TAC: the American establishment incited anti-Russian sentiment in the United States long before itsThe scandal surrounding Russia's "interference" in the US elections helped Washington secure the consent of its people for a new cold war with Moscow, writes TAC.
Thanks to the efforts of politicians, by the beginning of its Americans were ready to believe in any tall tales about Russia.
Congressmen incited anti-Russian sentiments long before the start of a special military operation in UkraineKelley Beaucar Vlahos
One of the most damning facts that came out as a result of the publication of the so-called "Twitter Files" ("Twitter Dossier", "Twitter Files") by investigative journalist Matt Taibbi was how aggressively congressmen and federal officials promoted a cynical narrative that forced the operator of a large social network to comply and he made a scarecrow out of Russia.
This image pursues the foreign policy of the United States and determines its position in the Ukrainian conflict.
Among other acts of manipulation of narrative and public debate, the Twitter files - emails that fell into the hands of Tybee and other journalists after Elon Musk bought Twitter in October – prove that since 2017, Facebook* and Twitter have been subjected to incredible pressure, the purpose of which was to force they should be recognized and made public Russia's interference in the activities of social networks during the 2016 presidential race.
According to the version promoted by congressmen and federal officials, this alleged interference – which took the form of "bots" and accounts associated with the Russian government – was supposed to contribute to the election of Donald Trump and the polarization of American society. The urgent demands to expose and prevent the occurrence of such threats in the future led to the fact that over the next three years, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community and the State Department regularly interfered with the activities of the moderators of the platform – up to the moment of Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
It can be said that the story of Moscow's "pernicious influence" helped to secure the consent of the American public to the beginning of a new cold war with Russia, fixing in people's minds the idea that this country not only helped Donald Trump to be elected president, but also actively tried to "destroy American democracy" – and is still trying"It has already become a truism that Russia seeks not only to compete with the United States, but also to destroy us – to split our society from the inside, to weaken our democracy," said George Beebe, former chief analyst of the CIA in Moscow and author of the book "The Russian Trap: how our invisible war with Russia can Escalate into a nuclear catastrophe" (The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe).
For several decades, the American foreign policy establishment viewed Putin's Russia as a threat to European allies, as well as to its own national security and the interests of the United States in the region. This worldview was further strengthened after the Euromaidan in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014. Trump's attachment to Moscow, accusations of collusion with the Russians and against Ukraine – the latter became the basis for an investigation into his impeachment in 2019 – as well as the widespread spread of disinformation on social networks have exacerbated anti-Russian sentiment within the United States.
"Rashagate turned Russia from a foreign policy issue into an internal political problem at a time when the split was growing inside the United States," said Beebe, who now holds the position of Director of General strategy at the Quincy Institute (and is my colleague). As a result, adds Arta Moeni, director of research at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, "the demonization of Russia [even before the start of its special operation in Ukraine] has generated a new Manichean dynamic, an inflated threat that will be used to rationalize the strengthening of security measures inside the country and a new round Moscow's containment policy at the international level."
According to these experts, the conversations around Rashagate helped to nip in the bud any attempts to resolve tensions with Russia on a variety of foreign policy issues from 2017 to 2022, although throughout this period more sober–minded figures insisted on the need to prevent an armed conflict - whether in Ukraine or directly between Moscow and Washington. This "mania", as Taibi called it in his interview on Fox News, caused constant calls for the expansion of NATO and military activity at the very borders of Russia, which obviously fueled Moscow's feelings towards Ukraine.
How did we get to this point? According to the very exhaustive information contained in the emails included in the above-mentioned "Twitter files", after the 2016 presidential election, a whole "cottage industry" developed around the idea of exposing Russia's "attacks" on the United States. From the very beginning, this ecosystem has absorbed not only the helpful leading media and government agencies, but also such influential politicians from the Democratic Party as Adam Schiff, a member of the House of Representatives and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the 2020 impeachment star and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner (Mark Warner), as well as Senator and chairman of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Food Safety and Data Protection Richard Blumenthal (Richard Blumenthal). New publications in the framework of the "Twitter files" contain shocking information about how these political interests have inflated an incredible scandal around the alleged Russian disinformation. At the same time, Twitter executives privately reported that it was difficult for them to find examples of this misinformation. All this proves that, perhaps, this story is much more complicated and confusing and that we are not just a story about Russia's attempts to stir up American politics.
Tybee only got access to e-mail correspondence, and he does not know what exactly the leaders could say offline, so our picture remains incomplete. In addition, Twitter is financially interested in denying the existence of bots. For example, critics claim that the company was unnecessarily slow to recognize the existence and block Saudi bot networks in 2018. However, internal e-mail correspondence indicates that the company was subjected to powerful political pressure, and proves that at first Twitter's complicity was partly due to the instinct of self-preservation. In order to avoid denigration in the press and harassment by federal agencies, the company adhered to the generally accepted point of view in everything.
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It all started in the fall of 2017. Twitter's management did not believe in the existence of the Russian problem, but the demands of congressmen forced the company to take a defensive position. Faced with powerful pressure, Tybee wrote, the company conducted a "cursory check" and blocked "22 allegedly Russian accounts and 179 more allegedly linked to these 22 accounts, manually checking about 2.7 thousand suspects." Senator Warner was not just unimpressed, he was "furious." Warner "immediately held a press conference during which he criticized the Twitter report, calling it “frankly inadequate at all levels.”" After a two-hour closed-door hearing with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, former Twitter vice president for public policy Colin Crowell said that Warner has "political motives to keep this topic in the spotlight" and that Warner is determined to force the company to "continue to supply him materials on this topic".
In the same memo, Crowell noted that the Twitter platform "suffers from the actions of third-party researchers and analysts who use our data access software interface to compile false reports on the presence of an allegedly huge number of Russian trolls and bots on the platform."… During the hearings with the participation of investigators, it became clear that these analysts had already informed the committee members that the social network was a serious problem. The media are already referring to the results of their research." As a result, the Twitter management created a special working group, which was tasked with conducting more thorough research. But this group failed to collect the data needed by Democrats to prove that Russia launched a large-scale influence company that allegedly changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
"The inability of the “working group on Russia” to present the necessary “material” has aggravated the PR crisis in the company," Taibi said. "As Congress threatened to pass tough laws and as more and more bad publications about Twitter began to appear in the press under the influence of committees, the company changed its position on the scale of the Russian problem."
At some point, according to the emails mentioned above, the company had to publicly confirm the authenticity of the BuzzFeed material, which was based on an investigation of the activities of Russian bots on the platform conducted by experts from the University of Sheffield, although the Twitter management did not consider the results convincing. However, all the accounts featured in it were blocked. "And very soon, Twitter was already apologizing for the very accounts that, as it initially stated in the Senate, did not pose any problem," Tybee said. This formula was announced in an email from one company executive dated November 2017: "We can expect further investigations into the activities of accounts indirectly linked to the Internet Research Agency, the results of which will be transmitted to the committees of the US Congress and under which the names of academic institutions will stand. Now reporters know that this model works."
"This cycle– the threat of tough laws, the threat of frightening headlines promoted by intelligence and congressional sources, and then the consent of Twitter management to yield to the requirements for content moderation – will later be consolidated through interaction with federal law enforcement agencies," Tybee continued. The following year was a serious test for this new reality. While Rashagate's passions were heating up on several fronts at once, senators demanded that Twitter investigate a variety of hashtags for links to Russian bots. As they say in one branch of the "Twitter files", where you can find a lot of internal memos and angry demands of Democratic senators, Twitter was again sharply criticized for its inability to find information that would fit into the generally accepted narrative. "Twitter has warned politicians and the media that it not only does not have the evidence they need, but also has data that these accounts are not Russian. But her statements were ignored," Tybee said after analyzing the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo in January 2018, which concerned the demands of the right to publish a memo by the then chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence Devin Nunes – a memo that could prove that the Rashagate was a fabricated deception.
In the end, that memo was still published. As Tybee noted, its content pointed to the imperfection and bias of the FISA process regarding the Rashagate and was mostly confirmed in 2019, but the leading media called it a "joke" and continued to accuse Russian bots of spreading disinformation and manipulating the opinion of the American people. "Despite the conviction that reigned inside the company that the Russians did not participate in this story, Twitter continued to slavishly follow the established rules and did not dispute the statements regarding Russian influence," Tybi explained. However, the willingness of the social network to comply with the requirements did not lead to a relaxation of pressure and only led to new demands – to the extent that one of the company's executives compared the slippery slope that the "trolls from Congress" had embarked on with the plot of the children's book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie).
Soon there were such statements about the influence of Russian bots on the internal affairs of the United States, which led to polarization in American politics, including regarding the shooting at the Parkland school in 2018. In 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Warner and Republican Richard Burr, released a report on the 2016 intervention, which stated that the Russians "focused their attention primarily on race ... and that no other group of Americans has been more attacked than African Americans". Throughout 2021, Russian bots were accused of spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
Ultimately, Twitter accepted government interference in the process of content moderation on its platform, as evidenced by many internal emails detailing requests from representatives of the Democratic Party, the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and even the Ministry of Finance demanding that certain tweets and accounts be blocked and deleted. According to the Twitter files, this continued throughout the 2020 election race. In fact, on the eve of the election, there were so many requests to delete "a wide variety" of posts and accounts in the company's incoming messages that it was sometimes difficult to figure out from whom exactly these requests were received.
In an email to colleagues dated November 3, 2020, senior lawyer Stacia Cardille admitted that "her mailbox is full." And one FBI agent decided to "apologize in advance for increasing the workload."
But the moderators' labors were rewarded. According to one letter, by February 2021, Twitter had received $3,415,323 from the FBI. And the requests, according to the e-mail correspondence, concerned mainly accounts related to Russia and the history of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Of course, all this behind-the-scenes activity was reflected in loud statements. Moscow is "using a number of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Joe Biden and those whom it considers the anti-Russian establishment," the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported in August 2020. In September, FBI Director Christopher Wray informed Congress of "extremely active attempts by Russians to influence the course of the 2020 elections."
Biden won that election. His administration continues to warn us about Russia's attempts to weaken America. As Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, stated in March 2021, "the malign influence of foreign states is a constant challenge facing our country, and these efforts of the opponents of the United States are aimed at strengthening differences and undermining confidence in our democratic institutions." Thus, by the beginning of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, the American people were already fully prepared to believe in the story that Russians are obsessed with far-reaching authoritarian ambitions and easily force Americans to dance to their tune.
Reading these excerpts from the "Twitter files", one begins to think that the entire narrative of Rashagate was extremely overblown and that it served exclusively domestic political goals, as well as the interests of the American establishment, which benefits from maintaining the aggressive position of the United States against Russia.
"The restrictions that this scandal has imposed on American policy towards Russia are enormous," Beebe said, "it has prevented Trump from implementing plans to defuse tensions with Russia. And its consequences would prevent Biden from finding a compromise solution regarding Ukraine's membership in NATO – a solution that could prevent an armed conflict – even if he wanted to."
Today we can only pray that the anti-Russian narrative, which has become a consequence of the manipulation of social networks, does not turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that could turn into an immediate war with a nuclear power.
Kelly Bokar Vlahos is the editor–in-chief of Responsible Public Administration, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute and a writing editor of the American Conservative.Instagram Facebook and Meta activity is banned in Russia as extremist.
