I have trouble making sense of the debate over Russian interference on the 2016 election. I’d like to separate out four distinct issues:
1. Is it bad if foreign governments interfere in US elections?
2. Is it bad if the Russian government interferes in US elections?
3. Is Facebook culpable for allowing Russia to spread fake news on their website?
4. Is the Trump campaign culpable for encouraging Russia to interfere in the US election?
I’m open to having my mind changed, but right now I see the answers as no, yes, no and yes.
1. As with terrorism, I judge foreign election interference on utilitarian grounds. If the US kills 100,000 people in a terrorist act in order to save a million people, that’s justifiable (unless the million could have been saved without the terrorism.) Most real world terrorism is bad not because innocent people get killed (even soldiers are “innocent”), rather because terrorist groups such as ISIS are fighting for evil causes.
If Canada runs TV ads saying, “Vote for Hillary, because Trump will destroy NAFTA and hurt the US economy”, that’s a perfectly respectable example of free speech in action. It would probably be politically foolish (or at least would have been when I was younger, as Americans once resented this sort of outside interference.) Thus Canada probably would not run this sort of TV commercial because it would backfire.
2. In contrast, if a militarily aggressive authoritarian government interferes by supporting a candidate who will remove from their party platform a plank that criticizes that regime’s invasion of another country, and also try to destabilize Western Europe, then the interference is a bad thing. Again, in the past that sort of interference would have backfired, as Americans would have resented election interference by a bad actor. Remember the McCarthy era? It was once a scandal to be seen as under Russian influence.
In my view, Russian election interference was a bad thing because they were trying to get the US government to support their evil policies, not because foreign election interference is inherently a bad thing.
3. What about media platforms? In my view, if a foreign government opts to run campaign commercials on TV, the networks should allow it to do so. The Facebook issue is more troublesome, as (unlike with campaign commercials) the source of the fake news was not identified. Even so, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s Facebook’s job to police everything said on its platform. Rather, the Democrats should have made an issue about this interference. Hopefully, next time they will do so.
Unfortunately, most voters don’t seem to agree with me. Polls should that most voters are not too upset with Russian election interference:
And yet, only 45 percent of survey respondents said outside influence from foreign governments is a major problem in American elections, along starkly partisan lines: 68 percent of Democrats versus only 22 percent of Republicans, and 40 percent of independents.
However one feels about this issue, one thing seems clear. If voters are not upset enough to hold the Trump Administration accountable, then it makes absolutely no sense to hold Facebook accountable. Any sins of omission committed by Facebook are trivial compared to the sin of a major political campaign encouraging Russian interference.
4. If the Trump campaign did attempt to encourage Russian meddling, that would reflect poorly on the Trump campaign. Nonetheless, in a free country, with free press and democratic elections, this scandal should be treated as a political problem, not a legal matter. I do understand that scandals almost always do get swept up in legal issues, such as perjury, or failing to report campaign spending, etc., but the Russian interference itself should be viewed as a political scandal. If the voters don’t want to punish it, that’s their prerogative.
Don’t take this post as a comment on the Mueller investigation, which is looking at obstruction of justice and all sorts of other separate issues. My goal here is to defend Facebook, which may well end up suffering more sanctions than the Trump administration. The voters should be demanding much higher ethics from politicians than from profit-maximizing corporations, not much lower ethics.
You may wonder if I have any evidence that the Trump campaign encouraged the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election. It so happens I do:
Donald Trump appeared to call on Russian intelligence agencies Wednesday to find 30,000 of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, adding a stunning twist to the uproar over Moscow’s alleged intervention in the presidential election.”
They probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there. So let’s see,” Trump said at a news conference in Florida.
He was referring to emails on the personal server that Clinton used to conduct official business as secretary of state but that she deemed private and did not hand over to the State Department.
The GOP nominee’s comments sparked an immediate furor at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as well as claims by Clinton’s campaign that Trump was endangering national security and even conspiring with a U.S. foe. Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta denounced Trump’s “irresponsible” comments from the convention floor, saying that the presidential candidate “asked the Russians to interfere in American politics.”
The voters knew all this before the election. They didn’t care.
PS. Tyler Cowen recently linked to a NYT article that suggests Taiwanese voters are equally indifferent to outside interference in their elections. (I say “outside” rather than “foreign”, as Taiwan’s constitution affirms that it is technically a part of China, although it is of course de facto self-governing.) There’s no doubt in my mind that one could find similar indifference in Europe and elsewhere. People just don’t care.
READER COMMENTS
Rebes
Nov 29 2018 at 3:45pm
Define “interfere.” Of course, outright illegal behavior, like manipulating vote counts, is unacceptable, but the same is true when committed by domestic citizens or organizations. However, if interference simply consists of legal participation in the discourse preceding an election alongside the domestic population, we should all get used to it, because that’s what happens in a world with open media platforms.
Another aspect here is symmetry. Hasn’t the United States interfered in the elections of other countries for decades?
Andre
Nov 29 2018 at 6:00pm
Define “interfere.”
My thought exactly, but for a different reason.
As far as I can tell, not being glued to this story, Russia paid for some Facebook ads, somewhere around of one tenth of one percent of one percent of what we spent (0.0015%), give or take an order of magnitude. About as relevant an issue as Benghazi.
(Plus, the spending happened mostly after the election, and wasn’t one sided, but rather trolling/misinformation swinging both ways, iirc).
Plus, it’s hard to take what to me appear to be Democrat partisan complaints that seriously; in recent years, it was the Republicans who were hawkish and Democrats dove-ish vis-a-vis Russia. All of a sudden, a few Facebook ads, which require consent of the gullible, on the INTERNET, are a national security threat? Please.
Scott Sumner
Nov 30 2018 at 11:51am
Rebes, I thought I made it quite clear that I don’t have any blanket opposition foreign governments “interfering” via the exercise of free speech. It should be legal. I may oppose what they have to say, on a case by case basis, as in the Russian case.
Obviously interference in the form of tampering with election machines is wrong.
Andres, Not sure what your comment has to do with this post.
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 29 2018 at 3:55pm
In #1 Scot writes, “If Canada runs TV ads saying, “Vote of Hillary, because Trump will destroy NAFTA and hurt the US economy”, that’s a perfectly respectable example of free speech in action. It would probably be politically foolish (or at least would have been when I was younger, as Americans once resented this sort of outside interference.) Thus Canada probably would not run this sort of TV commercial because it would backfire.”
While it might be an example of free speech in action it’s currently illegal under US campaign finance laws. It expressly is campaigning for a specific candidate. Bluman v the FEC (Federal Elections Commission) challenged this right after the Citizen’s United case and the US Court of Appeals upheld the law. Interestingly, our newest Supreme Court justice, Judge Kavanaugh, was one of the three judges on the DC Court of Appeals that ruled for the FEC!
RPLong
Nov 29 2018 at 5:51pm
You write,
<blockquote>As with terrorism, I judge foreign election interference on utilitarian grounds. If the US kills 100,000 people in a terrorist act in order to save a million people, that’s justifiable (unless the million could have been saved without the terrorism.) Most real world terrorism is bad not because innocent people get killed (even soldiers are “innocent”), rather because terrorist groups such as ISIS are fighting for evil causes.</blockquote>
I don’t disagree with your moral conclusion, but this doesn’t seem like utilitarian reasoning to me.
RPLong
Nov 29 2018 at 5:52pm
Forgive my scripting error. I sometimes forget the technicalities of the EconLog software.
Scott Sumner
Nov 30 2018 at 11:35am
I’m saying that terrorism is justified when the costs exceed the benefits.
Gordon
Nov 29 2018 at 7:42pm
Scott, you used a very innocuous example of interference for item 1 which is a far cry from what Russia is alleged to have done. According to US government security agencies, Russian hackers attempted to access the election systems in 39 states prior to the 2016 election.
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/13/15791744/russia-election-39-states-hack-putin-trump-sessions
Then there’s the Internet Research Agency which was run by one of Putin’s pals. Employees at this company would create a large number of social media accounts through which they pretended to be US citizens and disseminate all sorts of propaganda. Their posts went beyond just the election. They would post things around contentious issues like anti-vaxxer beliefs and take both sides of the issues to foster vehement disagreement and polarized viewpoints among Americans.
A democracy can only be strong if people have trust in its institutions. It’s a very debatable question if Russia’s attempt altered the outcome. But at the least, I would say trust in our institutions has been eroded. And that undermines our democracy and, therefor, aids Putin.
Mark Z
Nov 30 2018 at 1:48am
I’m not sure why ‘aids Putin’ is the end moral consequence in your sentence. I honestly don’t care a whole lot how well Putin is. I don’t think ‘hurting Putin’ should be a policy goal of ours. A trade war with Russia, for example, may hurt Putin, but it hurts us too (and in fact, the US hurting Putin probably actually helps Putin politically by galvanizing him among Russians).
The integrity of American institutions and democracy is of course important, but I’m not sure a bunch of failed hacking attempts and, essentially, large scale internet trolling constitute such a severe threat to them. I also suspect there is a strong overlap between people who who believe both A) that unsuccessful hacking and facebook meddling are a severe threat to the integrity of elections, and B) that any attempt to reduce voting fraud by requiring any kind of ID whatsoever constitutes ‘voter suppression.’
My suspicion is most people don’t really believe the integrity of democracy in America is so fragile or threatened, either by Russians or voter fraud, but selectively pretend to because it justifies denying the legitimacy of elections the outcomes of which they disapprove.
Miguel Madeira
Nov 30 2018 at 7:26am
“According to US government security agencies, Russian hackers attempted to access the election systems in 39 states prior to the 2016 election.”
The only relevant thing seems to be that; the rest is all variants of “some guys saying something in the internet”.
Scott Sumner
Nov 30 2018 at 11:37am
You said:
“Scott, you used a very innocuous example of interference for item 1 which is a far cry from what Russia is alleged to have done.”
That was exactly my point! The Russian interference was far worse that the innocuous example I used. That’s why the Russian interference was evil but my hypothetical Canadian interference would not be.
Mark Z
Nov 30 2018 at 1:37am
Scott,
It seems you’re inconsistent about when you defer to ‘process accountability’ or ‘outcome accountability.’ You’ve said you oppose the electoral college, even if it might result in a particular good outcome, because you think it deviates from the ideal process. There you’re a rule consequential. But on foreign election interference, you care about the outcome rather than the process, and are fine with the activity as long as the outcome is (in your opinion) good. So, why not be a rule consequentialist here, and oppose the practice for the same reason: because, even if a particular case of it may be beneficial, the practice in general undermines the perceived legitimacy of the system. What’s the criterion for when you care about the process and when you care about the outcome? I think this is an important question because people in general have a bias toward process accountability with their opponents (‘they need to go regardless of whether you like their policies because what they did undermines morals/norms’) and outcome accountability with those they support (‘so what if he/she did/said that bad thing, his/her policies have had a net positive effect.’)
Also, unless I’m missing something, that poll doesn’t show that “most voters don’t seem to agree with me.” What you quote from it says nothing about whether people think Russian interference is bad; it asks whether they think it’s a major problem. Many people (like myself) may simply think it didn’t have much of an impact. If you asked someone if polio is a major problem in America, and they said no, you shouldn’t assume they’re saying polio is, eo ipso, not bad; they may just be saying it’s not a problem because there isn’t enough of it to be a problem. This also would explain why Republicans view it as less of a problem: they don’t think they voted for Trump because the Russians made them; they think they voted for him for their own reasons.
Lastly, Trump encouraging the Russians to release Clinton’s emails because he believed they contained incriminating information is perfectly justifiable under utilitarian morality. If North Korea had irrefutable evidence of Donald Trump committing a slew of heinous felonies, would you want them to release it, or not? It’s quite reasonable to say, “yes, if he did those things, I want to know, regardless of who releases the information.” In fact, I think it’d be rather bizarre to object to the release of relevant information because one thinks the one doing the releasing is a bad person or has ulterior motives.
Scott Sumner
Nov 30 2018 at 11:46am
Mark, My “rule” is free speech, which is why I think it should be legal for foreign governments to advocate certain political outcomes in America. So I don’t see your objection.
Voters should then judge the exercise free speech on a case by case basis.
On your second point, over the years I’ve learned that the public does not respond to the specific wording of a public opinion poll, rather to the basic feel of the question. I stand by my claim that the public does not agree with me, although I concede that this claim involves a bit of creative interpretation. (That’s why I used the term ‘seem’.)
You said:
“Lastly, Trump encouraging the Russians to release Clinton’s emails because he believed they contained incriminating information is perfectly justifiable under utilitarian morality.”
I don’t agree. Trump’s pro-Russian views are unethical, and probably motivated by business considerations and/or authoritarian sympathies. You are confusing “utilitarian” with “advantageous to Trump”.
zeke5123
Nov 30 2018 at 9:10pm
This response gets tricky. Are you saying Trump’s motivations change the utilitarian calculus? I think that while there may be an argument there, it opens a massive can of worms (cans of worms that make pure utilitarian thinking unworkable)
Would really like to hear a response to the final point — does the source of info matter IF the info is irrefutably credible?
Scott Sumner
Dec 2 2018 at 12:47am
I’m not sure what you are asking. The source of the info doesn’t matter for its veracity, if it’s definitely true. But it may matter in other respects.
zeke5123
Dec 3 2018 at 7:55am
Scott,
Perhaps I read too much into your post, but it seemed that you were saying the motivation behind Trump’s desire to leak the emails was a paramount concern in evaluating the action.
If so, then are you merely worried about second order effects? Because in the main, it seems more info about politician’s dirty secrets is better than less info.
Mark Z
Dec 4 2018 at 12:26am
And I don’t think the “feeling” of the poll is any less vague than the wording. It makes as much sense to see the poll as asking, “do you think foreign interference made a difference in the election,” as “was it bad.”
And you’re moving the goalposts on Trump and Russia. You weren’t referring to his ‘general views on Russia.’ You were referring to a very particular suggestion by him that Russia release whatever compromising documents they had on Hillary Clinton. Whom it’s advantageous to is irrelevant to whether it’s justified. “You just support the release of X information because it’d be advantageous to Y” isn’t a valid argument against the release of the information. Your position, it would seem, is that one should oppose the release of true (note that he wasn’t suggesting they fabricate information, merely release it), incriminating information against someone if the one doing releasing is a bad person/entity.
Now, you might think it would be better if incriminating information against a candidate (assuming it exists) shouldn’t be released, even if true, because you think they’d be a better president; but you can hardly be indignant that the candidate you oppose doesn’t take the position, because he clearly thinks he’s the one who’d make a better president.
E. Harding
Dec 6 2018 at 9:31pm
“Trump’s pro-Russian views are unethical”
As, I assume, are Hitler’s pro-Jewish views.
I also support free speech, but that’s an extremely low bar, given your intellect.
Hazel Meade
Nov 30 2018 at 1:11pm
Yes, I really do not understand the argument that Facebook is somehow responsible for the Russian fake news on their platform. I really do not get the hearings or the idea that social media should somehow be “regulated”. Technologically, I don’t think we have an AI that can detect lies in text. There is no central authority that can determine which news is “fake”, nor would we want there to be. So what is Facebook supposed to do? Ban all Russian sourced content? Have a giant team of humans checking every facebook post for “fake” information?
The other thing is that the problem with fake news on Facebook isn’t really a problem with fake news per se, it is a problem with all of social media and how it affects our social interactions. Nobody’s really having that discussion. They’re having this wierd argument about how Facebook should somehow be held responsible for not protecting us from seeing fake information, even though the mechanism by which that fake information spreads is based on how people choose to use it, which is a larger problem than just Facebook or fake news or Russian election interference. The problem with facebook is structural and based in the nature of social media and human nature itself, it is not some failure of Facebook’s social responsibility to somehow be screening our media consumption for us. It’s our own failure to not screen our own information consumption – our own willingness to believe whatever we want to believe in the moment.
Yesterday on NPR, I heard someone saying something about how Facebook should be “broken up”, which makes no sense. What the heck do they mean by that? Have a bunch of regional facebooks so we can’t communicate with friends on the other side of the country? Disable a bunch of features so you can’t share video anymore? It’s crazy. it’s like people have no idea what’s going on or what to do about it and the only tools they have to deal with it are things they are familiar with like anti-trust law, that totally do not apply.
If you want to drag Facebook before Congress, don’t do it because Russians are posting fake news on it – do it because they created a tool that exploits human beings’ social signalling instincts and penchant for confirmation bias.
LK Beland
Nov 30 2018 at 4:20pm
I agree with you that Facebook shouldn’t be held responsible for the content that it hosts, which is created and shared by its users. It should be held responsible, however, for the content that it promotes in exchange for money.
Mark Z
Dec 4 2018 at 12:28am
It can be held responsible by users, if they’d like to, but it absolutely should not be held responsible by the state for whatever it broadcasts, regardless of whether it makes money off of it. The 1st amendment and whatnot.
Hazel Meade
Dec 5 2018 at 1:30pm
Was the Russian fake news actually sponsored “promoted content” though? I.e. were Russians basically paying money for ad placement, or did the fake news get spread through the social network the normal way?
Fackbook does use an algorithm to decide what content to “promote”, meaning that they decide which posts they will prioritize in your feed, based on your history and shares and likes, and the shares and lines in your friends network. When you like and share political content it becomes more likely that political content that is similar will be promoted to the top of your newsfeed, based on keyword analysis. It would be very hard to make that discriminate over the type of content and determine if it is fake, because the reason it is being promoted is determined by the actions of the users. You would have to build a “fakeness” detection system into the software to change that which is nearly impossible. I believe facebook is now filtering websites that are known to promote fake news but that’s really easy to bypass just by changing IP addresses and site names.
I think problem is that Facebooks users keep sharing and liking the fake content, not that Russians are making ad buys through third parties.
LK Beland
Nov 30 2018 at 4:14pm
The Mexican government running ads–clearly indicating that they are paid for by Mexico–seems OK to me.
Mexicans funneling money to a SuperPAC through shell corporations and other tactics–and using the SuperPAC to run ads in favor of the Mexican position–would be a problem.
This is especially true in this world where we are increasingly disagreeing about what is real and what is fake.
Phil H
Dec 1 2018 at 2:05am
Foreign interference in elections is presumably a bogey-man because of the fear that a foreign interest may want to undermine my state (and maybe take it over) by misleading the populace into installing a puppet/weak ruler. This would be an anti-democratic abuse of democracy. That worry is not so serious for the USA, with no realistic invasion threats; but most other countries around the world are not so secure. Even in Western Europe, literal questions of sovereignty are very close to the surface (Brexit, Basque separatism, ECB control of Greece, etc.).
You may respond that ultimately only the citizens get to vote, and they choose their own fate. But I don’t believe that voting is the primary mechanism of democracy – I think free speech is a much more important component of a democratic system, and in particular the kind of accountable free speech operated by the professional media. Accountable free speech depends ultimately on rule of law, so if the free speech mechanism is being heavily used by a party outside our state’s jurisdiction, then there is a problem, or at least a worrying asymmetry. For example, if Canada intervened in American elections, it would not be constrained by campaign financing rules, because it’s not constrained by American law at all.
There’s also a bit of a definitional worry. Elections are supposed to be either about expressing the will of the citizenry, or getting the best government for the citizenry, depending on how you view democracy. Foreign interests are by definition not the citizenry, so whatever they want, it is strictly irrelevant to what an election *ought* to produce. There is therefore not much benefit in allowing foreign powers to intervene.
All of these arguments include ideas of national sovereignty. I’m not a fan of this concept, so I basically agree with Sumner, but given that we still live in a world of sovereign states, I don’t think we should dismiss them too lightly.
Michael Sandifer
Dec 1 2018 at 2:22am
I vehemently disagree with your position on election influence by foreign governments. I don’t think the freedom of speech within our borders should apply to foreign governments. It should not merely be a political matter.
The whole point of having a Republic is to put guardrails on democracy. Without them, democracies are unstable and especially awful for less popular minorities. Too often, citizens are captured by lowest common denominator politics, ready to surrender republican forms of government in favor of various sorts of petty tyrants.
Mark Z
Dec 4 2018 at 12:13am
We put guardrails on democracy to protect freedom, not the other way around. The argument you make would apply to domestic speech just the same as foreign speech.
TravisV
Dec 2 2018 at 2:04pm
Prof. Sumner,
I’m going to put my utilitarian hat on for a second. I think a major question here involves comparing two risks:
Risk (1): Counterintelligence cases like Russiagate are kept quiet within the FBI, allowing the chief executive to suffocate such investigations in the crib.
Risk (2): Counterintelligence cases like Russiagate are allowed to be pursued by a new office of special counsel, which proceeds to abuse its investigatory power.
Andrew C. McCarthy does a good job of shedding light on this issue, but my personal feeling is that it’s still hard to say which risk is net larger than the other risk.
Prof. Sumner, do you agree that it’s “hard to say”?
E. Harding
Dec 6 2018 at 9:40pm
“In contrast, if a militarily aggressive authoritarian government interferes by supporting a candidate who will remove from their party platform a plank that criticizes that regime’s invasion of another country, and also try to destabilize Western Europe, ”
This is propaganda, about 150 degrees away from reality. Russia is not aggressive, nor is it particularly authoritarian by European standards. It has no intention of destabilizing Western Europe; quite the contrary, it desires a strong and independent Western Europe that can stand up to American bullying.
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