Russian Disinformation – The Technological Force Multiplier

Abstract

Part one of this article is a Literature Review assessing the state of the collected works of arguments surrounding the comparison and contrasting of older Soviet and contemporary Russian disinformation campaigns. There were two main overarching ideas that kept reemerging: either there is no practical difference or technological change is the only real difference, and even then, some believe it is just a natural evolution of these systems of disinformation. Other less frequent ideas surrounding this analysis are also highlighted as potentially important variables. After reviewing these previous works, the second part of this piece delves deeper into the topic by laying out examples of disinformation campaigns of the recent and distant pasts. The Literature Review and resulting analysis will ultimately show a correlation between the growth of technology and the speed of changes in the tactics used for Russian disinformation, as well as consistency between the goals of the Russian government today and the Soviet regime.