Here's an example that in major parts contributed to a civil war going on to this day: The existence of a US military operation that manipulates social media trough sock-puppet accounts [0] was revealed around the same time Syrians were riled up to regime change trough.. social media [1].
Said social media presence kept announcing "Days of Rage" protests in Syria which initially no Syrian even showed up to.
These operations predate anything noteworthy Russia did on the same front, as most of that only started in the wake of the Ukraine revolution, which also saw plenty of blatant US interference [2]. Back then Russia was diplomatically very vocal about how unprecedented the foreign interference in Ukraine was.
What followed was St. Petersburg troll farms heavily targeting the US.
> We also know that hundreds of thousands of foreign-sponsored accounts on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, have been banned over the years. (Please fact check by googling!)
How many domestic sponsored accounts have been banned? Zero, which means that on US based social media these kind of outfits are fighting with a heavy home game advantage [3], yet in most of these places that never comes up, it's always "Look out for the Russian/Chinese propagandist!", just like you are doing here. Which usually ends up targeting skeptical people not wholeheartedly endorsing the "Good vs Evil" narrative and not any actual propagandists.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20110203-syria-democracy-protest...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-uk...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
The Smith–Mundt Act makes it illegal to distribute propaganda where it may be consumed by a primarily US audience.
Also from just a practical investment perspective, creating a bunch of sock puppets on Reddit to try and influence the opinion of Putin doesn't make sense. r/Russia for example only has 150k subscribers and most of the posts are in English.
You would need to ask WeChat, VK, Weibo, Douyin, and OK for transparency reports on how many state-sponsored accounts they have terminated.
That hasn't been true for nearly a decade as the Smith-Mundt act was "modernized" in 2012 to allow for exactly that [0].
Even when it was in effect, I doubt anybody was seriously trying to abide by that. The closest thing to practically doing that would have been to completely skip on the English language, which I seriously doubt they did.
I put that denial into the very same camp as the NSA denying spying on American citizens: They say it because they are supposed to say that and admitting to it would put them in a world of trouble trough open admission of guilt.
> Also from just a practical investment perspective, creating a bunch of sock puppets on Reddit to try and influence the opinion of Putin doesn't make sense.
It makes a lot of sense, not just to manufacture consent, but also trough the fact how the US is the literally largest culture exporter on the planet. US social media isn't just populated by Americans: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and whatnot are by now overwhelmingly used by international audiences.
Sure, there are countries that try to ban these platforms, but that doesn't stop the USG from still trying to get something going [1]
> You would need to ask WeChat, VK, Weibo, Douyin, and OK for transparency reports on how many state-sponsored accounts they have terminated.
But none of these are in any way widely used outside of their respective countries, their very limited reach and lack of language diversity, makes them inherently inferior to the globally dominating US social media platforms.
Yet that's where the "opinion wars" are won, where the international Overton window is defined: On the global stage, not on comparatively obscure domestic platforms.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitt...
The "opinion wars" in the US are won on what you consider to be the dominant social media networks. Again, if you want to convince a bunch of people to overthrow Putin, those daily active users are on VK - not Facebook.
But you literally can't use a lack of evidence of US influence on US social networks as proof that it is happening. Your second link plainly states that the US created an entirely new social network to try and influence Cuba, they didn't do it on Instagram. Hold yourself to a higher standard.
0. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/23/facebook-p...
They agree on a very different question. Even if we want to reframe it as an allegedly completely harmless "VoA can now broadcast to Americans!", the embezzles the fact that outlets like VoA/Radio Liberty&co. are very much the US equivalent to a Russia Today.
With the difference how their US versions have been broadcasting globally, completely unopposed, for literally decades. Yet whenever RT is linked anywhere it doesn't take long for somebody to go "That's Russia bad/propaganda/all lies!", usually derailing the discussion from the actual topic.
> Again, if you want to convince a bunch of people to overthrow Putin, those daily active users are on VK - not Facebook.
You also want to dampen any criticism, propaganda is not just a game of offense, it's also one of defense [0] That's where it's really helpful to have more than just two eyes, like Five Eyes [1]
> Your second link plainly states that the US created an entirely new social network to try and influence Cuba, they didn't do it on Instagram.
Cuba actively blocks Internet traffic when it's convenient to them [2], Instagram can't sidestep that, SMS can [3], it can even reach people that still only have dumb phones, something quite relevant back in 2012.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsehood_in_War-Time#Summary
[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
[2] https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1333495221712265217
China on the other hand not so much. I might go trough the effort of finding them again but someone here shared some American studies that showed china initially didn't really have such a presence of bots and the like on twitter, fb, etc like Russia at that point (i think around 2016 or 2017) but there were notable networks of bots targeting chinese people with anti china stuff.
A second study showed that i think 3 years later China had also gotten into this but that it was comparatively small scale and notably incompetent.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-backed-facebook-account...
We also know that hundreds of thousands of foreign-sponsored accounts on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, have been banned over the years. (Please fact check by googling!)