CSPA Blog
In this interview with CSPA, Jessikka Aro, award-winning Finnish journalist and misinformation expert, explains that Russian election interference is "massive."
Just weeks before U.S. voters will decide on a new president, the race is neck and neck: According to a recent NBC News poll, “Harris gets support from 48% of registered voters in a head-to-head matchup, while Trump gets an identical 48%. Another 4% say they are undecided or wouldn’t vote for either option when forced to choose between those two major-party candidates.” Do voters strongly factor issues such as the economy, immigration, and abortion into their choices?
The answer is yes. Another poll found that the following issues (respondents were allowed to choose more than one) concerned voters most: abortion (22%), immigration/border security (19%), protecting democracy or constitutional rights (18%), and cost of living (16%). According to Pew Research, “about six-in-ten voters (61%) today say immigration is very important to their vote—a 9 percentage point increase from the 2020 presidential election and 13 points higher than during the 2022 congressional elections.” And a Gallup poll found that 32% of U.S. voters would support only a candidate who shared their views on abortion.
The race for president is tight, and these issues could factor strongly in voters’ picks of candidates. Hot-button issues like immigration and abortion have likely already made their way into your personal media universe. If you’ve logged onto your social media accounts, you may have found your feed filled with stories and posts that seem perfectly calibrated to play on your emotions, whatever your political inclinations might be. More than likely, you are on the receiving end of sophisticated targeted misinformation campaigns generated by Russian troll farms.
Last spring, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) welcomed Jessikka Aro, an award-winning Finnish journalist and misinformation expert, who herself has personally been targeted by trolls, to speak at its 100th Annual Spring Convention. CSPA director Jennifer Bensko Ha took the opportunity to interview Aro about misinformation campaigns and the upcoming U.S. elections.
Jennifer Bensko Ha: Jessikka, thank you very much for your presentation and sharing your experiences with our audience. In your opinion, how extensive is troll activity, specifically Russian troll activity, in the United States right now to influence our upcoming elections?
Jessikka Aro: It’s massive. And I hope that U.S. security officials are looking heavily into it, being able to expose information about it. But judging from what the Russians have previously done, we can assume that they are already attacking a swing state. They are microtargeting the swing state populations. They have been charting and mapping the hottest debates, themes, political themes in those states [with the intent of] dividing people.
So it’s microtargeting audiences and providing that information to the trolls in the Russian troll factories, who will then come up with the suitable messaging in order to turn them to support Donald Trump, who at least in the last two elections has been the favorite candidate of the Kremlin.
That might include, for example, Christian evangelicals who might be targeted with messages proposing dubious religious things about the other candidate and also proposing different kinds of themes around immigration—pushing really racist themes against immigrants … portraying [them] in a really negative light to create … racist sentiment that will turn into political support for Donald Trump.
Ha: If we can go back in time for a moment … we know about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. As you said in your lecture, nothing happened or nothing came to light until after the election. We are very close to the [2024] election. You’re seeing the same level of activity or even an increased level of activity? Yet there’s no alarm being raised that there is massive disinformation or misinformation or fake news. Regarding some of the issues that you talk about, [there is for example] a lot of interest around the border. Is there anything that can be done to counter some of these measures?
Aro: I know that there have been operations where, for example, the U.S. Cyber Command has even shut down the access to Trump from the troll factory to the internet. It was during the 2018 midterms. There should be more initiatives like that. There should be much more exposure for such activities to begin with.
There should even be the possibility for people who are the targets of these information warfare operations to protect themselves as well as their families. But as you said, there’s not much to be seen in that regard. There’s not much, if at all, happening. I would just like to also bring out what the special counsel Robert Mueller said in his hearing back in summer 2019 after he and his team had been investigating heavily and in detail Russian interference [in the 2016 elections]. He said that Russia is interfering in our elections while we’re sitting here. They are doing it all the time. So that should be seen as active warfare. The U.S. is being attacked.
Ha: You mentioned before that we’re very much talking about the swing states, right? There are a lot of lawsuits going on about redrawing the voter maps, and more. So could it be at that level where we’re talking about county by county, that kind of warfare?
Aro: Yes. That’s actually a really excellent question. According to a report by the U.S. Intelligence Directorate published back in 2017, Russia also used [targeted] interference [with] electoral officials. So they would go after them too.
So it would be a big miracle if they didn’t do everything they could to interfere, to really get what they want and to really get their candidate to [win]. In California, they are also directing operations against certain populations here in the United States, using other countries as proxies.
For example, last summer I went to Ghana. There is a Russian troll factory there used to attack African American populations here [in the U.S.]. They’re looking at weaknesses in the population.
Ha: So as an example, if we have people who are anti-immigration in a population, all of a sudden, like we saw in the 2016 election, there are these stories about how some person got through the border and then they committed all these crimes after they got through.
Aro: Yes.
Ha: What would you recommend that average citizens do? And what do you recommend for future journalists and just the average citizen to be aware of as they consume news?
Aro: For journalists, they should think about their audiences. Of course, that information warfare also means that the Russian troll stories are designed to be more compelling and interesting to those audiences. That’s how they are winning these audiences in this information warfare. So journalists need to make better stories. We have to write better, really better, more interesting, more relevant stories.
We cannot be [in] some kind of ivory tower, you know, writing to [an audience] of experts. Of course you can do that too. But that’s not the way to win in information warfare.
For U.S. citizens, I would say the first thing is to demand protection from officials. If the officials want to protect us from a hostile state that is [also] out there to destroy those officials, they should do their jobs. We are citizens. We’re not equipped to counter, act, or even recognize these tactics.
Ha: Military tactics?
Aro: Exactly.
Ha: Is the psychological piece of it, and the most dangerous, that of [playing on] ignorance? Ordinary people are unequipped and unprepared to understand what might be real and what might be fake.
Aro: Yes.
Update: These attacks have only ramped up in advance of November 5. According to an October 22, 2024, statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Foreign actors—particularly Russia, Iran, and China—remain intent on fanning divisive narratives to divide Americans and undermine Americans’ confidence in the U.S. democratic system consistent with what they perceive to be in their interests, even as their tactics continue to evolve.”
