I think Russian bots are basically fake news - a marginal non-issue. During RussiaGate the US media/intelligence agencies tried their hardest to find evidence of Russian influence and they found one billionaire's side-project with a comically low level of activity.
You have to think relative GDP/population size/level of interest. A bot net or troll farm costs money and if suspicious activity is detected it's easy for Twitter or whoever to shut it all down.
Russian PR operations are focused on influencing Russians and neighboring countries and maaaybe EU states. E.g. if a million Germans get pro-Russian opinions, there's a chance German politics will shift a little, because Germany's position on Russia is ambivalent in the first place.
But the US has a huge population AND it invented PR. So you have to invest way too much to sway a sizeable chunk of people AND every major company has their own PR operation sending their own bots and trolls in support of their policies, not to mention the political parties and SUPERPACs swimming in money all fighting to Correct The Record. And these are all Americans who understand other Americans intuitively - they speak the same language and continuously research what makes people tick.
How does a foreign group insert its own voice into a room where there's already a thousand voices shouting? Israel succeeds at it because there's millions of Israeli Americans, American Jews, and American Israelis - people who live between the two countries and can speak to both countries, and even more so because the US elites are aligned with Israeli elites - they already speak using similar narratives.
I doubt Saudi Arabia has much in the way of an influence operation - they hire PR firms, but their relationship to the US is through elites talking to other elites.
The idea that Russians can out-manipulate American manipulators who are bigger and more experienced at manipulating Americans is laughable.
China may have a better go at it, because of American-Chinese business relations and a large number of Chinese Americans, but without elite alignment the narratives are all off.
I think Russian bots are basically fake news - a marginal non-issue. During RussiaGate the US media/intelligence agencies tried their hardest to find evidence of Russian influence and they found one billionaire's side-project with a comically low level of activity.
You have to think relative GDP/population size/level of interest. A bot net or troll farm costs money and if suspicious activity is detected it's easy for Twitter or whoever to shut it all down.
Russian PR operations are focused on influencing Russians and neighboring countries and maaaybe EU states. E.g. if a million Germans get pro-Russian opinions, there's a chance German politics will shift a little, because Germany's position on Russia is ambivalent in the first place.
But the US has a huge population AND it invented PR. So you have to invest way too much to sway a sizeable chunk of people AND every major company has their own PR operation sending their own bots and trolls in support of their policies, not to mention the political parties and SUPERPACs swimming in money all fighting to Correct The Record. And these are all Americans who understand other Americans intuitively - they speak the same language and continuously research what makes people tick.
How does a foreign group insert its own voice into a room where there's already a thousand voices shouting? Israel succeeds at it because there's millions of Israeli Americans, American Jews, and American Israelis - people who live between the two countries and can speak to both countries, and even more so because the US elites are aligned with Israeli elites - they already speak using similar narratives.
I doubt Saudi Arabia has much in the way of an influence operation - they hire PR firms, but their relationship to the US is through elites talking to other elites.
The idea that Russians can out-manipulate American manipulators who are bigger and more experienced at manipulating Americans is laughable.
China may have a better go at it, because of American-Chinese business relations and a large number of Chinese Americans, but without elite alignment the narratives are all off.