How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project—together with a team of scholars at Princeton—found that Russia, together with China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, used clandestine social media campaigns fifty-three times between 2013 and 2018 to try to influence the internal politics of another country. Most of the campaigns examined by the Princeton team (65 percent) aimed to denigrate a public figure, usually a politician, in order to get his or her opponent elected. (Between 2012 and 2017, for example, seven of the ten most-read online pieces about Angela Merkel were fabricated, according to BuzzFeed.) The United States was the main target of these attacks but not the only one. Great Britain, Germany, Australia, and others were also targeted. Almost all the attacks were aimed at democracies.