Behind his lectern decorated with the Russian emblem, under the gilding of what must be the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin solemnly addresses “America”. “You accuse me of interfering in your democracy. But I don’t need to do it! You do it yourself ”, asserts the Head of State, in English with a Russian accent to cut with a knife.
This video is a fake, a deepfake created by an NGO to alert on threats to the US presidential election in November. Its realism does not stop at the perfect reproduction of Mr. Putin: it sums up wonderfully the situation of the United States in the home stretch of the presidential campaign. In 2020, even if foreign maneuvers cannot be ruled out – the authorities have also said they feared -, the most visible companies destabilizing the American political system no longer come from the East. This year the interference is made in USA.
In 2016, the US presidential election was targeted by an information manipulation operation. Its modalities and Russian origin have been extensively documented by parliamentary and judicial inquiries.
On the one hand, hackers belonging to the Russian military intelligence service stole emails within the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Transmitted to WikiLeaks, these messages have, for weeks, fueled the chronicle and highlighted the weak points of the Democratic candidacy. On the other hand, agents from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a dispensary based in St. Petersburg, flooded social media with messages intended to undermine Americans’ confidence in their electoral system and democracy.
An “elephant in the room”
In 2020, there is an “elephant in the room” (elephant in the room), as we say in English, a discomfort that we can hardly look in the face. This room is the Oval Office of the White House. Thus, the channel used for the publication of questionable documents on Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, is the American daily New York Post. And the person who provided these documents is none other than the lawyer for the incumbent President Rudy Giuliani, also a former mayor of New York (1994-2001). Even if, as fifty former members of the intelligence services asserted in an open letter, these documents include “All the classic characteristics of a Russian information operation”.
There is no longer any need for Kremlin agents to create false websites responsible for presenting American society in a light that favors Donald Trump’s candidacy: the New York Times has just uncovered a vast network of bogus local news sites actually run by people close to the Republican Party.
Beyond that, it has been weeks since, against all experts and all evidence, Mr. Trump campaigned on the fact that the November 3 election was “Rigged” and that postal voting was unreliable – a theory circulated by the IRA already in 2016. Its campaign team is trying to recruit volunteers to oversee the elections, which some see as a way of discouraging some voters, or even provoke violence during the ballot.
The US president has even, in an attitude prized by autocrats, refused to say whether or not he will concede defeat if he is defeated by Mr Biden. “This corresponds to the long-term objective [de la Russie], that of making Americans believe that democracy is a scam, that all elections are rigged, that they cannot trust their elected representatives ”, analysis, on NBCNews, Clint Watts, former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and expert in disinformation.
In 2016, the race question had been – by far – the favorite subject of the IRA, taking up an old Russian tradition. In 1984, during the Los Angeles Olympics, the KGB sent bogus letters, allegedly signed by the Ku Klux Klan, to foreign black athletes, causing international scandal. A subterfuge rendered unnecessary by a president who calls Mexicans “Rapists”, wanted to ban the entry of all Muslims on American soil and has multiplied insulting remarks for thirty years against African-Americans.
Donald Trump, “main disseminator of disinformation”
Aided by a host of support on social networks and in traditional media, Mr. Trump has been a vector of disinformation on all subjects since 2016. At the end of September, a Cornell University study devoted to the Covid-19 pandemic estimated that the American president was, by far, the “Main disseminator of disinformation” in the media globally, in particular because of its propensity to regularly present various treatments whose effectiveness is not proven as “Miraculous”.
The figures of the Russian propaganda campaign carried out in 2016 would seem almost ridiculous compared to those reached by a few big disinformers in the United States. According to reports commissioned by the US Senate, content posted by the IRA on Facebook has generated approximately 77 million interactions in two years – likes, comments, shares. In the past year alone, Republican conspiratorialist Dinesh D’Souza alone generated more than 50 million; the Daily Caller, an organ of disinformation favorable to Mr. Trump, more than 110 million.
According to data compiled by the German Marshall Fund think tank, the number of interactions on Facebook with pages that publish disinformation increased almost fourfold between late 2016 and mid-2020.
In 2016, the main messages disseminated by Russian trolls sought to denigrate Mr.me Clinton, to exacerbate racial tensions and to stir up hatred of refugees and immigrants. In 2020, an entire ecosystem is seeking, around the QAnon movement, to prove that the former Democratic candidate is a satanist pedophile.
Facebook pages with millions of subscribers claim that the police are, depending on your side, a uniform fascist group or the last line of defense before chaos. And the hatred of the refugees has given way, in thousands of particularly viral messages, to that of the Chinese, accused of having intentionally disseminated the Covid-19. Armed militias, like the Boogaloo Boys, parade, in big cities as in Facebook groups, claiming that the federal state is an illegitimate tyrant and that the “Ordinary citizens” must regain power by force.
Thus, without any external intervention, part of the United States has for several years followed a partition that Russia would not deny. Because his 2016 operation was not limited to the sole election. “It’s much more than that, explained in 2018 an expert cited by the senatorial commission responsible for shedding light on this operation, it is an interference in our society, our culture, our political conversation. “ Given the state of American society in 2020, a new major operation by Russian trolls would be like cracking a match in a forest fire.
