Prebunking Kamala Harris
The Russians are likely to pull out all the stops against the Vice-President; we should anticipate and start mitigations now
This will only be a short post, as it is late, I have other work to do, and a lot is happening.
As I write this, Vice-President Kamala Harris is preparing her campaign for the presidency. I am unversed in US politics, so I cannot comment on her and her chances on winning (although in many Russian minds, these chances are linked with the fate of Ukraine).
However, as soon as President Biden announced that he was stepping down, I immediately turned to one of my many phones to track what Russian sources were saying about events in the United States.
Naturally, the social media platform which I prioritise in watching Russian messaging is Telegram, the Russian-developed instant messaging service that is critical for pro-Russian sources in disseminating their material. Telegram is the starting point for much Russian hostile messaging. Telegram has, to my mind, transformed the way messaging – and information manipulation – works, to such an extent that, I believe, it should be studied separately from other platforms. Its architecture and impact are so distinct, certainly for the areas which I monitor and analyse, that it warrants much more dedicated examination.
More of that later. What was interesting yesterday (Sunday 21 July) was that key Russian Telegram channels seemingly had not had time to formulate a specific line on Biden’s decision to step down. Instead, prominent channels were recycling material from American media – invariably criticism of Harris – dubbed into Russian for domestic audiences.
This has changed today. Curators of pro-Kremlin channels have started to develop their own attacks on Harris, seemingly concerned that she will become the Democrats’ choice.
This is where prebunking could be extremely useful in preparing mitigations against Russian informational attacks. I have previously argued that we should move to a clever war of manoeuvres in the information war with Russia, rather than a positional information war. Much of our government and other communications work on Russian messaging has been highly reactive: we should combine expertise (regional experts, specialists on information manipulation, policy experts) to anticipate Russian lines of attack and launch our own information campaigns in advance to protect our democratic interests.
Telegram is a key source to examine in trying to anticipate what the Russians might do. Already the pro-Russian channels are posting the most egregious slurs on Harris, and we should be prepared for much worse.
This evening I have seen Russian channels call Harris a paedophile, incapable, worse than Biden, more dangerous than Biden, ambitious, and – this is awful – Vitaliy Klichko’s twin sister. There is almost certainly worse out there, and almost certainly worse to come.
At this point – this is a short post – I would like to point to this excellent and really important report by Nina Jankowicz and others at the Wilson Center – on how gender, sex, and lies are weaponized against women online. Priming and educating audiences about gendered information hostility is a crucial issue, and is likely to be extremely important in the US presidential race if – as seems likely – Harris wins the Democratic candidacy.
The final point to make in this how Russian messaging – and likely Russian political thinking more widely – blurs the issues of the US elections and Ukraine. For many Russian politicians, the two issues are part of the same, increasingly spiritual, conflict, the holy war of Russianness against anything seemingly anti-Russian.
In Russian information operations, the two issues also merge. Moscow uses its supposed success on the battlefield in Ukraine to target Americans with messaging that Biden is losing the war; it also uses reporting about the US presidential candidates for domestic audiences, claiming that Washington is the greatest anti-Russian threat to them.
Some Russian pundits do see Biden’s departure as an unknown quantity, a black swan. Yet their reporting is likely to consolidate around specific themes concerning Harris: that she is supposedly complicit in Biden’s presidency and its alleged mistakes, that she is immature, puerile, and inexperienced. Misogyny will almost certainly play a key role in this. It is time to prepare now.