FBI director warns of ongoing Russian 'information warfare'

https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-chief-no-one-asked-181503472.html

ERIC TUCKER
,Associated Press•February 5, 2020

FBI Director Chris Wray said Wednesday that Russia is engaged in “information warfare” heading into the 2020 presidential election, though he said law enforcement has not seen ongoing efforts by Russia to target America's election infrastructure.

Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that Russia, just as it did in 2016, is relying on a covert social media campaign aimed at dividing American public opinion and sowing discord. That effort, which involves fictional personas, bots, social media postings and disinformation, may have an election-year uptick but is also a round-the-clock threat that is in some ways harder to combat than an election system hack, Wray said.

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Even without signs of election system targeting, Wray said Russian efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and “fake news" had not tapered off since 2016. He said social media had injected “steroids" into those efforts.

"They identify an issue that they know that the American people feel passionately about on both sides and then they take both sides and spin them up so they pit us against each other," Wray said. “And then they combine that with an effort to weaken our confidence in our elections and our democratic institutions which has been a pernicious and asymmetric way of engaging in affect information warfare."

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