This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

In the four intervening years, the Kremlin only grew more emboldened—albeit stealthier. In 2016 Russia’s influence operation stood out for its brazenness. Social media posts were written in broken English. Facebook ads were paid out in rubles, and self-proclaimed Texas secessionists and Black Lives Matter protesters logged into servers from Red Square. Now Russians were setting up offshore bank accounts, paying real Facebook users to rent their accounts, and obscuring their real locations using Tor, the anonymizing software. Inside IRA headquarters in Saint Petersburg, Russian trolls had far greater command of America’s politics. They switched out obvious Russian bots for human-scripted chatbots that searched for keywords in discussions and chimed in with incendiary scripted responses. They seized every opportunity to pour fuel on America’s culture wars, weighing in on guns, immigration, feminism, race, even the NFL players who took a knee during the national anthem. Russia’s trolls grew mindful of the time difference, posting anything that would make liberals’ blood boil in the early Russian hours, so it would stir them up at night, and posting anything aimed at conservatives early in the morning, just as they were settling in to Fox & Friends. The IRA continued to create fictitious Facebook accounts with monikers like “Bertha Malone” and “Rachell Edison,” seeded false stories that Obama had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and echoed NRA narratives that Democrats were out...