But gun laws? What's the reasoning behind that? It doesn't add up. On the contrary, it would rather seem like some group in the US (Say a large gun rights organization of some form) would buy these services from the russians. The Russian twitter troll factories don't work for free, and in this case there doesn't seem to be a reason why Russia would pay for this?
Edit: another poster pointed out: there is one thing russia would gain from and that's political division and instability. Next up: pay someone to have a very public and very late abortion, for example.
Russia certainly was hoping for a weak-on-Russia Trump to win the election, but just as important to their aims is to create discord in American domestic politics. If a country is entirely preoccupied with issues and perceived enemies at home, they won't have the focus or political willpower to interfere with Russian plans on an international stage.
* Ukraine should be annexed by Russia..
* The United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe.
* Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
[2] https://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%...
Like you said, sowing political discord in general over hot-button issues is a benefit.
But if they're really trying to tip the scales in favor of the pro-gun lobby then that makes sense too. Riling up the pro-gun voters is a way of meddling in the 2018 elections with a pro-Republican/Trump bias that we already saw in 2016.
In addition, it's conceivable that Russia believes that more permissive gun laws will help destabilize America.
They want you to be at each others throats. Same reason they assisted brexit.
Tommy: "Why do you fuck with people when it serves no purpose?"
Tatiana Petrovna: "In Russia, because we were bored. In England, because we don't know how to stop."
Knowing a group of Russians (and calling them friends), this quote seemed so apt.
-- https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag...
So while there is certainly back-and-forth here, I can’t see any moral issues with anyone meddling in Russian elections. It’s likely even necessary if the current regime is to be changed (which I think will be harder than in 1990).
The US obviously also meddle with more or less acceptable means in countries that do have free and fair elections but that’s a different topic.
I've read a small selection of the IC reports and declassified info as well that at least support the general tendency of the Kremlin to operate this way as of late.
As an aside, this is a site set up that tracks known Kremlin Internet Research Agency accounts and bots activity:
https://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/
Also it's worth noting that the FBI is currently investigating Russian cash flow into the NRA:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/articl...
But at the same time, I have gun owning friends, and they tend to circle the wagons when something like this happens. With 1 in 3 adults in the US owning a firearm, it doesn't take very many of them for there to be a lot of tweets against gun control.
To put their reaction in perspective, realize that since fame appears to be a motive in these shootings, the easiest way to stop this would likely be to pass a law to prevent the media from covering mass shootings, or at least the names and life stories of the shooters. And I think a lot of reactions here would be "we can't do that!", because of the first amendment.
That's how a lot of people feel about the second amendment.
It may get to the point where activities such as these will be classed right along with acts of war, I have no idea what the solution is but clearly the downsides of our early days attempt at creating a 'hive mind' are starting to weigh pretty heavily.
Work to reduce the number of people (i.e., conservatives) who seek an purely objective world view that makes them comfortable and is actually reinforced by facts that disprove their beliefs.
I, as a STEM educator, blame a lot of all of this on the reification of STEM education and the devaluing of liberal arts and humanities.
That's a bit of a short-cut there, it's not just conservatives that do this.
Also, keep in mind that the web (not the internet) was created with a completely different goal in mind, to connect organizations and individuals in a relatively friendly setting.
The potential for hostile applications wasn't even on the radar back then and if it had been I'm pretty sure some of the foundation stones would have been laid differently.
So now you get this weird mix of open societies connected in a very open fashion to outright dictatorships with the additional asymmetries of English being a pre-requisite for trade all over the world and thus a ready and cheap to deploy workforce aided by bots to sow dissention and to drive a wedge between folks in the remainder of the world.
What is sad - and that's why I picked out that fragment - is that once the ball is rolling we will then happily take over beating on that wedge.
The problem here is not democracy being unable to weather the internet, any more than television, newspapers or radio, but of society trading healthy skepticism for cynicism, encouraging disengagement from the political process and failing to raise the electorate democracy needs.
That works as long as there are ways to ascertain what is rumor and falsehood and what is fact. As soon as that is impossible the S/N ratio drops to the point where you have a net negative making it much harder to engage in critical thinking. That's why the bot army operators don't really care which side of a particular argument they are taking, all they care about is - just like any other ad network, ironically - engagement so that there are less braincycles left over to think about the stuff that really matters.
> The problem here is not democracy being unable to weather the internet, any more than television, newspapers or radio
Television, newspapers or radio as a rule were not - RT excepted - usually under the control of ideological or actual enemies. And when they were - such as Radio Free Europe - the powers that be tried what they could to control the message. So now we are starting to see what happens when there is no way to control the message at all and individuals can be targeted with messages that are tailor made to excite and enrage them about subjects they care deeply about.
> but of society trading healthy skepticism for cynicism, encouraging disengagement from the political process and failing to raise the electorate democracy needs.
I'd love to live in that place but I haven't found it yet. For the most part people are not at all happy to have to expend time to get educated about subjects they care about, they prefer to have their opinion pre-chewed and in short to repeat soundbites, preferably short enough to be made into bumper stickers.
They're on the wrong side of the line as far as I'm concerned but in the end the goals are roughly the same: prevent outside influences from destabilizing the country to the point where the whole thing might collapse.
Open societies are probably (I hope) less vulnerable to this sort of thing than closed ones but it would be a huge mistake to think that we are immune to it.
/tinfoil
Twitter has no interest in making it clear just how many of its “users” are actually bots. Politically motivated bots even more so.
Moreover, they’ve shown no interest in making it more difficult to create new bots. They probably had news accounts before Twitter even finished deleting the old ones.
