Russiagate Panic Spreads to the UK, Absurdly Blaming Russian Bots for Brexit
It’s become a staple of “Russiagate” coverage in the US: a “bombshell report” promises to once and for all prove that Donald Trump owes his presidency to Russian dirty money, political meddling or bots, trolls and hackers. But buried deep inside the article, a reluctant qualifier completely undermines the bombastic headline.
Recent case in point: BuzzFeed’s article titled Secret Findings 60 Russian Payments “To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016”, complete with an eye-poppingly red banner which hammers home the above quote. Even more suggestive – and intentionally misleading, as it appears – was a push notification sent by BuzzFeed to promote the article. The most plausible explanation for wire transfers from a Russian bank to Russian embassies across the world makes it clear that the money was intended to fund the Russian election campaign of 2016, not the American one. It’s well hidden inside the article and surrounded by unnecessary, irrelevant details (“Seven nations had federal elections during the span when the funds were sent”.)
The cycle repeats ad nauseam, each time further diminishing trust in the media – both in the US and Russia itself where the likes of CNN have historically been looked up to, argues Oleg Kashin, a prominent Russian journalist, in a widely circulated opinion piece. Sensationalist, irresponsible reporting in the west gives perfect ammunition to Russia’s own state propaganda which gleefully uses every opportunity to shut down the Kremlin’s detractors both at home and abroad.
So far, the UK has been relatively insulated from the hysteria that has gripped Trump’s America for months. In the run-up to, and immediately after, the EU referendum, few voices attempted to blame Brexit on Vladimir Putin – one of them being Garry Kasparov, a career Putin critic.
However cataclysmic, Brexit has up until now been seen as Britain’s own doing, for better or worse, depending which side you support. Not any more: taking their cue from America, UK politicians and media are now attempting to blame the trauma of Brexit on – who else? – Putin.
The “It was the Russians wot won it” argument follows a familiar pattern of omission and exaggeration. Take a recent Sky News article: “An expert says posters linked to the Kremlin made a determined effort to interfere with the result of the Brexit vote in 2016,” says the piece. The inevitable downer waits until the seventh paragraph to pour cold water on your hopes that maybe Brexit wasn’t Britain’s own fault: “Ms Lu told Sky News: ‘First of all the number of these tweets is important to highlight. So there’s about 400 tweets here out of 22.6 million. That is a very infinitesimal fraction. So the word interference is perhaps a bit exaggerated.’”
ou can now expect to see many more of these hot takes, extrapolating scarce data to fit a narrative and carpet-blaming “the Russians” (really: “It is very strange that someone whose language is Russian tweets in English,” says a New York Times expert.) Especially now, when the idea has been encouraged by Theresa May’s unprompted tirade at the Lord Mayor’s dinner .
There will be more headlines, statements demanding an investigation into the “Russian meddling” in the vain hope that Brexit can be reversed, and parliamentary inquiries. Russia, it will be said, influenced (or at least attempted to) the Brexit vote. Or Russian trolls simply spread divisive messages, trying to “sow discord”.
What exactly does “influence” mean? Some facts at this point are not debatable: yes, there is a dedicated cyber-offensive unit (in fact, there are several; I personally know of at least three) based in Saint Petersburg where dozens of full-time employees post social media messages supporting one side of a major political or social debate, or both. The “Internet Research Agency”, as it’s now known, is well-staffed and funded by someone extremely close and loyal to Putin.
But how effective are their efforts, exactly? There is still no definite quantitative research confirming that “X people were successfully influenced by social media messaging” to the point where they reversed their previous convictions and voted for a candidate or cause supposedly preferential to the Kremlin. We are often presented with figures like “120 million people were exposed to Russian propaganda on social media” based on vague metrics like “reach” or “engagement”.
The idea that an outside power can influence the outcome of a national election rests on the assumption that enough citizens are so universally gullible that a tweet or a Facebook post which they’ve spent a fraction of a second viewing is enough to upend an entire life – or generations – of voting Democrat, Labour, or whatever political force the author associates themselves with. And that all of them are online.
Context is also important. What played a bigger role, a #Brexit hashtag retweeted by a dozen other bots or leave’s campaign bus? What’s more divisive, a hundred Russian trolls or a Daily Mail front page? Who’s sowing more discord, a RT show watched by 0.05% of UK’s TV audience (per Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board’s latest measure) or Nigel Farage? If you consider this, Russian trolling operations seem less like pouring gasoline on fire and more like pouring a bucket of water into the ocean.
Maybe it’s the very idea that someone who is not even British violated the sacred rituals of democracy that is so offensive to May? But surely, that the same democracy is so fragile and its members can be led by a cyber Pied Piper into oblivion must be more offensive?
Brexit, Trump, the resurgence of rightwing populism and centrifugal forces ripping Europe apart all have deep historical roots and a myriad of contemporary factors – of which Russian meddling is but one, and by no objective measure a significant one at that. Consider this: even if Putin supported Brexit, as Kasparov argued, because he benefits from a fractured Europe – which itself is doubtful – he’s definitely not a very talented strategist. Russian officials privately sigh in exasperation: they had no plan in place for Brexit, the whole thing is baffling and they don’t know who to talk to any more (the same applies to Trump’s administration). “If they only knew,” one told me, meaning the level of confusion in their agency.
If you want to effectively resist outside attempts to influence your democratic processes, you must be able to assess them realistically. Repeating vague, panic-mongering statements from self-interested parties won’t help. Putin’s Russia definitely has some capacity for general mischief-making, but it’s no super villain. Take it from someone who’s seen enough absurdity and incompetence in his 17 years spent covering it from the inside.
