We've Got Disinformation Covered Right Here at Home

Russia and Iran's predictable attempts to meddle with the U.S. election don't add much to what we're already producing ourselves.

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In 2016, Russia engaged in a deliberate and concerted effort to sway the 2016 election, flooding social media with troll accounts, meme pages, fake protests, and other disinformation. They hacked email servers, pitched journalists, spammed comments sections, and set up fake accounts. All of this happened. And yet: Hillary Clinton lost the election primarily because she ran an uninspiring campaign that completely misread the changing political landscape and neglected key battleground states. The disinformation? Probably didn’t help — but let’s be real here, America has never needed foreign influence to whip itself up into a frenzy of idiotic conspiracies and rampant polarization. We do that just fine ourselves.

The same dynamic is playing out all over again in 2024. Reports from the New York Times and other outlets today have both Russia and Iran carrying out “brazen” “varied” and “ambitious” campaigns of propaganda inside the United States, aimed at further muddying the waters of our political discourse. And yet: we’ve been doing this to ourselves for generations, so forgive me if I think this is not the most pressing concern going into November.

Don’t get me wrong, it is extremely funny that a federal indictment appears to indicate that right wing influencers like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool have been financed by a Russian influence operation. But if you allow those connections to overshadow the fact that these actors have been getting rich off of posting alt-right chum bait for decades, you’re missing the point.