On Foreign Digital Intervention

By Noor Suwwan

There is nothing new about foreign interventions in an anarchical international system. In fact, states have often engaged in calculated and at times bizarre foreign meddling, routinely violating state sovereignties. Consider, for instance, that the United States and the United Kingdom both developed sophisticated intelligence campaigns in Italy, Haiti and Chile; spreading what can only be described as anti-communism propaganda during the Cold War (Chertoff & Rasmussen, 2018). Similarly, it was the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that staged a coup d’état against popular Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in favor of strengthening the Shah in 1953, an event so pivotal in Iranian history that it can hardly be overstated (Wright, 1989). Meanwhile, Russia attempted the reputational destruction of the CIA, claiming it was the source of the HIV virus (Chertoff & Rasmussen, 2018). Even more odd was the Kremlin’s attempt to claim President John F. Kennedy’s assassination (Chertoff & Rasmussen, 2018).   

While commonplace, executing a foreign intervention campaign successfully from inception to delivery was a complex, multi-dimensional process. One of its key factors was ensuring the availability of funds to pay for the high price tag of such projects. For example, in the context of the CIA’s election interventions in Italy, a former officer elaborated “we had bags of money that we delivered to preferred candidates” (The National Security Archive, 1996). Thus, ensuring a competitive edge to the economically superior interfering state. Similarly, foreign institutional complicity was also a key factor in a successful campaign. For instance, Richard Bissell, who ran the CIA’s operations between the 50s and the 60s emphasized the importance of controlling foreign national media outlets including newspapers and broadcasting stations to spread propaganda (Bissell, 1996).  Often, these outlets had to exhibit symptoms of institutional decay and incompetence to ensure accidental complicity or outright corruption to ensure propaganda space to the highest bidder. 

The importance of exerting influence over the content of large media corporations stems from their effective monopolization of the information ecosphere. Hijacking or at least inserting disinformation, misinformation and sometimes the truth within these information factories was critical to successful foreign meddling. However, nestled within the rise of the Internet was an inherent threat to a process long practiced. In fact, no norm in International Relations was as disrupted by the Internet as that of foreign interventions. Owing to the emergence of information communication technologies (ICTs), the Internet had accidentally equipped the willing with new routes to information sharing (Lynch, 2011), with that ending the monopoly of media corporations. With the decentring of information, the challenge for meddlers initially seemed too large to be overcome. In retrospect, the Internet was nothing but a new front for foreign interventions, in a still anarchical world, to a non-trivial minority of states. 

For instance, Howard and Kollanyi (2016) sampled 1.5 million tweets containing the hashtag, Brexit, in relation to the debate on the 2016 Brexit and found that almost a third of all tweets were generated by a mere 1% of users, indicating heavy bot activity (Howard & Kollanyi, 2016). They also found that pro-Brexit tweets were 3 times more common than anti, revealing an intent to sway public discourse towards an exit from the European Union (Howard & Kollanyi, 2016). Similarly, the highly controversial Russia Report, written by an independent committee of parliament (ISC), in an investigation of the Russian influence in the referendum, acknowledged the presence of Russian online campaigns including bots, social media accounts, misinformation and disinformation campaigns, all linked to the Kremlin. Furthermore, in an analysis of the Report, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies concluded that given the nature of the closeness of the results, the Russian influence may have well been causal to the outcomes (Ruy, 2020). 

Similarly, while the Mueller Report concluded that Russia’s digital intervention was not causal in the 2016 US presidential election, it did establish that Kremlin’s intervention was both “sweeping and systematic” (Lemke & Habegger, 2022). A problematic finding compounded by the fact that malign foreign content mimics the conversational style and cultural norms of its audience, to accumulate reputational capital and ensure amplification (Lemke & Habegger, 2022). This means that barring computational methods, digital intervention campaigns are virtually undetectable to the average user. Furthermore, online interventions can target political values, by analyzing data shared by individual users. For instance, the Kremlin targeted users who already expressed fringe political values including Islamophobia, misogyny and xenophobia to further spread pro-Trump messages to prospective audiences (Lemke & Habegger, 2022). 

While exceptional in its digital savvy, Russia is by no means the only state e-intervening in foreign states’ internal matters. Consider, for instance, the surge in Twitter activity in the lead-up to the 2018 Mexican presidential elections, which focused on casting doubt on then-candidate Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador’s economic fluency and spread misinformation that his opponents had already lost (Chertoff & Rasmussen, 2018). The majority of these bots originated in Iran, Argentina, Venezuela (and Russia) (Chertoff & Rasmussen, 2018). Similarly, American national security advisor, John Bolton, warned against suspected Chinese, Korean and Iranian meddling (Chertoff & Rasmussen, 2018). Other states known to have conducted online foreign campaigns include Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Morocco (Howard & Kollanyi, 2016). 

So common has foreign digital intervention become that it’s suspected even in civil society online discourse. Consider, for example, the alarming fact that the majority of Tweets within the early days of the Arab Spring didn’t geographically originate within the region, let alone respective Arab states(Gunter, Elareshi, & Al-Jaber, 2016). Even Iran’s ‘Twitter revolution’, famously discredited for its oversized foreign involvement, was a screeching, early example of the denationalization of national debates, courtesy of ICTs. In fact, far from premature hopes of a liberalizing effect common in the early days of ICT emergence, their only legacy seems to be headed towards e-imperializing instead, holding the promise of low-barrier, foreign orchestrated coups, as opposed to the now technically impossible national, Twitter revolutions, in a still anarchical system.

References

Bissell, R. (1996). Reflections of a Cold Warrior - From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. Yale University Press.

Chertoff, M., & Rasmussen, A. F. (2018, December 11). The Unhackable Election - What it takes to defend Democracy. Retrieved from Foreign Affairs : https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/unhackable-election

Gunter, B., Elareshi, M., & Al-Jaber, K. (2016). Social media in the Arab World: Communication and Public Opinion in the Gulf States. I.B. Tauris.

Howard, P. N., & Kollanyi, B. (2016, 1 1). Bots, #StrongerIn, and #Brexit: Computational Propaganda during the UK-EU Referendum. Social Science Research Network, 1. doi:https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1606.06356

Lemke, T., & Habegger, M. W. (2022). Foreign Interference and Social Media Networks: A Relational Approach to Studying Contemporary Russian Disinformation. Journal of Global Security Studies, 7(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogac004

Lynch, M. (2011). After Egypt: the limits and promise of Online challenges to the Authoritarian Arab state. Perspective on Politics.

Ruy, D. (2020, July 21). Centre for Strategic and International Studies . Retrieved from https://www.csis.org/blogs/brexit-bits-bobs-and-blogs/did-russia-influence-brexit

The National Security Archive. (1996, February 12). Marshal Plan - Episode 3 - Interview with Mark Wyatt.

Wright, R. (1989). In the name of God - the Khomeini Decade. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc.