“I think it would be entirely inaccurate to say that the protests that are happening on college campuses, the divisiveness of the debate in Congress and among the public is a result of anything that Russians have done or could do,” [Bret] Schafer [who tracks Russian and other propaganda at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Alliance for Securing Democracy] said. “I think it would all be there regardless of whether there were Russian bots and Russian state media messaging.”

Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a think tank, said reports on propaganda efforts by foreign actors over protest movements needed to be treated with caution. 

Allegations of foreign influence “can often be used to delegitimize large and authentic democratic movements in the United States,” Brooking said, adding that some critics of the Black Lives Matter protests tried that tactic citing foreign adversaries’ information operations.

A lot of people on here (and likely the author of the article, who buried it at paragraph 17 and further down after and before a lot of arguing for the contrary) could do with taking that to heart. Both on Gaza and on Biden.

Honestly, I think it's just time to start peer-banning known Russian networks. For real, are they doing ANY good out in the world at this point that they would be missed on the Internet in any way?

Russia exploits America's division on fucking everything. If they could figure out a way to exploit the divide between whether pineapple should be on pizza or not, they'd do that too.

This is why you should check a little bit of someone’s history before replying to any inflammatory comments. Most of the time it’s obvious they have an agenda when you look at their post submissions and comments.

The more ineffectual the USA is, the easier it is for PuttyPoot to enrich himself. He’s spending a TON of money to buy an entire wing of a political party.

I'll bet Putin knew about the Oct. 7 attack and sat on the info. One of the reason being to exploit division in the US.

It is high time we wage an earnest hybrid war against the blyats. Sabotage, covert action of all manner, full-blown economic warfare, cutting off their supply chains, smuggling fentanyl, all that shit.

Lol, OK so what if this messaging was the state department's way of undercutting anti-israel sentiment so that they could protect their interests in the middle east from domestic opposition?