Russia has given up on outright fake news for meddling in midterms, experts say — but is using more subtle techniques instead

pulse

November 6, 2018 1:31 PM

Russia's strategy in the US midterm elections is harder for people to detect, experts say, because it relies less on lying and more on selection.

Russia is stepping away from using fake news and has adopted different
tactics to bait and divide Americans and influence elections, experts say.
The apparent playbook for interfering in the midterm elections is harder for people and social media companies to detect, experts told Reuters.
New tricks include boosting existing partisan memes from both political extremes, and promoting divisive posts online which originate from Americans.

Russians believed to be connected to the government are still interfering in the US midterm elections, experts say — but have moved on crude tactics like fake news to new, more subtle efforts to bait and divide Americans.

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Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told Reuters: "The Russians are definitely not sitting this one out."

Instead, Brookie said, they have "adapted over time" to the increased focus in the US on "influence operations."

Intelligence officials are now paying greater attention to such operations because they believe Russia used tactics such as the spread of false information to support Donald Trump's presidential election campaign 2016, though the Russian government denies it.

Social media companies have also tried to stall these tactics by looking to prevent the spread of disinformation on their platforms. Facebook, for example, has created a "war room" to try and avoid the mistakes of the 2016 election.Read more:

But researchers told Reuters that Russia's tactics have changed in response, and now relies less on pure fiction.

The new tactics involve picking up on trending topics, like Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court or the Occupy Democrats protests, to promote extreme opinions, according to

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Priscilla Moriuchi, a former NSA official who is now a threat analyst at a cybersecurity firm, said that this change came about as people became more used to checking for fake news. "We’ve done a lot research on fake news and people are getting better at figuring out what it is, so it's become less effective as a tactic."

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