Partisanship has made it more difficult for social media platforms to react to hacked and leaked materials, Media and Digital Disinformation Fellow Bret Schafer argues in New York Daily News.
Baked into Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy is the idea of reflexive control — a Soviet-era theory in which an action is taken to bait an adversary, without their awareness, into a series of seemingly rational but ultimately self-defeating moves. More than simply outmaneuvering an opponent, reflexive control seeks to “create a certain model of behavior in the system it seeks to control.”
While it remains unclear what role, if any, the Kremlin played in the publication of a trove of materials purporting to show evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son, one can’t help but think that the response of the tech platforms and media to the leak, and the subsequent firestorm those responses created, was, if not the intended outcome, at the very least a desirable one for the leakers.