The Q-Word: Weapon of Choice for Smearing Opponents
One of the most effective information-operation weapons during the 2016 presidential election was to smear political targets as “Russian bots” working on behalf of the Kremlin. Journalists were de-platformed, presidential candidates were smeared, and lives were immeasurably damaged. The art of attacking political targets by using open-sourced guilt-by-association is not new – nor is using Russians as foils: Joseph McCarthy and his ilk did it in the 1950s with “red-baiting” and the FBI tried to do it to Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Today that disgraceful tact...