Even after the [2020] election, Russian online influence actors continued to promote narratives questioning the election results and disparaging President Biden and the Democratic Party. These efforts parallel plans Moscow had in place in 2016 to discredit a potential incoming Clinton administration, but which it scrapped after former President Trump's victory.[20]
Russian influence efforts in the 2016 and 2020 elections, while distinct in their particulars, shared some similarities. Historically, Russia has engaged in near-industrial scale online influence efforts.[21] The Intelligence Community Assessment states that in 2020, Russia again relied on internet trolls to amplify divisive content aimed at American audiences:
The Kremlin-linked influence organization Project Lakhta and its Lakhta Internet Research (LIR) troll farm—commonly referred to by its former moniker Internet Research Agency (IRA)—amplified controversial domestic issues. LIR used social media personas, news websites, and US persons to deliver tailored content to subsets of the US population. LIR established short-lived troll farms that used unwitting third-country nationals in Ghana, Mexico, and Nigeria to propagate these US-focused narratives. . . .[22]
The threats posed by Russia's influence efforts are not new, nor are they diminishing. The latest unclassified Intelligence Community Annual Threat Assessment throws this into sharp relief:
Moscow has conducted influence operations against U.S. elections for decades, including as recently as the 2020 presidential election. We assess that it probably will try to strengthen ties to U.S. persons in the media and politics in hopes of developing vectors for future influence operations.[23]
PROXIES AMONG US: MALIGN FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND U.S. AUDIENCES
Tech-enabled or not, if ever there was a "people business," foreign influence is it. People working on behalf of a foreign government—foreign government officials, their agents, and proxies—work to influence, directly or indirectly, a target audience in another country—its officials and citizens at large. Most who are engaged in those efforts act overtly: ambassadors, consuls general, government delegations and so forth. Their foreign influence efforts are not, however, focused on philanthropy or foreign aid. Moreover, the perspectives they seek to embed in their target audiences may be intentionally and materially inaccurate, propagandistic, or driven by unstated motives. In such instances, foreign influence may amount to injecting foreign disinformation into the U.S. media ecosystem for re-branding and onward transmission to an American audience.[24]
