Analysis of the Method and Political Objectives of Cyber Intervention Elements Associated with Russia in the US Presidential Election of 2016

Subject Areas : International Relations

Saeedeh Moradifar ¹ ( Associate Professor of International Relations, Department of Political Science, University of Isfahan )
ali omidi ² ( Associate Professor of International Relations, Department of Political Science, University of Isfahan )

Received: 2019-12-13 Accepted : 2019-12-13 Published : 2019-11-22

Keywords: social media, intervention, Post-truth, intelligence warfare, cyber influence,

Abstract :

  Abstract: Based on evidence provided by the Americans, Russia was able to influence the US presidential election in 2016. Moscow by using its cyberspace technologies could pursue its political goals at a time which it is called post-truth era. Therefore, the main question of this article is how Russia intervened in the presidential election in 2016 and basically what Russia main goal was for this intervention. The hypothesis of this article, which has been analyzed by descriptive-analytic method, is that Russia influenced by the use of cyberspace technologies such as social media, robots and trolls, with the propagation of fraudulent news or selective information to undermine Hillary Clinton's opportunity to win and therefore boost the candidacy of Donald Trump. This issue in turn undermined the US public's confidence in the political institutions and has brought about the intensification of Moscow-Washington relations afterwards. Although Russia officially and repeatedly denied such an intervention by government sources, But the authors, according to the evidence presented by the "United States Intelligence Community" and "the Director of National Intelligence" in 2016, as well as the "Robert Müller Report" in 2019, in which 26 individuals and three Russian entities were charged with cyber – intervention, It assumes the intervention of elements from the Russian soil (not necessarily the Russian government) in the election. This article investigates the consequences of this intervention.

References:

منابع:

-      Busby, Joshua W. (2007). “Climate Change and National Security, an Agenda for Action”, CFR NO.32, November, Council on Foreign Relations.

-      Arnault, B. (2017). “The Trump presidency: What consequences will this have on Europe? Fondation Robert Schuman Policy Paper”. Europe an Issues, 417.‏ pp.1-11.

-      Badawy, A., Ferrara, E., & Lerman, K. (2018). “Analyzing the digital traces of political manipulation: the 2016 Russian interference Twitter campaign”. In 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). IEEE.‏

-      Baezner, M. & Robin, P. (2017). “Cyber-conflict between the United States of America and Russia”.ETH Zurich, 2.

-      Baruah, T. D. (2012). “Effectiveness of Social Media as a tool of communication and its potential for technology enabled connections: A micro-level study”. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 2(5), pp.1-10.

-      Bevan, M. (2018). “Why does Vladimir Putin hate Hillary Clinton?”. (May 22), Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-22/vladimir-putin-and-hillary-clinton-hatred-explained/9783076

-      Cheng, J., Bernstein, M., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. & Leskovec, J. (2017). “Anyone can become a troll: Causes of trolling behavior in online discussions”. In CSCW: proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. NIH Public Access.‏

-      Colibasanu, A. (2018). “Why the US Can’t Afford a Trade War With the EU”. Available at: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/us-cant-afford-trade-war-eu/

-      Cordy, J. (2017). “Social Media Revolution: Political and Security Implications”. NATO Parliamentary Assembly.‏ Available at: https://www.nato-pa.int/download-file?filename=sites/default/files/2017-11/2017%20

-      Crowley, M. & Ioffe, J. (2016). “Why Putin hates Hillary”. (July 25), Available at: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/clinton-putin-226153

-      Dorell, O. (2018). “Another Cold War? Tensions between U.S. and Russia may be higher now”. (March 29), Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/03/29/united-states-russia-cold-war-putin-trump/467806002/

-      Ferguson, N. (2018). The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. New York: Penguin Press.

-      Haeni, R. E. (1997). “Information Warfare - an introduction”. The George Washington University Cyberspace Policy Institute, pp1-16.

-      Hastedt, P. G. (2017). Readings in American Foreign Policy: Problems and Responses. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Maryland

-      Hutchings, S. (2017). “Fake news and ‘post truth’: some preliminary notes”. Russian Journal of Communication, DOI: 10.1080/19409419.2017.1323178.

-      Jaitner, M. (2012). “Exercising Power in Social Media: A Study of Hard and Soft Power in the Context of Russian Elections 2011‐2012”. M.A Disertation, National defence college,  New Delhi, India.

-      Journell, W. (2017). “Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Trump: Teaching Social Studies in a Post-Truth Era”. Social Studies Journal, 37, pp.8-21.

-      Khan, G. F. (2017). Social Media for Government. Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

-      Libicki, M. C. (1995). What is information warfare?. Natinal defense UNIV Washington DC inst for national strategic studies.

-      Ludes, J.M. & Jacobson, M.R. (2017). “Shatter the House of Mirrors: A Conference Report on Russian Influence Operations”. The Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University.

-      Mazzetti, M. &  Sanger, D. E.(2013). “Security Leader Says U.S. Would Retaliate Against Cyberattacks”. (March 12), Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/us/intelligence-official-warns-congress-that-cyberattacks-pose-threat-to-us.html?pagewanted=all     

-      Meijer, H. (2017). “Strategic Implications of Donald Trump’s Election”. IRSEM. Research Paper, 33, pp.1-13.

-      Menkiszak, M. (2017). “Russia’s best enemy, Russian policy towards the United States in Putin’s era”. Point of View, 62, pp.5-55.

-      Mulvenon, J. (1999). “The PLA and information warfare”. The People’s Liberation Army in the Information Age, 297, pp.175-186.‏

-      Nagy, V. (2012). “The geostrategic struggle in cyberspace between the United States, China, and Russia”. AARMS: Academic & Applied Research in Military Science, 11(1),pp.13-26.

-      Nation, R. C. (2012). “Reset or rerun? Sources of discord in Russian–American relations”. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 45(3-4), 379-387.‏

-      Nichol, J. (2012). “Russia’s March 2012 Presidential Election: Outcome and Implications”. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. pp.1-12.

-      Norden, L. and Vandewalker, L. (2017). “Securing Elections from Foreign Interference, Brennan Center for Justice”. Available at: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Securing_Elections_From_Foreign_Interference.pdf

-      Oxford Dictionaries (2017). “Post-truth, Oxforddictionaries”. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016

-      Peters, M.A. (2017). “The information wars, fake news and the end of globalization”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, pp.1-4. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2017.1417200.

-      Polyakova, A. & Sencer p. B. (2018). “The Future of Political Warfare: Russia, The West, and The Coming Age of Global Digital Competition”. EUROPE.

-      Rochlin, N. (2017). “Fake news: belief in post-truth”. Library Hi Tech, 35(3), pp.386-392.

-      Rosenberg, D. (2017). The “Colorless” Protests in Russia: Mixed Messages and an Uncertain Future. Springe. Cham

-      Rutland, P. (2017). “Trump, Putin, and the Future of US-Russian Relations”. Slavic Review, 76(1), pp.41-56.

-      Sachs, J. (2019). “Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump”. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/20/opinions/mueller-report-trump-congress-initiate-impeachment-sachs/index.html

-      Sather, J. (2017). “An Invisible Curtain Falls between Russia and the West”. Stratfor, (May 26), Available at: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/invisible-curtain-falls-between-russia-and-west

-      Shackelford, S. J., Schneier, B., Sulmeyer, M., Boustead, A., Buchanan, B., Deckard, A. N. C., ... & Smith, J. M. (2016). “Making Democracy Harder to Hack”. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 50(3), pp.629-668.

-      Shapiro, J. (2016). “The Everyday and The Existential: How Clinton and Trump Challenge Transatlantic Relations”. European Council on Foreign Relations, pp.1-9.

-      Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J., & Liu, H. (2017). “Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective”. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 19(1), pp.22-36.

-      Shuya, M. (2018). “Russian Cyber Aggression and the New Cold War”. Journal of Strategic Security, 11(1), pp.1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.11.1.1646

-      Sides, W. G. J., Tesler, M., Vavreck, L., Snyder, J., Puddington, A., Roylance, T., ... & Lynch, G. (2017). “The 2016 US Election”. Journal of Democracy, 28(2).

-      Park, S. H. (2014). “Contentious Politics in Contemporary Russia: Protest Movement of 2011-2013”. 6th East Asian Conference on Slavic Eurasian Studies,Seoul, (June 27-28).

-      Smith, A. (March 10, 2018). “Alexan Putin on U.S. election interference: 'I couldn't care less”, NBC News.

-      Stent, A. (2012). “US–Russia Relations in the Second Obama Administration”. Survival, 54(6), pp.123–138.

-      Stewart, L. G., Arif, A., & Starbird, K. (2018). “Examining trolls and polarization with a retweet network”. In Proc. ACM WSDM, Workshop on Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web (to appear).

-      Stukal, D., Sanovich, S., Bonneau, R., & Tucker, J. A. (2017). “Detecting Bots on Russian Political Twitter”. Big data, 5(4), pp.310-324.

-      Taddeo, M. (2012). “Information warfare: A philosophical perspective”. Philosophy & Technology, 25(1), pp.105-120.‏

-      Theohary, C. A. (2018). “Information Warfare: Issues for Congress”. Congressional Research Service.

-      Treverton, G. F. & Chen, A. R. (2017). “Hybrid Threats: Russian Interference in the 2016 US Election”. SMA, Inc.

-      Tsvetkova, M., García-Gavilanes, R., Floridi, L., & Yasseri, T. (2017). “Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia”. PLoS ONE, 12. (2), pp.1-13.

-      Van De Velde, J. (2017). “The Law of Cyber Interference in Elections”. SSRN. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3043828

-      Vasu, Norman, Benjamin Ang, Terri-Anne-Teo, Shashi Jayakumar, Muhammad Faizal, and Juhi A. (2018). “Fake News: National Security in the Post-Truth Era”. RSIS, pp.1-25.

-      Wilson, C. (2004). “Information Warfare and Cyberwar: Capabilities and Related Policy Issues”. CRS Report for Congress. pp.1-21

-      Woolley, S. C. (2016). “Automating power: Social bot interference in global politics”. First Monday, 21(4).

-      Zakem, V., Saunders, P., Hashimova, U., & Frier, P. K. (2017). “Mapping Russian Media Network: Media's Role in Russian Foreign Policy and Decision-Making”.CNA Analysis and Solutions Arlington United States.

-      Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., De Cristofaro, E., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G., & Blackburn, J. (2019). “Disinformation warfare: Understanding state-sponsored trolls on Twitter and their influence on the web”. In Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (pp. 218-226). ACM.‏

-      Ziegler, C.E. (2017). “International dimensions of electoral processes: Russia, the USA, and the 2016 elections”. International Politics, pp.1-18.

-      Zinovyeva, E. (2013). “US digital diplomacy: Impact on international security and opportunities for Russia”. Security Index: A Russian Journal on International Security, 19(2), pp.33-43.