全球智库信息集成服务系统

• Russian information efforts are recycling U.S. partisanship at scale.
• Most participants in focus groups and interviews mistakenly assumed that Russian content was sourced by Americans.
• Most of these participants held a positive view of a PSA on foreign election interference that provided a nonpartisan, general warning created by an authoritative source: the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
• After interviewers told participants that the content they viewed was from Russia, the PSA appeared to be particularly relevant to them.

This report is the fourth in a four-part series aimed at helping policymakers and the public understand—and mitigate—the threat of online foreign interference in national, state, and local elections. During future U.S. political campaigns, Russia might try again to manipulate and divide U.S. voters via social media. Given the past and likely extant threats to U.S. elections, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services asked for research to help analyze, forecast, and mitigate threats by foreign actors targeting local, state, and national elections.

This report first describes research from focus groups and individual interviews on how people respond to memes sourced in Russia that were designed to breed dissension and to a public service announcement (PSA) warning about such online manipulation, then outlines a strategy to counter foreign interference in U.S. elections. The authors posit that adversaries are trying to exploit fault lines that already exist within U.S. society. These efforts could be effectively countered by collecting open-source intelligence on social media; releasing a simple, well-designed PSA for use during election cycles that warns the public about strategic threats targeting U.S. elections; and coordinating with social media companies to flag the source of foreign political content.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Background and Methods

• Chapter Three

  Focus Groups of Partisans and Independents

• Chapter Four

  Individual Interviews

• Chapter Five

  Conclusion and Recommendations

• Appendix A

  Focus Group and Interview Guide

• Appendix B

  Response Rates for Focus Groups and Interviews

• Appendix C

  Relevant Literature