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Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President - What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

3.95 · Rating details · 109 ratings · 33 reviews

The question of how Donald Trump won the 2016 election looms over all of the many controversies that continue to swirl around him to this day. In particular, was his victory the result of Russian meddling in our political system? Up until now, the answer to that has been equivocal at best given how difficult it is to prove. Trump has vociferously denied it, as has Vladimir The question of how Donald Trump won the 2016 election looms over all of the many controversies that continue to swirl around him to this day. In particular, was his victory the result of Russian meddling in our political system? Up until now, the answer to that has been equivocal at best given how difficult it is to prove. Trump has vociferously denied it, as has Vladimir Putin himself. Even the famous intelligence reports establishing that the Russians interfered hold back from saying whether the interference tipped the scales in the outcome.

In Cyberwar, however, the eminent scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who sifted through a vast amount of polling and voting data, is able to conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty that Russian help was crucial in elevating Trump to the Oval Office. Put simply, by changing the behavior of key players and altering the focus and content of mainstream news, Russian hackers reshaped the 2016 electoral dynamic. At the same time, Russian trolls used social media to target voting groups indispensable to a Trump victory or Clinton defeat. There are of course many arguments on offer that push against the idea that the Russians handed Trump his victory. Russia's goal was fomenting division, not electing Trump. Most of the Russian ads reportedly did not reference either the election or a candidate. Nor did they differ much from U.S.-based messaging that was already in play. Russian intervention did not surgically target Trump in key states. Finally, if WikiLeaks' releases of stolen email had truly affected the vote, Clinton's perceived honesty would have dropped in October. Jamieson, drawing from her four decades of research on the role of media in American elections, dispenses with these arguments through a forensic tracing of both Russian hackers' impact on media coverage as well as the ebbs and flows of Trump's polling support over the course of the campaign. To be sure, it is impossible to prove with absolute certainty that the Russians handed the election to Trump because there is too much that we don't know. That said, the lessons of a half century of research on the role of media framing in elections strongly suggests that many voters' opinions were altered by Russia's wide-ranging and coordinated campaign-including at least seventy eight thousand votes in three key states. Combining scholarly rigor with a bracing argument, Cyberwar shows that we can now be reasonably confident that Russian efforts helped put Trump in the White House.
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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published October 3rd 2018 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published 2018)

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Start your review of Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President - What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know

Sep 24, 2018 Michael Perkins rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The tech dystopia is here. This book lays out in detail how it happened and what the implications are. Many users have been psychologically manipulated through their addiction to social media, but don't realize it. Basically totalitarian states----Russia, China, North Korea----have co-otped our love of free expression and used it against us. It's the cyberwar that has been in the making for decades.

One hundred and twenty-six million Americans were exposed to Russian-trafficked content on ...more

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Dec 25, 2018 Anuradha rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Anyone who is interested in politics

Recommended to Anuradha by: The New Yorker

Shelves: favourites, i-weep-for-humanity, non-fiction, sci-fi

Cyberwar is one of the absolutely most riveting pieces of non fiction I have read in a while. Maybe it's because it does, in fact read like a spy novel. Maybe it's because it confirms everything I'd suspected, but also simultaneously, that only makes it more terrifying. But mostly, because nothing gets my wheels going like international politics.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the foremost expert on campaign communications. She has spent her career studying how campaigns craft and disseminate their Cyberwar is one of the absolutely most riveting pieces of non fiction I have read in a while. Maybe it's because it does, in fact read like a spy novel. Maybe it's because it confirms everything I'd suspected, but also simultaneously, that only makes it more terrifying. But mostly, because nothing gets my wheels going like international politics.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the foremost expert on campaign communications. She has spent her career studying how campaigns craft and disseminate their messages to the masses. As someone who is trying to learn more about how press and policy influence each other, I have made it my pet project to determine if generally influencing the elections and general public opinion in any country would constitute a crime against humanity. Jamieson delves into the dark, seedy world of campaign politics, the Kremlin, and everything in between. Her research solely depends on facts, and doesn't look at sensationalising those facts.

This is especially evident in the fact that she emphasises vehemently, multiple times, that it wasn't that the Russians made Trump win the elections, just that they influence the public dialogue in the US just enough to exacerbate the divide between, to put it simply, the liberals and the conservatives. Armed with thousands of Twitter handles, and Facebook accounts that constituted only a tenth of that number, it is equally terrifying and fascinating how the Russians were able to push those that were on the fence, just enough to the right to get the results they wanted. In an increasingly political world that seems to run on social media, Jamieson's book talks about exactly why we need to be scrupulous about using and understanding data we find on the internet. Of course, her book is an academic work, and that is not the solid "moral" of the story. But if your take away from this is not "holy shit, people can write whatever they want on the internet and I need to be careful with where I get my facts from", then I don't know. ...more

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Jan 08, 2019 Terri rated it really liked it

Shelves: political-current-events, terrorism-cyber-war-history, american-mass-media, new-york-politics, russian-putin, president-william-clinton

A must read for 2019! If you are a political junkie or just want to understand how the Russian meddling is still going on... than read this book. It explains the Russian cyber war against the U.S.A. with careful evidence and expert data. Knowledge is power so Americans need to grasp the situation more than ever.

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Apr 23, 2019 Jeffrey Powanda rated it really liked it

Shelves: trump-russia

A persuasively-argued, impressively researched investigation into the sophisticated, coordinated Russian cyberattack designed to elect Donald Trump in 2016.

Surprisingly, the Russians’ messaging was strategically adept, although filled with clumsy typos. Examples of the Russian content provide some of the most entertaining sections of the book. The Russian-originated or stolen communication shaped the agenda and framing of the news media, reweighted the message environment in news and social A persuasively-argued, impressively researched investigation into the sophisticated, coordinated Russian cyberattack designed to elect Donald Trump in 2016.

Surprisingly, the Russians’ messaging was strategically adept, although filled with clumsy typos. Examples of the Russian content provide some of the most entertaining sections of the book. The Russian-originated or stolen communication shaped the agenda and framing of the news media, reweighted the message environment in news and social media, primed and reinforced anti-Clinton content, capitalized on timing with short-term effects, and relayed and created content designed to mobilize and demobilize (that is, suppress the voting of) key constituencies, such as Christian evangelicals and black voters.

Jamieson suggests that Russian-hacked private emails may have had a bigger impact than the widespread trolling and bots. WikiLeaks dumps altered the news agenda at key points in the election cycle, including the final four weeks of the campaign. The news media, particularly television, were complicit in this propaganda dissemination. They helped the Russians achieve their goals.

Most voters are largely unpersuadable. However, the 2016 election was an extremely close contest, ultimately determined by only 79,000 votes in three swing states. Russians didn't need to persuade all Americans to vote for Trump (or not vote at all). They just had to target enough persuadable voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And they appear to have succeeded (although Jamieson is careful not to make the argument that Trump is president solely due to Russian hacking).

In perhaps the book's most surprising section, Jamieson provides a fascinating analysis of how FBI Director Jim Comey may have been fooled by Russian disinformation, which compelled him to interfere in the election in ways that may have cost Hillary the presidency. It’s strange that that story isn't mentioned anywhere in the Mueller Report, although it was covered in the Washington Post and CNN.

I enjoyed Jamieson's book, but found it drier, less personal, and more academic and scholarly than Messing with the Enemy by Clint Watts. Both books are excellent, however, and they explain how a corrupt racist traitor ended up in the White House. ...more

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Feb 02, 2019 Susan M rated it liked it

I hated reading this book.

The information was important. I have read at least one other book on the topic, which I found very compelling.

Reading this book was torture. I am not exactly sure what it was -- her choice of obtuse language, difficult phraseology, unclear analysis. I would never recommend this highly praised author, despite her credentials. I would often plan on reading 25 pages and find myself struggling through two or three. Yuk!

Yes, the information is very important. Someone should ...more

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May 01, 2019 Anders Hjortshøj rated it really liked it

Shelves: historie, milit-r, usa, rusland, diplomati

Don't let the lurid title fool you: Anyone who still doubts the astonishing scale, sophistication, and, yes, impact of Russian interference in the 2016 US election ought to read this book.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson draws on her decades-long experience of applying social science methods and concepts (including framing, priming and agenda setting) to studying the effect of advertising and debates on US presidential elections. This offers an excellent point of departure for establishing "what we don't, ...more

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Dec 10, 2018 Na'ama Yehuda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

This book is a must read for anyone who is interested in reality ... and the events that unfolded and allowed the results of the last elections -- both on election day and since. While the author leaves the final decision about whether the cyberwar did or did not change the results of the election, she does a masterful job of describing the conditions, realities, and FACTS people ought to be aware of as they reach their own conclusions, as well as the questions that any one should be asking ...more

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Sep 16, 2019 James rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-politics, social-commentary

The Russians did not have to pull levers in the voting booths; just needed to target audiences with persuasive advertising to win this cyber-war.

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Mar 01, 2019 Sam Poole rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2019, 3-stars-in-2019

The most frustrating part of reading any piece of investigative work regarding Trump and his repulsive administration is the constant lack of illuminating material. "Fear", which received an undeserved amount of credit for regurgitating trash and platitudes that surprised no one, has unfortunately been the torch bearer (and likely standard setter) for the burgeoning "Trump is evil....but impressive!!!" empire of imaginative nonfiction we're going to be subjected to for decades once he's finally The most frustrating part of reading any piece of investigative work regarding Trump and his repulsive administration is the constant lack of illuminating material. "Fear", which received an undeserved amount of credit for regurgitating trash and platitudes that surprised no one, has unfortunately been the torch bearer (and likely standard setter) for the burgeoning "Trump is evil....but impressive!!!" empire of imaginative nonfiction we're going to be subjected to for decades once he's finally ousted from office. The failure of US politics that he manifests isn't just a metaphor: there are real, tangible, life ruining stakes to his sham of a presidency. Treating him as a sort of Napoleon meets Nero mastermind manipulator of the US-exceptionalist psyche isn't just boring & passé- it's a morally repulsive act of rewriting history as it happens. Thanks, but no thanks. The real reason Trump is in office? We have a horrible sham of a democracy that silences the majority and raises the voices of a spiteful minority. We had a race that was tainted by misogynistic media that failed to see Trump as something more than a hateful trash monster, that hungered for a "real" race and assumed Trump would burn himself out. As much as anything, we had a level of foreign interference so comprehensive (aided and abetted by the ignorance of Facebook, primarily) that the United States has now become something of a puppet government for Russia. This is not disputable.

Kathleen Jamieson succeeds by leaps and bounds where other journalists, quantitative analysts & pundits fall short. "Cyberwar" is not sensationalist or hot take driven. It is instead an academic, statistically based analysis of what extent the Russian government's troll efforts impacted our 2016 election. Without going into explicit detail, the chain of information went something like this: Russian trolls & bots push Trump or Trump-esque policies -> Facebook allows fake news & misinformation to be advertised on their sites to target Trump voters and demos with justifiable doubt about Hilary as a candidate -> people begin to parrot Russian disinformation -> new anchors parrot disinfo -> Trump parrots Russian disinformation & the cycle continues. It was very, very hard for me to read this as anything but a confirmation of my personal feeling that Zuckerberg deserves an outsized amount of blame for what happened. The Russian cyber infiltration went beyond stuff you see on your social networking sites. It become the basis of policy for the current president & the entire source of political knowledge for scores of Trump voters & Clinton adverse voters or nonvoters.

Perhaps the most explosive section of the book (a word I used lightly because Jamieson's prose is very measured and balanced in her exploration for the truth) is the amount of effort Russian trolls put into pushing third party candidates on young voters and voters of color. Of course the degrees to which someone like Jill Stein is indebted to the Russian government is obvious (there is no other explanation for her constant praise of Putin), but the cyberwar being waged on US voters was informed by a very nuanced and developed understanding of North American paranoia. Nothing about Trump and the advertising campaign of lies which helped sway millions of citizens to the side of hate surprises me. For added measure, Jamieson has a comprehensive index in the back of her data tables which i highly recommend to anybody with even a cursory interest in statistical analysis.

My biggest bone to pick with "Cyberwar", and perhaps my only prominent issue with the book, is Jamieson's unwillingness to budge from occasionally blaming Clinton for what happened, as if her campaigns failure at better mobilizing skeptical voters was somehow related to the largest cyber attack in US history. The dots are there and Jamieson does not fully fill in the missing lines, which may be an act of both self-preservation and reluctance to fully cast blame without the complete factual and statistical basis to do so. I can't fault her for that, but it is near impossible to read her book and think anything other than these two salient points: 1.) the Trump campaign won in large part because of a concerted cyber espionage effort and 2.) the United States is a proxy state of Russian policy because Facebook's indifference to targeted lying in advertisements. ...more

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Mar 27, 2019 Dennis Fischman rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

An important book by a serious scholar. She has a sophisticated political science understanding of how social media, or any media, influence public opinion. She is not positing a magic syringe that injects anti-Clinton, pro-Trump ideas into people's minds. Instead, she is showing how social media can amplify certain themes, downplay others, set the agenda, mobilize some constituencies, and discourage other constituencies from participating.

Jamieson also paints a horrifying picture of how the ...more

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Oct 28, 2018 John Spiller rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"Cyberwar" is a scholarly attempt to assess whether Russian interference changed the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. As Jamieson makes clear, we will never definitively know whether Russian hackers caused Trump to be elected President. "Cyberwar" makes a fairly compelling case that Russian interference probably helped Trump win.

To begin with, the Russian bots and fictitious social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter worked almost in tandem with Trump's campaign messaging. Russia ...more

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Oct 29, 2018 Stephen Morrissey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Much commentary on the Russian "interference" in the 2016 election goes something like this: "Yes, the Russians hacked Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but it did not alter the ultimate outcome. That was up to the voters themselves." Jamieson meticulously demolishes that position, marshalling facts, figures, and theories on media and human behavior to say that American voters were likely swayed by the Russian attacks, the media narrative and framing of those attacks, and a certain false ...more

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Nov 28, 2019 Wbahrmail.Com rated it it was amazing

f you're familiar with the phrase “Russia meddled or interfered in the 2016 election" and concerned for your country, I recommend you read “Cyber-War” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson about Russia’s “mind-messing” effort. The author’s conclusion is summarized on the book jacket: “Drawing on path-breaking work in which she and her colleagues isolated significant communication effects in the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, the eminent political communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson marshals ...more

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Jan 27, 2019 Susan rated it it was amazing

As an avid reader of everything I can find about the 2016 presidential election I find myself concluding that the Russian government under the direction of Vladimir Putin interfered in said election to the benefit of Trump and the detriment of Clinton. However, despite my intense feelings on this subject, I was unable to conclude with certainty that the efforts by the Russians did in fact help elect Trump. However, after reading this book, I have no doubt that in this close electoral college ...more

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Mar 20, 2019 Jeffrey Ogden Thomas rated it it was amazing

Stunning, excruciatingly detailed logical proof of Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election. I grant five stars because of the importance of this issue, though frankly the detailed nature of the analysis is excruciating -- the author covers and re-covers the same ground from multiple directions, effectively answering all imaginable logical objections to the conclusion.
Unfortunately, Trump supporters are unlikely to read the full analysis, so the effort merely reinforces the beliefs ...more

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Jun 16, 2019 Priscilla rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is a detailed academic analysis of what happened in the 2016 election by someone who has been doing this kind of thing for decades. The bottomline is that Americans, not Russians, elected Donald Trump. He was assisted by circumstances, Hillary Clinton's self-destructive mistakes, James Comey, the mainstream press, and Russians. There is no doubt that the Russian propaganda campaign, waged to help Donald Trump and harm Hillary Clinton, is one of the main factors in his victory. The Russians ...more

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Jan 13, 2019 Paul rated it liked it

A scholarly report on the Russian hacking of the 2016 election. She tackles the important question of whether the combination of troll activity on the internet and the hacking of DNC emails materially influenced the outcome. Her conclusion is that it probably did.

Its too bad she (or someone) isn't able to take a more statistical approach to the problem, because I think it would be more convincing.

I actually think one can get the gist of it from reading her important article in the New Yorker, ...more

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Nov 20, 2018 Ceil rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics-and-government

Meticulously researched, this is an indispensable source for actual data on how hackers, trolls, the media, and our understanding of how best to manipulate public opinion converged in the 2016 presidential election. From "agenda setting, framing, message priming, message weighting, debates, negative information, contagion, peer influence, and the spiral of silence" to "Kremlin-tied interventions," the data are conclusive that the deliberate attempts to alter the outcome of the election were ...more

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Sep 30, 2018 Paul rated it liked it · review of another edition

Further erosion of our democracy

Jamieson Cyber-War. How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President

Our eroded democracy, which is pretty much already an oligarchy, was ripe for attack by Russia. Professor Jamieson presents comprehensive facts to support her thesis. A main concern was, “the news media who inadvertently helped them achieve their goals” by the bread and circus atmosphere of the 24/7 news cycle. She painstakingly explores who, what, how and why the attacks this time were ...more

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Jul 04, 2019 Trudy Preston rated it really liked it

Not an easy book to read on all fronts: dense and academic, while at the same time being a true horror story, terrifying enough to challenge Stephen King. Bottom line, the Russians committed an overwhelming act of war and the U. S. response was, "eh." And guess what? The Russkies are locked and loaded and prepared to do it all over again. Welcome to the oligarchy, comrade.

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Oct 25, 2018 Ed Eleazer rated it really liked it

An excellent non-partisan investigation of how the Russians influenced the 2016 presidential race. Its only problem is that it's SCHOLARLY — which means there are many facts and figures, redundancies, and ambiguities, which makes it a difficult read for a lay audience, Being a scholar, myself, I found its argument quite convincing.

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May 25, 2019 Ietrio rated it did not like it

Shelves: junk

Strength in numbers or how a divided hive was disrupted by the evil foreigners.

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Jan 12, 2019 Robin Case rated it it was ok

No new information here. Weak analysis. Readable but not recommended.

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Jun 01, 2019 Ted Tschopp rated it it was amazing

A great summary of the media impacts the Russian Hackers had on the 2016 election.

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Apr 23, 2019 Zaron rated it really liked it

I think the argument is oversold, but presents a case that the impact of the election meddling was greater than much of the left and all of the right acknowledges.

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Mar 07, 2019 Steven Maher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history

This was a difficult read in that it was so detailed and precise. Yet it is just those qualities that made it so persuasive and terrifying.

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May 14, 2019 Jacqueline rated it it was amazing

Now here is a book everyone who worries about the survival of our political system should read. It is a scholarly study of what we can know about Russian meddling has done and may do to our politics.

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Mar 23, 2019 Kenneth Flusche rated it did not like it

Did not finish, very repedative and confusing with it's Don't, Can't, and DO KNOW.

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Sep 06, 2019 Jessica Scott rated it liked it

The intriguing part of this is the mass media exposure argument.

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Oct 17, 2018 Majolo rated it really liked it

Not a great deal that was new if you follow the news closely, but well-organized and from an author who has done extensive work on the levers that sway elections.

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