Seems unlikely to work in the US given that we are already highly polarized and dug in to our positions. It's also hard to tell who is a bot and who is not on most forums discussing politics due to the low quality.
I believe all the discord and polarization that has happened over the past 10+ years have been because of psyops. I came to that realization when I read a paper from the CIA about memetics and naturally propagating ideas through a population. Social media makes it extremely easy to do.
It could be russia, it could be china...but the goal is to destabilize the US
I'm not sure that all of it is. I know there has been some. One of the biggest known examples is Russia playing both sides of the Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter issue to drive violence.
My comment was mostly about voting outcomes and not other types of disruption. Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
>Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
In case you missed it there was a recent paper on this topic:
>Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
I'm glad you mentioned this. Everyone should take a bit of time and look through the media they were disseminating to familiarize themselves with what their approach looked like.
You can find it here (Sorry, large zip files, but straight from the source):
A lot of this is related to reflexive control theory applied to psyops where you are conditioning a target to respond with anger (negative emotions work best, but any emotional response is valid). The goal being to divide groups and prevent them from establishing a constructive dialogue between themselves and by eliciting predictable (again, often negative) responses to certain stimuli. This allows a malign actor to effectively paralyze a governing body by preventing the two sides from working together to accomplish even the most basic of goals. It's often used in concert with other forms of subversion such as political/legal manipulation and warfare to achieve the desired outcome.
RAND and CSIS have a number of good reports and articles on this type of thing if you wish to know more.
It sounds like you consider it as disruption only when people change their vote from A to B? That's only one type of disruption. Reinforcing polarization is also a disruption.
I’m not sure it would affect total opinion reversals in the US, but it might serve to radicalize existing opinions in the hopes of inciting violence. It might also help reinforce existing extremism by providing the appearance of unanimity within a subgroup (e.g. pick a random Republican and punish them for an insufficiently extreme view by creating a false consensus that “everyone knows” they are OK with Shakespeare casting men in drag).
The out of context and oversensationalized use of a candidate's positions has been used forever. At this point, it could exacerbate the existing opinions, as you point out. My comment was about affecting voting outcomes. I don't see this sort of thing causing people to flip, just digging in more.
