The Fool on the Web

While special investigators, Congress, CNN and MSNBC are all about Russia, Russia, Russia and election meddling in 2016, nobody seems to be taking the time to consider why efforts to influence voters that year were so effective--and why it likely would work again this year and in 2020.  And the reason there is no focus on that is because it would force a lot of Americans to do something they hate: blame themselves.

No one is saying that election totals from 2016 were hacked and adjusted to benefit any candidate.  Nobody is claiming that Russians used hacked voter rolls to send fake voters to the polls.  There aren't even allegations of "dark money" being funneled to political campaigns.  What is causing all of the concern was a directed campaign of misinformation on social media.

How did the Russian operatives know that such a campaign would be effective?  To me, it's nothing more than the "Nigerian Prince" email scam--something you see in the inbox and delete automatically.  Every once in a while we have a story about someone actually being scammed by that email and you wonder how they could possibly be so gullible.  And yet, the Russians knew that posting fake news stories from "sources" that no one had ever heard of before would be taken as gospel truth by millions of Facebook and other social media users.

And the Russians didn't even have to get those posts onto everyone's pages because they knew that those that did receive them would gladly repost them for like-minded friends, who would repost for other friends and so on and so on and so on.  Let's not forget that they also played both ends of the political spectrum.  After a Milwaukee Police shooting of a young, black man, people in that neighborhood were targeted with fake reports meant to incite distrust in the police department and possible unrest--which did happen.

The "collusion" executed by the Trump campaign was to continually tell Americans that they could not trust the information they received from mainstream media outlets--playing directly into the hands of the Russian operatives and social media bots providing Americans with the misinformation that they wanted to hear.  And judging by the polling data that shows continued distrust in traditional media outlets, and failure to appreciate real reporting, we remain ripe for another round of "meddling" this year and for years to come.

But it's much easier to blame Russia, Trump campaign workers, Hillary Clinton and her email server and Mark Zuckerberg for "fooling us"--when we ourselves make it so easy.