Disinformation has long played a role in international relations, conflict, and politics. Within the modern era, much of the focus on disinformation in the international arena has centered around Soviet campaigns in the Cold War and Russian campaigns in the last several years. Media, researchers, and the general public have paid particular attention to the social media disinformation campaign conducted during the United States 2016 presidential election. This campaign utilized increasingly ubiquitous social media platforms to target individual segments of the American population with tailored disinformation designed to inflame existing societal tensions. Social media provide a powerful tool to push disaggregated disinformation narratives in ways that were not available to previous Soviet efforts during the Cold War. These capabilities represent a sea change in how disinformation campaigns will be conducted from this point forward. However, the various strains of disinformation in Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign shared no unifying narrative, and the positions advanced frequently contradicted each other. This lack of a central narrative in Russia’s disinformation reflects Russia’s secondary (at this point in time) international strategic position and is reinforced by the characteristics of communication over social media.
