Barack Obama Quotes

We had a general awareness, for example, of Russian use of social media - Facebook ads, use of Twitter, fake news implants - we had a general understanding of that. But now, as time has elapsed and time has gone on, I've certainly learned a lot more about the depth and breadth of what the Russians were about.

Russia has conducted a coordinated cyberattack on state election systems and hacked critical infrastructure. They have used social media to sow chaos and discord in our society. They have beaten and harassed U.S. diplomats and violated anti-proliferation treaties.

Russia has a long history of propaganda and trying to influence various nation's cultures and elections. It's happening. They seem to have stepped up their game.

The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious. There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us.

I do believe that Russia did and will continue to try and manipulate Americans' perspective on a whole variety of issues.

No single solution or actor can deal with the complex and interrelated challenges to electoral integrity arising from manipulated data, hate speech, and fake news. These phenomena are not new; they have been part of electoral cycles since the advent of democracy.

The Russians are clearly a big adversary, and they demonstrated it by trying to mess around in our election.

I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. They're troublemaking efforts. They're also not illegal.

Protected Voices aims to help political campaigns, private companies, and individuals protect themselves from foreign actors who want to hijack their message.

My experience investigating foreign propaganda operations predated the proliferation of social media platforms.

The Russians know that well executed disinformation, when exercised tactically, can quickly metastasize.

We are at war, if you will, in the cyber domain now, constantly battling countries, such as Russia or China, who are trying to do everything from steal our technology to influence our elections to put out disinformation about the United States.

There may be evidence the Russians are trying to tamper with elections. The Russians are trying to infiltrate everything we do, and they've succeeded. They've infiltrated Hollywood, they've infiltrated our universities, probably try to infiltrate elections by who knows what. But the idea that there is evidence that Putin was actively trying to elect Trump, there isn't a morsel of evidence for that, yet it shows up. The truth of the matter is that Putin doesn't care who runs the United States. It doesn't matter to him.

I think that what is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled. And it could be another country in the future.

The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.

A perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflct by political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population.

The fact that Russia has shown a willingness to disrupt elections and undermine institutions should come as no surprise. Just ask our allies across Europe, particularly in places like Georgia and Ukraine.

I am talking about strategies that were developed, working with the Trump campaign. I really do believe that much of what you saw coming out of Trump's mouth was a play from Putin's playbook.

I'm worried about privacy issues, I'm worried about Russian attacks. They literally, if you if you look at what their insidious aims are - to divide this country, is to make us hate each other, to make us not to trust media.

It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.

What we have seen the Russians do is attempt to manipulate public confidence on both sides. So we've seen them encourage people go to a protest on one side; we've seen them simultaneously encourage people to go to that same protest on the other side.

Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.

Many observers believe that the greatest damage Russia has done to U.S. interests in recent years stems from the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Although there is no question that Moscow's meddling in American elections is deeply worrying, it is just one aspect of the threat Russia poses.

Instead of debating whether or not Russia attempted to influence the 2016 elections - in ways that ranged from encouraging incorrect voting methods to promoting fake rallies to sharing false election stories - Americans should be debating how to counter this activity.

The Russian propaganda machine, even in the U.S., is not to be discounted.