

and still conceive of and sometimes slip up and say the Soviet Union instead of Russia, right? It's a different country. It's a different country and and and it's people are different the young people are different I think the the tactics that the IRA uses are a reflection of that again a reflection of the weaponization of our own openness and there's a reluctance to Look in the mirror and say, you know that this isn't this isn't something that Russia caused, that it's our weakness that's being weaponized, not just democratic weaknesses, but again, these societal issues. And I think that's hampering us. When we, again, because Chinese propaganda and this

information is a little bit more straightforward, it's just easier to be like, this is bad. What they're doing is bad. And nobody wants that. But what Russia is doing is so clever. And it is hard to attribute like exactly how bad it is. There's always this ongoing debate about, did Russia change any votes. And it's impossible to know that, right? Because we can't do retroactive polling and be like, did you see this ad? Did it change your vote? People don't, that's not how people's thought process works, but it is a steady drip drip over time that affects public opinion and people's conception of candidates

and issues during campaign. And as such, you know, it makes it really hard to respond to, whether it's Russia or anybody else. And so I don't know. I hope that there is a little bit of return to nuance in the next couple of months. I hope that's going to be hard. Nobody's really talking about form policy right now in the United States. We have bigger fish to fry. And I think what little form policy discussion we are going to talk about is going to be characterized by that same rancor and kind of simplicity that the past couple of years have been. And it's just going to be either your pro-medaling or anti-medaling,

which is a really poor distillation of the topic. But unfortunately, that's what it's come down to in Washington and a lot of discussions. We'll have to see how 2020 plays out. Nina, I think good point to leave it there. What do you want to plug? Where do you want people to go? Oh, well, you should buy my book at whatever local bookstore you like. I think those local bookstores need help right now. I understand if you don't want to leave your house,

then you can buy it on one of the online sites. But if you can order from your local indie, I think that is the best thing to do at these difficult times. Very cool. It will be linked in the show notes below on Amazon or, you know, throw a face mask on, go to Waterstones or W. Use the Google machine.

You can find it. Yeah, sure. Look, Nina, thank you. I hope that you have nothing to write about for the rest of 2020 and yet sadly, I think that I'm going gonna be wrong. Probably, unfortunately. It's great to talk to you Chris. And you.

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