Addressing Russian Influence: What Can We Learn From U.S. Cold War Counter-Propaganda Efforts? - Lawfare

History repeats, accelerated by Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others; on a related note, see Russia’s Favored Outlet Is an Online News Giant. YouTube Helped. (NYT)

"Microsoft and Google have joined Facebook in revealing that Russia may have purchased ads in an effort to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Reactions to this news have been a mix of bewilderment and alarm—but perhaps we should not be so surprised. The fabricated news stories and click-bait headlines that dominated social media throughout the 2016 campaign are not a new tactic for the Russians. They are simply the latest iteration of a practice Moscow has used for nearly a century.

This type of operation is known in the intelligence community as “disinformation,” an Anglicization of the Russian term “dezinformatsiya.” Disinformation has taken many forms across the decades, from funding communist newspapers to orchestrating the publication of news stories based on forged documents. During the Cold War these tactics were at the forefront of the Soviet Union’s strategy to discredit and undermine the United States. In light of this history, it is perhaps useful to look at how the United States countered Soviet tactics and consider whether any U.S. countermeasures drawn from the past can be adapted to address the situation today."

Addressing Russian Influence: What Can We Learn From U.S. Cold War Counter-Propaganda Efforts? - Lawfare