You can draw a straight line from the groundwork laid by Gerasimov, Chekinov and Bogdanov, right through the actions of Cambridge Analytica, to the victories of the Brexit and Trump campaigns. In only five or so years, the Russian military and state have managed to develop the first devastatingly effective new weapon of the twenty-first century. They knew it would work, because companies such as Facebook would never take the ‘un-American’ step of reining in their users. So Russia didn’t have to disseminate propaganda. They could just get the Americans to do it themselves, by clicking, liking
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