A Conversation With Clint Watts on Influence and Information in the Social Media Era

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2018

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How has our understanding of Russian influence operations evolved since the 2016 election? Just a few days before Trump was elected president, Clint Watts, Andrew Weisburd, and J.M. Berger sounded the alarm in a War on the Rocks article about the Kremlin's efforts to undermine American democracy. Since then, the world has learned a lot more about how Russia influenced the election and, more generally, the continued dangers of influence campaigns and information warfare. Clint's new book, Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News, is an effort to help us think through these issues. He recently spoke with Usha about his efforts to track and understand Russian social media trolling, what studying jihadi terrorists taught him about online propaganda, and what the government, tech companies, and the public can do to deal with this difficult problem.

Read the November 2016 War on the Rocks article here: https://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy/

Order Clint's book here: https://amzn.to/2I4NKbt

Image: powtac/Flickr

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast. My name is Usha Sahei, the managing editor of
0:14.3	War on the Rocks, and I'm here with Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, a leading expert on
0:19.0	disinformation, influence operations, and social media, and the author of the recent messing with the enemy
0:24.8	surviving in a social media world of hackers terrorists Russians and fake news.
0:28.8	Clint, thanks so much for being on the show.
0:30.4	Thank you and thanks for that search engine optimization you did there I got all the
0:34.0	key words on. That is what I do. Clint you testified before the Senate last year
0:39.1	about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
0:44.1	And you talk in your book about a number of efforts
0:46.6	prior to the election to sort of make the policy
0:50.2	community aware of this problem. So how has the political conversation
0:55.1	changed on the one hand and the policy and expert conversation on the
0:58.4	other hand since your testimony over the last approximately 15 months?
1:01.6	Yeah so the tracking, you know, Jamberger, Andrew Weisberg, and I, and the article we wrote, which was at
1:10.8	War on the Rocks, was really, you know, we decided to do it before the election and it was based on we didn't we didn't think anybody
1:18.0	Would read it post election and we thought it would be turned into a political battle.
1:22.5	So I wanted it out before election day.
1:24.6	And Ryan, you know, who had started war on the rocks,
1:29.6	I send it to him and I said, look, it's got to go out before that because we could not get anyone
1:34.4	to pay attention to it.
1:36.0	So we started in January 14 really watching this stuff and from January 14 really until a month after the election,
1:45.0	there, you could not get people to pay attention to it.
	...

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