Soft Power of Russian Bots

Recently, a large topic of debate has been around Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Russian government has been accused of creating fake accounts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter pretending to be Americans, and posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting hacked material they had leaked. It is largely believed and accepted information that Russia's interference in the election strongly influenced voters and had a hand in Trump being elected as President of the United States. While it may seem like a silly notion that something as frivolous as Twitter could affect who becomes arguably the most powerful person in the world, these posts added fuel to already growing tensions between two increasingly polarized political ideology. As the internet and technologies advance, social media and cybernetic attacks will likely become a more actively used approach to influence and more powerful. While leaking information and cyber attack are a fairly recent phenomena from the past decade or so, they aren't incredibly new. What makes this attack  from the Russians unique, however, is the consciously tactical way the Russians had of undermining the government through influencing the American people with social media. This is what I believe is the rise of strategic cyber soft power. There are a lot of things that the Russians could have done with the information they had hacked from the U.S government. They could have threatened representatives through blackmail to get something. They could have used information to get the upper hand in some sort of business transaction. However, none of these would have been particularly effective in influencing the election. Instead, they launched a very targeted campaign on Twitter and Facebook that got to the root of our democracy; the people. Through posts that seemed like they came from their own, Americans were provoked, and the Russians affected an aspect of Americans' ideological culture, without us even realizing it. They co-opted and planted a subconscious seed in our people's heads that later affected how they voted. This is a very interesting example of soft power. It's a subtle and persuasive approach that specifically uses the internet to affect our culture.

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