Enjoying this timeline documenting psyops Interesting that Flynn was mostly stationed at the Army base where these operations were run.
Older article yet contains a glossary of useful disinformation terms from "The Observer" repost The 9 Russian Words That Explain KremlinGate It’s International Talk Like a Chekist Day—here’s a quick primer on kombinatsiya, konspiratsiya and more By John R. Schindler As the Trump administration’s Russia problem shows no sign of going away, protesting presidential tweets notwithstanding, it’s time to think about it properly. Understanding what the Kremlin’s up to helps to see the big picture. This means learning a bit of spy lingo. Espionage, like everything else, has its own culture—including special verbiage—which varies from country to country. Russia’s espionage culture is unique and in key ways markedly different from how Western countries approach the spy-game. It’s a product of the Soviet secret police, that brutal and cunning force, and it’s no accident that Vladimir Putin’s spies proudly call themselves Chekists today to commemorate them—just as they did in the days of the KGB. “There are no ‘former’ Chekists,” as the KGB veteran Putin has stated, and this attitude permeates his Kremlin. The threat to our democracy posed by Moscow’s spy-games won’t recede on its own. As Rick Ledgett, NSA’s straight-talking deputy director, stated last week, “This is a challenge to the foundations of our democracy.” He went on: “How do we counter that?” adding, “What do we do as a nation to make it stop?” This first thing we must do is gain a reality-based understanding of the SpyWar we’re in with Moscow. So, let’s walk through a few of the most important Russian espionage terms to shed some light on what’s really going on between Washington and the Kremlin. First, there’s provokatsiya (provocation), which is the cornerstone of the Russian espionage worldview. This part of Kremlin spy culture is older than the Bolsheviks, dating to the late Tsarist era, when Russia invented the modern intelligence agency to fight anarchist terrorists. Provocation is complicated, but at its most basic involves secret acts to confuse and dismay your enemy. The recent antics of Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee—positing conflicting and unsubstantiated allegations of malfeasance by our spy agencies—are a classic provocation designed to divert attention from the White House as its Russia crisis mounts. Regardless of whether anyone in Russia has a hand in this, the Kremlin surely approves. Provokatsiya gets more complicated and nefarious from there, with the ultimate aim of turning the tables on your enemy and defeating him detail—before he realizes what’s happened. As I’ve explained, this involves a lot of shady stuff such as: Taking control of your enemies in secret and encouraging them to do things that discredit them and help you. You plant your own agents provocateurs and flip legitimate activists, turning them to your side…While this isn’t a particularly nice technique, it works surprisingly well, particularly if you don’t care about bloody and messy consequences. Moscow is alarmingly forward-leaning about provocation, and the Kremlin’s traditional devil-may-care attitude about these dirty tricks means it’s a safe bet that when you encounter rabid anti-Putin activists, there’s a solid chance some of them are secretly working for the Russians. Next there’s konspiratsiya (yes, conspiracy), the Russian term for what we call espionage tradecraft. This is the clandestine nuts and bolts of recruiting and running agents, placing targets under surveillance, running covert action and whatnot. While the word conspiracy has a negative, tinfoil-y connotation in the West—where anything which polite people don’t wish to ponder can be brushed off as a “conspiracy theory”—Moscow feels differently. Russians accept that conspiracies exist because people conspire—and what’s more conspiratorial than espionage, the vaunted second-oldest profession? The Kremlin is notably cold-blooded about konspiratsiya, being willing to sacrifice even highly valuable agents when something better comes along. Moscow does not believe in tears, as the saying goes. A related term is kompromat (compromising material), which is used to coercively recruit people to spy for Russia—and to keep already recruited agents in line. Thanks to the salacious Steele dossier, with its allegations of Moscow possessing not-safe-for-work kompromat on Donald Trump, lots of Americans know this unpleasant term now. The fear of kompromat is almost as potent as the embarrassing photos or videos themselves, as Russians know only too well. Given the murky finances and messy personal lives of numerous members of Team Trump, it’s a safe bet that the Kremlin has its hands on juicy information which, if revealed, would cause problems. That said, there’s no reason to think Steele’s X-rated assertions are true, nor that Moscow needed kompromat in this operation. President Trump’s inner circle seems perfectly willing to parley with Russians, particularly powerful and rich ones, without any hint of coercion. Dezinformatsiya (disinformation) is another Russian term once known only to espionage mavens but which, thanks to the events of 2016, now falls off the tongue of average citizens. Deza, as it’s called for short, is the original “fake news,” an alluring amalgam of fact and fantasy—much of it unverifiable—designed to confuse readers and shift political discussions. Vladimir Putin. Sergei Karpukhin/AFP/Getty Images Peddling deza is much faster and easier these days, thanks to the Internet and the rise of fringe websites, but there’s nothing new about it. It was part of the KGB’s Cold War arsenal, when Chekists faked documents and disseminated lies through trusted Western journalists, in order to embarrass the West, especially NATO and the United States. Some of these vintage disinformation fables are still with us, despite being debunked decades ago. Deza, however, is only one component of what the Russians call aktivniyye meropriyatiya (Active Measures), which is a vital Chekist concept lacking a precise Western equivalent. It roughly aligns with our notion of political warfare, albeit with a highly clandestine side. The bureaucratically bland-sounding KGB definition of Active Measures covers a broad brush of nefarious spy-games: Agent-operational measures aimed at exerting useful influence on aspects of the political life of a target country which are of interest, its foreign policy, the solution of international problems, misleading the adversary, undermining and weakening his positions, the disruption of his hostile plans, and the achievement of other aims. The Kremlin’s 2016 brazen operation to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump was a classic Active Measure, relying on cyber-espionage to steal emails, then employing a Kremlin front to disseminate them to the world. As I recently explained, this successful spy-game was notable only for its astonishing lack of subtlety, with Putin’s special services seeming to want us to know what they were doing. Overall, however, the on-going Russian clandestine operation to subvert our democracy falls under the rubric of what Chekists call kombinatsiya (combination), meaning the coordinated application of provocation and Active Measures in order to influence political outcomes. Pushing disinformation is perhaps too easy these days, and now the FBI is investigating the Kremlin-to-far-right-websites deza loop which has become commonplace in America. Weaponized lies only get the Russians so far, though, and here’s where provokatsiya moves the spy-game further down the field. To pull off provocations, however, Moscow needs operatives, and it’s evident that members of Team Trump possess links to Kremlin agents and cut-outs. There’s no doubt the FBI is unraveling all that right now in its investigation of KremlinGate. Fully understanding this complex Russian operational game will take months, maybe years, but Americans should feel confident that the FBI, with help from NSA and other secret agencies, will eventually get to the bottom of the kombinatsiya that Putin has inflicted on our democracy. What ought to worry anybody caught up in all this is the Russian term mokroye delo (wet affairs, commonly styled as “wetwork” in the West, referring to bloody hands), meaning assassinations. Putin’s regime has embraced wetwork in a manner not seen in the Kremlin since Stalin’s time. His assassins have taken out defectors and enemies all over the world, including in the West. The most infamous hit was the notorious polonium-210 murder of the defector Sasha Litvinenko in London in 2006, but several other Russian émigrés on Putin’s “enemies list” have met unnatural ends in recent years—to say nothing of the numerous regime opponents who have been murdered in Russia. Wetwork may even reach the United States, as testified by the brutal and mysterious death of Mikhail Lesin, a former member of Putin’s inner circle, in the heart of our nation’s capital in late 2015. Moscow coldly disposes of people it no longer needs, who may possess kompromat on the Kremlin. Last week’s brazen murder of a Russian dissident politician on the streets of Kyiv, in broad daylight, sends a clear message that Putin will settle scores and tie up loose ends wherever he needs to. John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
Repost from The Atlantic's WHAT HAPPENED TO MICHAEL FLYNN? In military intelligence, he was renowned for his skill connecting the dots and finding terrorists. But somewhere along the way, his dot detector began spinning out of control. By Barton Gellman JULY 8, 2022 SAVED STORIES Michael Flynn faced the camera with brow creased and lips compressed. He hadn’t been born yesterday, his expression said. He was not going to fall for trick questions. “General Flynn, do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified?” Representative Liz Cheney asked him in a video teleconference deposition for the January 6 committee. Flynn’s lawyer pressed the mute button and switched off the camera. Ninety-six seconds passed. Flynn and the lawyer reappeared with a request for clarification. Did Cheney mean morally justified, or legally? Cheney obligingly asked each question in turn. “Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?” she asked. Flynn squinted, truculent. “Take the Fifth,” he said. “Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified legally?” Cheney asked. “Fifth,” he replied. Cheney moved on to the ultimate question. “General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” she asked. “The Fifth,” he repeated. It was a surreal moment: Here was a retired three-star general and former national security adviser refusing to opine on the foundational requirement of a constitutional democracy. Flynn had sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Rule of law had been drilled into him for decades in the Army. Now, by invoking the right against self-incrimination, he was asserting that his beliefs about lawful succession could expose him to criminal charges. That could not be literally true—beliefs have absolute protection under the First Amendment—but his lawyer might well have worried about where Cheney’s line of questioning would lead. Flynn had said publicly that President Donald Trump could declare martial law and “re-run” the presidential election he had lost. He and Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, had turned up in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020, with a draft executive order instructing the Defense Department to seize the voting machines that recorded Trump’s defeat. Flynn and Roger Stone, the self-described political dirty trickster, were the two men Trump made a point of asking his chief of staff to call on January 5, on the eve of insurrection, according to Cassidy Hutchinson’s recent testimony before the January 6 committee. All of which raises a question: What happened to Michael Flynn? He has baffled old comrades with his transformation since being fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. He led chants to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, he posted a video of himself taking an oath associated with QAnon. He has endorsed crackpot fabrications of the extreme right: that Italy used military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Biden in 2020, that COVID-19 was a hoax perpetrated by a malevolent global elite, that the vaccine infused recipients with microchips designed for mind control. Has Flynn always been susceptible to paranoid conspiracies? Or did something happen along the way that fundamentally shifted his relationship to reality? In recent conversations I had with the former general’s close associates, some for attribution and some not, they offered a variety of theories. Ihad started trying to answer these questions about Flynn well before the country saw him plead the Fifth. The best way to investigate, I initially thought, would be to spend time with the man himself. I’d had lunch with Flynn some years ago at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He was a one-star general working for then–Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, his most important mentor in the Army. He fit in comfortably at the Council, a pinstriped bastion of the foreign-policy establishment, which these days is a bugaboo of his dark suspicions about global elites. We spoke of then–Vice President Dick Cheney, the subject of a biography I had recently written, and he later sent word that he had enjoyed listening to the audiobook while running. His affect was thoughtful, buttoned-down, and appropriate to the setting. I recalled that lunch to Flynn’s brother Joe, who serves as his gatekeeper with the press, when I asked for an interview for this story. (Another brother, Charles, is the commanding general of the U.S. Army in the Pacific.)Joe Flynn said those were very different times. “His attitude about speaking to the mainstream media—or I’d say I would put The Atlantic into the left-wing media—is very negative because it always blows up in your face,” he said. “They always report things that [he] didn’t say or they’re calling names that he doesn’t, you know, that don’t have anything to do with him.” “That’s kind of the whole point of talking to a guy, to understand him in his own words,” I said. Joe Flynn didn’t bite. “Write what you want to write. But we don’t necessarily want to add fuel to the fire by talking to people and then they twist your words. There has not been a time yet that it hasn’t backfired,” he said. Every story turns out to say, “‘Ah, Flynn’s a nut, Flynn’s a conspiracy theorist, Flynn’s an insurrectionist,’ all the other bullshit they say.” This week, I tried again to seek comment from Flynn, via his brother. “There is no chance General Flynn will speak to the Atlantic,” Joe Flynn wrote. “Have a great day.” When Flynn moves through public spaces these days, three muscular men with earpieces enclose him in a wedge. One of them moved to intercept me when I approached with a question at an event, taking my elbow and turning me away. “Don’t,” he said, succinctly. The next-best strategy, I figured, was to watch Flynn in his element, surrounded by supporters. I went to hear him speak at the Trinity Gospel Temple in Canton, Ohio, where he served as mascot and majordomo of a traveling road show called “ReAwaken America.” It was a proudly mask-free event; anyone with a covered face was asked to leave. There would be six dozen speakers over two days, including MAGA stars such as Eric Trump, Mike Lindell, and Roger Stone. But Flynn was the big draw. Nearly every other speaker paid Flynn homage. One of them won a standing ovation by invoking a MAGA trinity: “Jesus is my God. Trump is my president. And Mike Flynn is my general!” Flynn stood in the wings, stage left, just visible to an adoring audience of 3,000. He wore cowboy boots, a gray worsted suit, and an open-collared shirt, arms crossed at his chest in a posture of benign command. “Ladieeeees and gentlemen, stand on your feet and greet Generalllll … Miiiiiichael Flyyyyynnn!” Clay Clark, Flynn’s touring partner and emcee, yelled into the microphone in the style of a professional-wrestling announcer. The room erupted. “Fight like a Flynn!” screamed a man in the audience, quoting a slogan that Flynn’s niece was selling on T-shirts outside. “We love you!” screamed the woman next to me. Nothing superficial explained the appeal. Flynn is not an orator. He does not premeditate applause lines, and he sometimes seems startled when the audience reacts. He rambles, scriptless, through fields of apparently disconnected thoughts. “He’s free-range,” Clark told me. Some of the things he said fell into a category of assertion that his military-intelligence critics used to call “Flynn facts.” “Read some of The Federalist Papers,” Flynn told the crowd. “They’re simple; they’re amazing, amazing documents as to who we are.” He added, “Ben Franklin’s one of the ones that wrote some of this and argued some of it.” (No, he’s not.) Flynn attributed the nation’s founding to divine intervention, adding, “That’s why the word creator is even in our Constitution.” (It isn’t.) What Flynn has is an everyman quality, according to Steve Bannon, who said he declined an invitation to join the tour. “Mike is authentic,” Bannon told me. “To them, he’s authentic. He’s a fighter. That’s big.” Flynn reminds Bannon, he said, of his Irish uncles and cousins: “He’s not pretentious. He’s one of them.” If this was authenticity, though, it was authentically detached from reality. The animating ideas behind the “Great ReAwakening,” expounded by the various speakers, were (1) that forces loyal to Satan are stealing political power in rigged elections (2) on behalf of a global conspiracy masterminded by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, and Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli public intellectual, and (3) that the cabal has fabricated the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to mandate dangerous vaccines, which (4) make people sick and may secretly turn them into “transhumans” under the conspiracy’s remote control. From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q QAnon talking points pervade the “ReAwaken America” tour. In Canton, Clark got a rise from the crowd with a reference to “adrenochrome,” which QAnon myths describe as a drug that cannibalistic global elites harvest by torturing children. Some of the “ReAwaken America” speakers fairly glowed with insincerity—Roger Stone grinned a Cheshire Cat grin after telling the crowd that he saw a “demonic portal” open over the White House when Joe Biden moved in. But Flynn, by contrast, did not display any guile at all. By every outward indication, he was speaking in earnest. The man had once had an outstanding career in military intelligence, a field that values discernment and reason, evidence and verification. Now he looked high on his own supply. In 1972, Michael Flynn received a commendation and town title in Middletown, Rhode Island, for his help rescuing toddlers from the path of a car rolling driverless down a hill. (The Newport Daily News / AP) Did something in his history offer a clue? Flynn grew up in Rhode Island, the sixth of nine children of an Army sergeant first class and a mother from a military family. He stood out early. He graduated from Middletown High School in 1977 as homecoming king, a co-captain of the state-champion football team, and the “best looking” senior by vote of his classmates. Thomas Heaney, the quarterback, told me that Flynn, at maybe 160 pounds, was scrawny for an offensive lineman but he had grit. He was “not the fastest guy on the field, but played hard.” Already, Flynn had a flair for the heroic. As a teenager, he and a friend rescued a pair of toddlers from the path of a car rolling driverless down a hill. Flynn became known in the neighborhood as a “guardian of the little ones,” according to Kathleen Connell, a neighbor and a former Rhode Island secretary of state. But he also had a brush with the criminal-justice system, he writes in a 2016 book, which landed him in juvenile detention for a night and earned him a year of supervised probation. He does not elaborate. Flynn was a B student at the University of Rhode Island but top of his class in the ROTC cohort. In 1983, not long after graduation, First Lieutenant Flynn deployed with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in the invasion of Grenada. There was not much combat to speak of, but Flynn demonstrated valor when two fellow soldiers were swept out on a riptide and struggled to stay afloat. Again, he was the hero, diving off a 40-foot cliff to rescue them both. Flynn began to make his name as a colonel in 2004, when the Army deployed him to Iraq as J-2, or director of intelligence, of a Special Operations unit called Task Force 714. The task force, drawn from the most elite units in the Joint Special Operations Command and led by then–Major General Stanley McChrystal, had one mission in Iraq: to track and kill insurgents. They had a slow start. In his memoir, My Share of the Task, McChrystal writes that he arrived in the command to discover “painstakingly selected, exquisitely trained warriors” who could not keep track of their targets. In those early days, the task force would stage a raid, kill or capture insurgents, and fill burlap sacks with “scooped-up piles of documents, CDs, computers, and cell phones.” Unable to make sense of that raw intelligence in the field, the commandos would ship it all back to headquarters in Baghdad, or even back to the United States, for analysis. At McChrystal’s direction, Flynn rebuilt the system. The two men shaped the task force into an “extraordinary machine,” a senior flag officer who worked with them told me. McChrystal described Flynn as “pure energy.” He speed-walked, speed-talked, and filled bulging green notebooks with diagrams and briefing notes. Flynn, McChrystal writes, “had an uncanny ability to take a two-hour discussion or a thicket of diagrams on a whiteboard and then marshal his people, resources, and energy to make it happen.” Under Flynn’s leadership, and with forward-deployed intelligence analysts, the commandos found that they could capture an enemy safe house, exploit devices and papers on the spot, and use the fresh intelligence to launch another operation within an hour or two, before insurgents had even realized that they had been compromised. Flynn and McChrystal became an exceedingly deadly team. At its peak, the task force was “doing 12 to 15 operations a night,” the flag officer said, month after month. “He was incredibly hardworking, and he could see how to connect the dots.” Another admirer of Flynn’s at the time, a retired four-star general, told me that there were no illusions about the nature of those missions. “You go in the house to kill everybody in there,” he said. In his three years in Iraq, Flynn lived in a world of good and evil. He oversaw a relentless machine that killed thousands, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the prolifically murderous leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Flynn won his promotion to brigadier general, then added a second star when he served briefly as J-2 for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon in 2008, a prestigious assignment. Then, in 2009, McChrystal was selected to command all U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. He brought Flynn with him. General Barry McCaffrey, one of the most decorated generals in recent decades, made a fact-finding tour of McChrystal’s command in November 2009 and met with Flynn. He was dazzled. “He had a map, and he had this immense command of the terrorist forces in Afghanistan and the nature of the culture and what was going on in Pakistan,” McCaffrey told me. “I thought, God, this guy is flipping magic.” People who worked with Flynn in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of whom declined to speak on the record out of respect for old friendships, said Flynn showed no sign in those years of extreme or fantastical views. One of his colleagues in Afghanistan was a young Marine captain named Matt Pottinger, who would go on to become deputy national security adviser under Trump. “When we were in Afghanistan,” Pottinger told me, “I didn’t hear wacky conspiracies.” Still, with Pottinger’s help, Flynn cultivated a reputation as an iconoclast. He was best known in Afghanistan for a controversial white paper that he published in January 2010, a sharp critique of the U.S. government’s intelligence operations in Afghanistan by the man ostensibly in charge of them. Flynn was listed as the first and senior author, and it burnished his reputation as a defense intellectual, though in fact, Pottinger told me, he himself “wrote most of the paper,” and “Flynn provided guidance and edits.” Flynn had taken a risk by publishing the paper outside the Pentagon chain of command, and then–Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained about the breach of protocol to James Clapper, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “He didn’t object to the article as much as he did object to … the manner in which it came out,” Clapper told me. Clapper called to admonish Flynn, passing along the secretary’s displeasure. But on the whole, the episode raised Flynn’s profile and laid the ground for his next promotion. Flynn spent his career in a fixed universe of black and white, right and wrong. His expertise was in connecting the dots and drawing inferences. But somewhere along the way, his dot detector began spinning out of control. David Frum: Trump pardoned Flynn to save himself Flynn’s last job in uniform, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, became his first major failure. He had been “a superb officer” in staff positions, a senior colleague told me, but when it came time to run a large organization—with more than 15,000 employees, most of them civilians—Flynn struggled. Another colleague, a high-ranking officer, told me that Flynn “thought he was the only one speaking truth to power.” Flynn clashed with his civilian deputy, David Shedd, and his supervisor, Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, according to Clapper. “I think he was a one-trick pony,” McCaffrey said. “He and McChrystal knew how to hunt down and kill or neutralize terrorist threats to the United States, and they were unbelievable at it, and Flynn was a part of it. Then they moved him into DIA.” There, McCaffrey said, “he was way over his head.” In retrospect, the first signs of Flynn’s loss of touch with evidence came in this final military posting. Flynn, colleagues told me, would become fixated on an idea and demand that analysts find evidence to support it. This is when DIA executives began to speak derisively of “Flynn facts.” Flynn would say, for example, that Iran had killed more Americans than al-Qaeda had, a claim that could easily be refuted, but Flynn kept repeating it. In February 2014, when he was not yet two years into the job, Flynn was summoned to Room 3E834 at the Pentagon. Vickers and Clapper, his two bosses, were waiting. The position was not working out, they said. He was fired, but allowed to hang on until he reached the minimum service required to retire as a lieutenant general. “My problem was his impact on the morale of the workforce,” Clapper told me. “It was the stories about ‘Flynn facts.’ Very erratic, you know, he’d always contradict himself and give direction and then 10 minutes later contradict it. You just can’t do that, running a big organization.” For Vickers, Clapper suggested, “it was a case of insubordination” on issues relating to the Defense Clandestine Service. Both reasons for his firing hinted at an overweening confidence in his own apprehension of the world. Flynn wrote in a memoir that President Barack Obama fired him because he did not want to hear Flynn’s warnings about the danger of Islamic extremism. Clapper calls that explanation “complete baloney.” Obama had nothing to do with Flynn’s firing, Clapper says, and neither did Flynn’s views on the Islamic State. Michael Flynn spoke in Phoenix in January as part of the “ReAwaken America” tour. (Mark Peterson / Redux) Flynn’s dissolution in recent years is a subject of considerable chagrin and embarrassment to his old brothers in arms. It is a forbidden subject for many of them, and an awkward one for others. McChrystal, his longtime mentor and commander, is said by friends to have watched in horror as Flynn chanted “Lock her up!” at the Republican convention in 2016. He declined to be interviewed for this story. “Out of the respect for our service together, and years of closer friendship, I’m now just going to stay silent,” he told me by email. Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, once Flynn’s commander and later his White House colleague, wrote, “I have known Mike Flynn for many years going back to our days as Paratroopers in the 82d Airborne Division. As such, he remains a friend and prefer to not talk about him.” My inquiries prompted many replies like those. Former close associates of Flynn who did respond to my queries proposed varying explanations for Flynn’s behavior in recent years. One high-ranking officer said his extremism and conspiratorial bent may have been in him all along, but tamped down. “The uniform constrains people’s political and emotional qualities,” he said. “You can misjudge a person because they are constrained by the job and the uniform.” When he takes off the uniform, “the personality that may have been constrained comes out.” “Keep in mind, his reputation was built essentially as staff officer who’s got, you know, a really smart commander,” another top-ranking officer said. “You had Stan McChrystal, you know, holding both arms and keeping him focused.” Clapper thinks it was Flynn’s humiliation at the DIA that started him down the wrong road. “Getting terminated a year early ate at him,” Clapper told me. “He had a grievance. And it just, it was corrosive with him, and he became a bitter, angry man and just latched on to anybody who was opposed to Obama and the Obama administration. That’s my armchair analysis of what happened.” The humiliation of his subsequent firing as national security adviser and prosecution for lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States (he pleaded guilty, then tried to withdraw his plea, and then was pardoned by Trump) only amplified his feelings of persecution, by this hypothesis. David A. Graham: Why Michael Flynn is walking free But Clapper has another theory too. “He spent a lot of time deployed, maybe too much, as it turns out,” Clapper said. “He spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan chasing terrorists, and I think that, to some extent, that consumed him.” An officer who worked closely with Flynn in the field told me, “If you spend years hunting terrorists and honing this killing machine,” some people “get unhinged by all that.” One after another in my interviews, people who know Flynn speculated about the possibility of cognitive decline or a psychological disorder, then shied away. McCaffrey was the only person prepared to say on the record, “I think he was having mental-health problems.” At every stage of his career in the Army, Flynn’s performance had been dissected and judged by a senior rater. Given his rapid ascent, he must have been promoted at least twice “below the zone,” or before he would normally have been eligible. Shouldn’t the Army have seen the seeds of Flynn’s unraveling? McCaffrey said that that is asking too much. There are hundreds of generals in the Army, he said, and nearly 1,000 flag officers across the armed services. They are among the most rigorously selected people in any profession. “As people get older, in particular, and as circumstances push in on them,” he said, “every year there’s some fairly small number who have mental-health problems … So yeah, some of them go bad. But Flynn went bad in one of the most spectacular manners we’ve ever witnessed. You know, it wasn’t just bad judgment. It was demented behavior.” Demented, and well rewarded. Which is still another potential explanation for the Flynn we see today. Somebody is making good money on the “ReAwaken America” tour. At $250 a ticket, the gate for the Canton event was in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a million dollars, not including sales of MAGA swag, Flynn memorabilia, Jesus hats, survival gear, vitamins and plant pigments marketed as COVID therapy, and, inevitably, MyPillow bedroom furnishings. Clay Clark, the emcee, is a Tulsa-based business coach who conceived of and organizes the tour; he holds the two-day events every month. Clark declined, in an interview, to say what Flynn’s cut is. It could be that I am wrong about Flynn’s purity of belief. It could be that he is responding, rationally enough, to incentives. Flynn faced monumental legal bills in his criminal case, and there is a lucrative role in the MAGA ecosystem for someone who says the things that he says. John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff and a retired general, told me that Flynn “spent quite a bit of money” to defend himself. Perhaps, Kelly said, “he’s trying to make some of that money back.” Then there is the lure of adulation. The latter-day Flynn is celebrated by adoring crowds. Standing onstage, he gets to be the hero once again. Does flynn imagine a political future? Sometimes it sounds that way. He closed his Ohio appearance with a rallying cry. “I’m trying to get this message out to the American people that now is the time to decide whether you’re going to be courageous or not,” he said. “I mean, this is it.” I asked Joe Flynn whether his brother planned to run for office. “I don’t think he’s interested in that at all,” Joe replied. He wouldn’t be the last guy who got conscripted, however, and there is one political office for which Flynn has been on the shortlist before. “I personally think he should become Trump’s running mate,” Clark said. “I’d love to see a Trump-Flynn ticket.” In the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump flew to as many as five campaign events a day, Flynn became his regular warm-up act. “He was an amazingly popular opener,” Bannon told me. “He was as popular as Rudy [Giuliani], and Rudy’s pretty fucking popular with the crowd. Flynn was the most popular opening act we had.” Trump, according to contemporary news accounts, looked hard at Flynn as a running mate in 2016 before selecting Mike Pence. Some Trump allies think that Flynn, who recently visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago, is back on the menu for 2024. “I think Mike [Flynn] could very well be on the VP shortlist in ‘24,” Bannon said. “And if the president doesn’t run, I strongly believe Mike is running.” Roger Stone, the veteran operative of countless campaigns—and, like Flynn, the recipient of a pardon from Trump—told the Canton crowd to expect great things. “There is one person who is absolutely central to the future of this country,” he said. “Absolutely central to the struggle for freedom that we face. This is a man who’s not a politician. I don’t think he much likes politics. This is a man who served his country. He’s actually a war hero … I speak of that great American patriot, General Michael Flynn.” “And let me say this,” he added. “General Flynn’s greatest acts of public service lie ahead.” Barton Gellman is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Repost from Jim Stewartson's site "Mind-War" The glossary of terms is helpful. It’s time to talk about harmful online “ops” As the target of a persistent campaign to smear my reputation, undermine my work and damage my ability to make a living, I have learned a lot about what really happens on social media. JIM STEWARTSOJAN 22, 2022 5 Source: RAND Introduction This is not an exposé of anyone. I will not name my attackers in this piece. But it’s important for people to understand what happens in the shadows online and how it works to manipulate reality to target and harm people. This is difficult to write for several reasons. First, it brings up trauma and triggers PTSD. The last 18 months have been the most challenging of my life in many ways. I’ve experienced all of what I will describe in this piece and, to say the minimum possible, it sucked. That, of course, is exactly what they intend, to tear the target down psychologically and to interfere with what they do in every other possible way. To lower their influence, wear them out, and defeat their ability to speak. Writing this also opens me up to new lines of attack which I am dreading. Again, this is the point. They make it painful to speak. My attackers still have three big problems with me, however. I have dismantled their narrative and they know it. They have been, are, and will always be dead wrong about the origin, operations and mechanisms of the Cult that is currently putting global liberal democracy on life support. That is the point of what they do. To be wrong — aggressively. The same ability that allows me to see a network like QAnon and accurately predict what it will do and who’s doing it, allows me to see what my attackers are doing to me. It’s just another network to expose. I hate being part of the story but I have no choice — so be it. I am stubborn, extremely stubborn. I will not stop — or be silenced. Ultimately, their goal is to change the narrative to the one they’ve been assigned to enforce. I was way off their script and had to be taken out. Since taking out my Twitter account wasn’t enough, they’re continuing to attack me on Twitter in my absence, and extending it to anywhere else I show up. If you think this is hyperbole, search my name and any derogatory term on Twitter. I dare you. Also, let me say this before getting into the details. Anyone who followed me knows that I do not make statements without back up, without “receipts” — if for no other reason than the trolls would crucify me. The good news about a social media attack is that is it recordable. The internet really is forever. The receipts create themselves. I spent about 15 months doing everything in my power to ignore the trolls publicly, despite their constant attacks behind a block and their active attempts to prevent me from doing my work. I very rarely mentioned it for nearly a year. However, I did not sit still about it. I have collected a great deal of information. I fully expect my trolls to tear this article apart, to clip it out of context, to deny any of this happens and to make fun of me for crying about mean tweets. I can’t wait. The network will light up like a Christmas tree and the camera will be rolling. Who am I? What makes me qualified to even be in this conversation? Some of my “critics” have questioned whether I’m an “expert.” Let me say this clearly: Yes. You can go to my About page or LinkedIn if you want, but I’ve been involved in internet technology for nearly 30 years. I was one of the inventors of “alternate reality games” which QAnon mirrored and weaponized. I started “larping” nearly 20 years ago. I have a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement — Original Interactive Show and a bunch of other awards and patents. I’ve run five internet/technology/entertainment companies and worked at Google/Niantic. And I have a talent for absorbing large amounts of information and identifying patterns. I’ve also done the work and put in the time. if you’ve followed me at all you know this is true. I have done this seven days a week since August 2, 2020. Thousands and thousands of hours. I have talked to thousands of people and have hundreds of sources. I will debate any of the people who put me down and claim to be experts on any related subject. Any of them. Moving on. “Ops” What is an “op” in the context of harmful online activities? Confusingly, it can mean two different things. It can be short for either “operative,” a person doing a job, or for “operation” which is a coordinated set of activities with a specific goal. In this context, “op” is used to mean either an intentionally inauthentic actor, or an inauthentic coordinated action. In other words, a person or people who know what they are doing is harmful someone else and do it anyway. Operative “op” examples: “Jane was high up at Palantir, I wonder if she’s a Thiel op.” This is speculation, inquiring whether Jane is not being authentic in her actions, that rather than doing what she personally believes, she is using her voice to shape the narrative in a way conducive to Thiel’s plans. “Tom joined our group, made friends with everyone and then blew everything up. He was obviously an op.” This means that because of Tom’s clearly inauthentic actions infiltrating the group and causing chaos, he wasn’t there for the reasons he led everyone to believe. He was an operative for someone else. Operation “op” examples: “That website platforms disinformation actors in the guise of free speech. I’m trying to find out who’s running the op.” “There’s a group of them who won’t leave her alone. Seems to be an op to get her to quit Twitter because she’s ready to talk.” Hopefully you get the idea. It’s just shorthand for stuff that sadly happens all the time. The trolls will go to town on this word, claiming “ops” do not exist, while every single one of them do it and use the word themselves. Why do they do it? MICE Money Ideology Compromising material / Coercion Ego In counterintelligence, they use this acronym to break down the basic motivations for people to go against the interests of their own country. It serves just as well to describe why people engage in harmful behavior online. I know many people attacking me that fit each of these categories or various combinations thereof. Terms I’m going to define some terms and give examples based on my own experience. Some of this may seem outlandish. Trust me, I know. Nonetheless, all of this happens. A lot. LARP Live Action Role Play. Verb form: to “larp.” In this context, a LARP is simply a social media account that is portraying itself as something it’s not. It’s a human playing a character behind a digital mask. Not all characters are bad of course, and neither are all LARPs. I started larping online in 2004 for entertainment doing an alternate reality game for Halo 2. It was fun and people loved it. However, when people are larping and harming people while hiding behind an anonymous account or being deceptive about their true intentions in order to solicit information or to traumatize people, that’s not entertainment, it’s fraud and malicious injury. It should be a crime. “Q” is now the most famous LARP in history of course. As I’ve explained in detail, QAnon was a psychological operation to radicalize Americans toward fascism and theocracy. The same basic process that brainwashed tens of millions of people into seeing Donald Trump as the Second Coming and Hillary as the Antichrist, can be used at smaller scales as well. Troll This word is used in a lot of ways, but in my experience, it has two somewhat different meanings depending on the part of speech being used. As a verb, to “troll” someone can simply mean saying something to intentionally get a reaction from someone else or a group. This is not necessarily toxic in isolation. Verbal battles can be fun if there is engagement on both sides and it doesn’t get abusive. As a noun however, in my experience, a “troll” is an account whose purpose is to target and harm others. For example, there are at least 20 people whose actual job appears to be to defame me personally — or at least a substantial part of their job. And hundreds more who actively follow and cooperate with it. This may sound hard to believe but I assure you it’s true and I have proof. The ringleaders seem to be paid by the tweet because they generate thousands and thousands of lies and false insinuations while on assignment, which can go on for many months. None of the tweets in isolation is enough to get them suspended but in combination creates serious direct damage to the target and as much collateral damage as possible as well. They target your allies — ruthlessly. All of my public friends and partners have been targeted. Every last one. Concern trolls and sealions While this used to be a relatively small part of trolling, in my experience at least, it is now the majority of what they do in public. In order to circumvent Twitter’s TOS, the trolls have learned the exact set of rules they must follow to avoid suspension. While ad hominem attacks and attacks on minority status seem less frequent, they have simply replaced them with lies, mischaracterizations and insinuations which do not break TOS at the tweet level. And they create volume. Here’s an example of someone who lives in the UK dedicated to trashing me with his “concerns” — literally dedicated. Thousands and thousands of tweets like this since February 2021 completely mischaracterizing me. He takes one small part of an enormous amount of evidence and creates a straw man which he then attacks. The tell is what he and his allies go after constantly — Russian involvement and Mike Flynn. Both of those subjects are off limits to them. I wonder why. Weaponizing mental health One of the things trolls do is target people based on vulnerabilities. They try to find weaknesses, or strengths, and then target those. For me, one theme has been that I am “unwell.” A prominent “dirtbag left” QAnon-related podcast that pulls in over a million dollars a year put a notice up on the main discord channel that I was “unwell” and implied I was suicidal. However, they did say that their audience should stop targeting me for trolling in their server. You may be surprised to learn that it only got worse. When I confronted one of the co-hosts about this, they gaslit me that I was in fact unwell and thought it was fine to say this anyway. Note the discussion of “BlueAnon” which is a term used to discredit researchers used by Russia-friendly commentators on the far-left like Aaron Maté and Matt Taibbi as well as fascists like Jack Posobiec and Mike Flynn himself. This person, a prominent figure in spreading disinformation about QAnon who trolls me ruthlessly and runs ops on my friends had “Jim Stewartson is unwell” in their bio for months. Apparently this does not break Twitter’s TOS. For the record, I am neurodiverse and I take care of my mental health which has certainly suffered from these attacks. But I am not unwell, and implying this is a despicable ableist smear. Sock Puppets Sock puppets are a form of account that is designed to be disposable and has a purpose the owner wants to conceal. I’ve used them to monitor accounts that I’m blocked on and used them to interact with accounts to get information, for example this fifteen minute video of me in August 2020 getting indoctrinated into QAnon in 15 minutes. I did conceal my purpose with my profile and actions. But I was not there to harm people. However, I certainly could have if i had bad intentions. Coordination with sock puppets Coordinated harmful activity is against the Twitter TOS, but there is no way to report it. When you report tweets for abuse and harassment, they ask you for specific tweets only. If you add to the report providing evidence of harmful coordination, they respond that the specific tweets were not in violation. It’s maddening. The rules are there and it’s happening under their noses all over their platform but there is no enforcement. Zero. Twitter TOS - Coordinated Harmful Activity I am aware of several people who are attacking me and my friends who operate dozens of sock puppet accounts through Tweetdeck that play both sides. This is so they argue with themselves in order to get as much of the poisonous material out as possible. Mindfucking This is one of the most difficult parts to believe, but it’s true. Bear with me. There are people out there who are experts in psychological manipulation through trauma, gaslighting and manufactured drama. They target vulnerable people and brainwash them into believing their attacker is their friend at the same the “friend” is attacking through separate accounts or having collaborators do it. This is also known as “gangstalking.” They set situations up to intentionally cause trauma. Trauma causes fear and it causes dissociation, both of which are necessary components of undue influence. I have a great deal of evidence of this process. Of people intentionally coordinating psychological attacks to break a target down in order to insert whatever ideas they want and get the victim to take actions they would not otherwise take. The process is “360” and involves contacting the associates of the target. Phone calls, emails, lawsuits, physical intimidation and financial levers are all in the toolkit. Horrifyingly, sometimes the actions they want people to take are self-harm. There are a number of suicides associated with QAnon and associated groups that are the direct result of people being mindfucked. There are also a large number of people who have been mindfucked into mental institutions or chronic insanity. Victims of this process, however, are mostly weaponized against the enemies of the person who mindfucked them. They are led to believe the people they are attacking are evil and must be destroyed. So they become effectively cult members who do whatever their cult leader says, including causing harm to others. In other words, like mini QAnon. Misusing Private Information Imagine this situation. There’s someone you thought was a friend. Someone you trusted but seems to have pulled away for reasons you don’t understand. They contact you in DMs and purposefully engage you in a conversation about others who you believe are harmful and attacking you. Almost immediately the DMs are spread all over Twitter by the same bad actors you were talking about in your private conversation with your “friend.” The DMs are then used as “evidence” to support the idea that you are “attacking” the bad actors who are actually the ones attacking you. It’s manufactured evidence to use as projection. This is an op. It’s happened to me many times. I’ve talked to thousands of people over the last 18 months. I say lots of stuff in private I wouldn’t say publicly — just like everyone else. Using someone’s deceptively appropriated private conversations is a disgusting tactic and should be against TOS. Two-sided Ops / Infiltration The hardest thing to achieve online while being attacked is trust. My policy has always been to trust people who tell the truth and take actions that help preserve democracy. This works — to a point. The hole in this strategy are “two-sided ops” or people who say things and take actions which appear to be benevolent while they are actually there for deceptive and harmful reasons. They will report back to others what you are doing, generate material to use against you, and cause chaos and divide you from your friends. The people who do this are sociopaths by definition, because what they are doing is intentionally and deceptively harming people. Finding out you were deceived by someone you trusted also creates paranoia. It makes you not trust anyone — which again, is the point. The people who do this want you isolated. Influence Journalists and Blue Checks Going into this project, innocent child that I was, I gave the press the benefit of the doubt that they could absorb facts and report them accurately. Sadly, the press is a minefield of people who are either too afraid, too gaslit, or too compromised to accurately report on what’s going on. I have made contact with a large number of prominent journalists along the way. For the most part, they are well meaning and they want to tell the truth. But journalists are just people like anyone else. The are not immune to gaslighting, lies and smear campaigns. There are a few good journalists — they know who they are — that were fully engaged in helping me get stories out. Then they suddenly ghosted me and started amplifying the people attacking me — the same people who are spreading disinformation about QAnon and related subjects. They were influenced by bad actors who lied to them. That is just the symptom, however. The disease is the embedded ops in the press that spread disinformation, attack people and solicit others to write hit pieces while working hard to maintain a veneer of credibility. For example, there are at least 6 blue checks who larp as journalists or academics who have decided that destroying my ability to talk to the press is a good use of their time. They do it both publicly and privately. They poison my name to people I trusted and lie about me and my record at every opportunity. Again, if you doubt me, most of the receipts are all public. Platforming bad actors Last year a semi-prominent blue check journalist wrote a bullshit story about a trivial drama that gave a lot of oxygen to several people, including someone who is infamous for manufacturing situations to give himself clout. The two other people he platformed in his story have spent every single day since trying to destroy me publicly and privately. There was no reason to print the story. It was completely made up and the journalist knew it. Yet the journalist published it anyway, giving clout to the precise people that are trying to harm me. Killing stories The same blue check journalist who wrote the story above also specializes in downplaying anything related to QAnon, and especially, for some weird reason, Mike Flynn. They took my story about Mike Flynn leading a Christian church in an occult prayer by fascist cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet and turned it into a nonsense story about how all the QAnon members were calling Flynn “Satanic” which, especially at the time, was pure bullshit. None of that was the point. And this journalist knew it. They pushed the story mainstream. It was on MSNBC, etc. and the journalist went on TV to take credit for this lie, giving no credit to me, although he did identify me in his article as “Twitter user Jim Stewartson.” So, instead of taking seriously the fact that Flynn was deceptively trying to insert dangerous fascist ideology into unknowing Christian audiences, the story became “QAnon turns on Flynn.” This had the effect of obscuring the point of my discovery AND generated more disinformation that Flynn is not involved in QAnon, except as a “grifter.” Here is his good friend, another blue check that has been aggressively attacking me for a year and a half. This guy runs around the internet trying to discredit everything I do. He does it in public and he does it in private. He solicits hit pieces on me. He seems to like protecting Flynn and hates any mention of Russian interference. He is desperate for you to believe that Ron Watkins did everything and that Mike Flynn is just a “grifter.” Ask yourself why. If he’s so sure he’s right, why not just prove it? Do some work. Show your research. Since what you’re saying is true, it should speak for itself. But it’s not authentic, it’s a clear and motivated agenda. Who are these people anyway? When you really look at these journalists’ backgrounds and see who they have associated with, the LARP becomes apparent. Some of the people who larp as “Q experts” are friends with many of the people who operated and amplified QAnon. Yes, some of them started covering QAnon very early which they tout obsessively, but that in itself should tell you something. Why amplify a small internet LARP when no one outside of 8chan was paying attention? Most importantly, look at the coverage. Look at their stories. Is what they are writing actually contributing information that’s useful, or does it misdirect people from the point and from the people that are perpetrating disinformation and harmful behavior? Finally, look at their track record and analysis. Did they warn about the danger in a way that was helpful? Was their analysis insightful or did it just muddy the water? Also, who do they interact with? What sort of people do they talk to? Do they amplify trolls and harmful actors? Chaos Agents Let’s say you are a rich, malevolent person and someone on Twitter is exposing stuff you don’t like. Let’s say you have a deep network of dangerous, harmful bad actors online that you have been cultivating since GamerGate. Let’s say you have people you pay whose job is to generate conflict and chaos. I’ll call them “handlers.” You give your handler a couple hundred grand to pay people to take the target down and pay the network through any number of crypto schemes. This sum is a rounding error for a billionaire. Your handler recruits people and gives them sums of money to be dedicated to attacking the target. The people doing it don’t need to know the reason for the attack or where the money’s coming from. It’s a job. And for narcissists and sociopaths it’s a lot of fun. They spend their days in discord and Twitter DMs trying to figure out different ways to take a target down. They run ops. They recruit trolls. And they attack your friends and partners. They deploy two-sided ops to get information to use maliciously. There is quite a list of these people, who have been paid to attack me personally. The record is clear. I’ve identified a few already publicly and I will identify more. Being paid to intentionally harm another person is immoral and anyone who does it is a monster. The people doing it to me right now, be on notice. I will not allow this to continue and I will take action to be compensated for the harm you have caused me. Harm You may have noticed that I have used the word “harm” a lot in this piece. That’s intentional, because our system is not set up to prevent it and it needs to change. Coordinated harmful online campaigns cause real damage to the target. I’m not going to go into the details of all the damage they cause, but here are a few categories Emotional / psychological Financial / business Reputation / destroying groups of friends Occupational In my case, I have documented all of this. Everyone who contributed to it is liable. What Now? I know the people doing this to me. I am taking all necessary actions to put a stop to it. Once we preserve democracy, I’m going to make it a mission to make our online lives safer. It’s currently a weaponized influence war with rules that are easily gamed to benefit people with bad intentions. I’m going to keep comments off this article for now. I want people to be able to share it without the inevitable garbage that will come at me. If you found this helpful, I urge you to share it. This stuff is real. It happens in the open and I want people to understand it. Please feel free to email me at stewartson at protonmail dot com. ☠️ Subscribe to MindWar: The Psychological War on Democracy
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/russian-disinformation-campaigns-on-twitter/ Russian Twitter disinformation campaigns reach across the American political spectrum Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group identities. The groups affected spanned the ideological spectrum, suggesting the importance of coordinated counter-responses from diverse coalitions of users. By Deen Freelon Hussman School of Journalism and Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Tetyana Lokot School of Communications, Dublin City University, Ireland Research Questions What authentic audiences did the Internet Research Agency (IRA) interact with, and with what messages? To what extent did these audiences share the ideological orientation of the IRA accounts to which they replied? Are IRA strategies different for different communities? What strategies might be the most effective to counter IRA activities? Essay Summary The IRA is a private company sponsored by the Russian government, which distributes Kremlin-friendly disinformation on social media under false identities (see DiResta et al., 2018; Howard, Ganesh, Liotsiou, Kelly, & Francois, 2018). The IRA engaged with several distinct communities of authentic users—primarily conservatives, progressives, and Black people—which exhibited only minimal overlap on Twitter. Authentic users primarily engaged with IRA accounts that shared their own ideological and/or racial identities. Racist stereotyping, racial grievances, the scapegoating of political opponents, and outright false statements were four of the most common appeals found among the most replied-to IRA tweets. We conducted a network analysis of 2,057,747 authentic replies to IRA tweets over nine years, generated ideology ratings for a random sample of authentic users, and qualitatively analyzed some of the most replied-to IRA tweets. State-sponsored disinformation agents have demonstrated success in infiltrating distinct online communities. Political content attracts far more engagement than non-political content and appears crafted to exploit intergroup distrust and enmity. Collaboration between different political groups and communities might be successful in detecting IRA campaigns more effectively. Implications This study’s results support two broad conclusions and two practical implications regarding State-supported social media disinformation in general and the IRA’s efforts in particular: 1) Politically active communities present substantial vulnerabilities that disinformation agents can exploit. By far, the IRA accounts and content that attracted the most attention were explicitly political in nature. In contrast, the organization was less successful in engaging users with its hashtag games, health appeals, and general-interest news headlines. This indicates that politically engaged users should be especially mindful of attempts by foreign governments and others to co-opt their social media activities for surreptitious disinformation purposes. 2) Our results make it clear that group identities are at the core of the IRA’s attack strategy. Political audiences were addressed as liberals, conservatives, and Black people to provoke anger against oppositional outgroups. Each group was paired with a specific set of opponents: the IRA presented conservatives with outrages committed by liberals, immigrants, CNN, George Soros, and others; liberals witnessed the travesties of the Trump administration, Republicans in general, and evangelical Christians; and Black users were confronted with an endless cavalcade of racism, often perpetrated by white police officers. There was very little policy-related or even horse-race campaign content to be found—most tweets were devoted to vilifying political and social adversaries. Other tweets supported the core group identity in affirmative ways, such as conservative tweets celebrating law enforcement and the military and Black posts spotlighting Black history and achievements. Individuals who identify as members of targeted groups ran a disproportionate risk of exposure to IRA disinformation over the study time period. The 2020 election may put them in a similar position (Linvill & Warren, 2019). Facts, inflammatory opinions, and outright falsehoods are all components of a successful disinformation playbook. In their typology of IRA Twitter accounts, Linvill and Warren (2018) separate political users on the left and right from so-called “Fearmongers” whose main purpose is to spread fabricated news stories. Our results reveal that political IRA users also trafficked in falsehoods alongside factual content and extreme opinions. While previous research has noted this tendency (Howard et al., 2018), we find false content among the ranks of the most widely-discussed tweets, especially on the right. The IRA’s strategy of posting about nonexistent events can only be successful if authentic users engage with and spread such content at scale. This opens the possibility that it may have had some degree of political impact. This study’s findings imply that 1) combating State-sponsored disinformation requires cross-ideological engagement, and 2) to protect and empower their users, social media platforms need to do more than simply delete disinformation messages upon detection. The relative sizes of the communities we detected suggest that neither side of the political aisle is immune to foreign disinformation. The ideological breadth of the threat presents opportunities for anti-propaganda collaborations across lines of political difference. We have already seen bipartisan efforts to this effect in the US Congress (e.g., US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2017), but civil society could do more. Because disinformation messages targeted at one group are unlikely to be seen by others, members of different targeted groups could coordinate to identify and expose suspicious behaviors, perhaps by using private messaging tools. While they may not agree on the issues, they should at least be able to identify foreign meddling in domestic elections as a common threat. Social media platforms could also do more to empower their users against foreign manipulation. Both Facebook and Twitter’s current policies require that “coordinated inauthentic behavior” be removed immediately upon detection. But this practice robs users of opportunities to understand and recognize attempts at manipulation in context. Platforms could balance user disinformation education with the understandable desire to stop such messages from spreading by: Labeling disinformation messages as such, Providing links to supporting evidence for the labels, Showing statistics on how far the account’s messages had spread before detection, and disabling the share and reply functions for such messages. Policy changes such as these might help users understand how politically polarizing and hostile messages are marshaled as nonpartisan weapons of information warfare, and perhaps even discourage them from circulating their own such messages. Extensive user testing should be conducted before implementing such measures to ensure that they do not backfire by inviting users to believe disinformation content. Findings We find that the IRA engaged with several distinct communities of users on Twitter. We used a network analysis technique called community detection to determine the sizes of the most popular IRA accounts’ respective audiences. A “community” is defined as a group of authentic (non-IRA) users that mostly reply to the same popular IRA accounts and only rarely to other accounts. We discovered ten distinct communities, all featuring varying degrees of overlap with one another: four devoted to right-wing politics, one left-wing and generally anti-Trump, one focused on Black American issues, one focused on false news outlets that mostly discussed real news, one devoted to hashtag games (i.e., hashtags that pose challenges for users to answer cleverly, such as #ReasonsIAintInARelationship and #3wordsBetterThanILoveYou), one about health and diet issues, and one Russian-language community. Figure 1 is a network visualization of the ten communities. The size of each circle is proportional to the number of members within each community—the larger the circle, the more populous the community. The lines connecting each circle indicate how many replies crossed community boundaries, with thicker lines corresponding to more replies. We found that 47.5% of unique users across all communities were placed in one of the four right-wing communities, compared to 16.5% in the Left community, 15.2% in the Russian-language community, 14% in the Black community, 2.3% in the News community, 2.2% in the Hashtag Gamer community, and 2.2% in the Health and Diet community. Figure 1. Sociogram of IRA network communities. Each community is anchored by one or more leaders that are responsible for a plurality or majority of replies. Table 1 displays the top three of each community’s most prominent leaders and the proportion of replies for which each is responsible, out of all replies pointing to community members. Twenty-three of the 30 leader accounts are affiliated with the IRA. The remaining seven authentic accounts (highlighted in italics) all appear in one of the Right communities. Some authentic accounts were included in these communities simply because someone mentioned them, while others actively participated in conversations in which IRA accounts were involved. Community Leader(s) Percent replies to community Right 1 @pamela_moore13 27.1% @usa_gunslinger 3.5% @potus 1.9% Right 2 @jenn_abrams 83.4% @youtube 0.6% @vine 0.2% Right 3 @ten_gop 85.5% @realdonaldtrump 5.9% @anncoulter 0.6% Right 4 @southlonestar 85.5% @jk_rowling 0.8% @kthopkins 0.8% Left @wokeluisa 45.1% @kanijjackson 21.5% @jemishaaazzz 7.0% Black @crystal1johnson 33.3% @blacktolive 8.6% @blacknewsoutlet 5.3% News @chicagodailynew 9.6% @dailylosangeles 8.1% @seattle_post 4.7% Hashtag gamers @giselleevns 18.6% @danageezus 9.7% @chrixmorgan 5.1% Health & diet @exquote 11.7% @funddiet 7.5% @finddiet 4.6% Russian @kadirovrussia 16.7% @lavrovmuesli 11.7% @margosavazh 8.0% Table 1. IRA Community Leaders. Most communities exhibited only minimal overlap with one another, except for the conservative communities. The other communities that engaged with the IRA’s messages had -in general- minimal direct contact with one another. For each community, Figure 2 shows the proportion of replies in which both accounts reside within the community out of all those in which at least one account resides within the community. The right-wing communities proved the most outward-facing, with three of the four sharing most of their replies with other communities. (The Right 3 community included @realDonaldTrump, which understandably attracted substantial amounts of attention from other communities.) In contrast, nearly 70% of the replies in which at least one participant was classified as Left or Black remained internal. This means that these communities mainly interacted within themselves, overlapping minimally with their neighbors. The Russian-language community was by far the most insular, most likely due to the language difference. Figure 2. Percent internal replies for IRA network communities. Our network analysis technique allows us to determine whether authentic users mostly engaged with IRA accounts sharing similar identities, or whether they mostly replied to accounts of vastly different identities. Our findings strongly favor the former conclusion; in other words, most of the authentic users shared the political ideologies of the IRA accounts to which they replied. Figure 3 depicts average ideology scores for random samples of 500 unique, authentic users replying to members of each community. The ideology scores are on a unidimensional scale in which lower negative values indicate more liberal ideologies, and higher positive values indicate more conservative ideologies. (See the Methods section for details on how we calculated these scores.) The ideology averages for all four Right communities are right of center, while those for Left and Black are left of center. Health & Diet and Hashtag Gamers also have left of center averages. Figure 3. Mean ideology scores for IRA network communities. Political IRA accounts were more effective at eliciting reactions than apolitical ones, with identity-specific appeals—particularly racial (i.e., invoking race) and racist (i.e., expressing racial animus) ones—frequently appearing among the former’s most replied-to tweets.IRA accounts tailored their messages to exploit prejudices held by community members against disfavored outgroups. Common targets among conservative-presenting IRA accounts’ top tweets included Democrats, Liberals, Antifa, Muslims, immigrants/refugees, George Soros, the Black Lives Matter movement, and CNN. Some tweets presented inflammatory interpretations of undisputed facts, e.g., “VIDEO: Biker Revs Engine, Drives Through Anti-Trump Activists Laying in the Street for a ‘Die-In’ RT if you’d buy the biker a beer!” (@pamela_moore13). But others presented false stories as factual, for example, “This is big! Hillary Clinton covered up child trafficking investigation at the State Department.” (@ten_gop). Thinly veiled racism was common, often manifesting in the form of such outgroup-directed pejoratives as “creeping sharia,” “BLM domestic terrorists,” “Muslim no-go zones,” and “illegals,” among others. All four conservative-presenting communities used similar tactics, differing from one another mainly in terms of size. The Left and Black communities also relied heavily on racial appeals, although from an opposite political stance from the Right communities. Topically, there was some overlap between the two, with nearly all the Black community’s tweets directly addressing race, while this was the case with only some of the Left community’s. The Left community’s non-racial tweets typically targeted Trump, his political allies, and evangelical Christians, e.g., “RT if you want Mueller to arrest Trump on live TV during the State of the Uniom [sic] address #SOTU” (@wokeluisa) and “Michael Flynn (convicted felon) gets a standing ovation at a republican fundraising event. Andrew McCabe (defended America from terrorist threats post 9/11) gets fired without a pension. This is a shining example of what the republican party has become.” (@kanijjackson). The IRA leaders of the Black community posted two main types of tweets: first, denunciations of racism, e.g., “Ohio cop shatter [sic] windshield of police cruiser with handcuffed black man’s face. Stop police brutality!” (@blk_voice); and second, apolitical celebrations of Black achievement, e.g. “8th grader, Kory Terrell is the Texas Spelling Bee champion! Show him some love. These things go unnoticed!” (@crystal1johnson). The remaining communities deviated sharply from these patterns. While many of the headlines that emerged from the News community focused on controversial topics such as guns and immigration, their tone was reserved and journalistic, in sharp contrast to the more political communities. The hashtag gamers engaged in a mishmash of political, apolitical, and vulgar jokes in reaction to hashtag prompts such as #RenameMillionWomenMarch, #IKnewWeWereDoomed, #3WordsBetterThanILoveYou, and #ThingsNotToMicrowave. The accounts devoted to health and diet issues remained unswervingly on-topic, avoiding politics altogether. Our community detection method collated nearly all the Russian-language accounts into a single community. These accounts posted a combination of many of the types of content documented above, including divisive political opinions, jokes, news headlines, and historical facts. Many of the tweets voiced opposition to the government of Ukraine, a common IRA position noted in prior research (Hjorth & Adler-Nissen, 2019). One major difference between the Russian-language IRA accounts and their Anglophone counterparts is that some of the former parodied or impersonated real people, includingRamzan Kadyrov (head of the Chechen Republic) and Sergei Lavrov (Russian foreign affairs minister), whereas none of the latter did so. Methods We collected our data between October 17 and 19, 2018, using a Twitter data collection program called Twint. We searched for all tweets that replied to any screen name on Twitter’s list of 3,814 confirmed IRA accounts. A complete list of the screen names we used can be found here. This process yielded 2,057,747 tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2018. Fewer than 1% of these tweets appeared prior to 2014, and almost half (46%) appeared in 2017. Given that we collected our data directly from Twitter in real time, we have a high degree of confidence that the true number of authentic replies is no lower than this. However, it may be higher, as tweet deletions and account suspensions almost certainly removed access to at least some replies. We used a network community detection algorithm called the Louvain method (Blondel, Guillaume, Lambiotte, & Lefebvre, 2008) to generate our communities. We chose to retain the ten largest detected communities based on the insight that larger communities are generally more important than smaller ones. 92% of all unique users in our dataset were classified into one of these ten communities. We labeled the communities based on a qualitative reading of the highest-ranking community members by reply count and the content of their tweets. The network visualization in Figure 1 was created with the network analysis program Gephi. To generate mean ideology scores for each community, we used an algorithm that infers political ideology based on whom Twitter users follow (Barberá, 2015). Briefly, it uses a list of “elite” users whose ideologies are known to estimate the political ideologies of any user who follows at least one of them. The algorithm assumes that liberals will tend to follow more liberals, and conservatives will follow more conservatives. It produces a unidimensional score in which negative values indicate liberal ideology, positive values indicate conservative ideology, and zero indicates a balanced or moderate ideology. Because collecting followers for the algorithm to analyze is time-consuming, for each community, we randomly sampled 500 authentic users who replied to an IRA member. Our initial sample was thus 5,000 (500 users x 10 communities), but we removed 1,314 users (26.3%) because they did not follow any elites. The ideology scores of the remaining 3,686 users (73.7%) were used to compute each community’s mean ideology scores.