Target America: Dissecting Moscow’s Social Media Campaign

By Mark Jacobson

Mark Jacobson is currently an Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a non-resident Senior Fellow at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. As a public servant in the Department of Defense, at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and on Capitol Hill, he has worked on some of the most complex and politically sensitive national security issues facing the United States. His most recent appointments at the Pentagon were as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. Previously he served in Kabul, Afghanistan as the Deputy NATO Representative and Director of International Affairs at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and in these roles advised Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal on the international political dynamics of the mission. Jacobson’s military service includes time as both an Army and Navy reservist including mobilizations to Bosnia in 1996 and to Afghanistan in 2006. As an academic Jacobson focuses on military history, the use of propaganda, as well as the politics of U.S. national security policy.

In recent years, Russia has waged a new cold war on the United States through its actions, though we have only recently come to grips with this reality. As in any war, the Kremlin’s objectives are political. The principal weapon in this conflict is information, and the evidence of Russia’s use of it in Europe and the United States is clear. With the advent of ever-expanding and precise communications technologies capable of manipulating public opinion at the individual level on a massive scale – in particular social media – the tools and tactics of influence developed over the course of the 20th century can now alter perceptions of reality to a degree that they can shape societies, influence election outcomes and undermine states and alliances.

Russia’s well-financed and deliberate intervention in American political dialogue, including the 2016 election, is part of a broader effort to: undermine America’s faith in its free institutions and diminish U.S. political cohesion; erode confidence in western democracies and the credibility of western institutions; weaken trans-Atlantic relationships, including NATO; and diminish the international appeal of the United States as well as reduce American power abroad, as I noted earlier this year in a co-authored report, Shatter the House of Mirrors.

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