> Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently en

> Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. The author seems to fully have bought into the anti-Trump narrative that the only problem about the bots is that they were /Russian/ bots, and things would turn out all right if only the US developed a reliable mechanism to keep them foreigners (Russian bots, ISIS recruiters...) out of its internet; I'm not sure if the usage of the term "digital illegals" here is to be taken as a sign of self-awareness just how much this mentality mirrors "build the wall" and Brexit and what-not. Is there any reason to assume that there isn't plenty of potential and will within the borders of the US to attack its society's ability to "operate with a shared epistemology"? I remember debates between internet creationists and evolutionists back in the '90s, and they looked exactly the same as red-blue debates look nowadays: every side had access to its own endless stream of well-written sources constituting a backdrop against which their own worldview was obviously true and the opposition's worldview was obviously false, and each side treated constructing another such prop that would contribute to the picture that their interpretation is the only reasonable one as a pro-social act regardless of how unsound or badly argued it was. This is the era for which the phrase that "arguments are soldiers" was quipped. I take it nobody contends that PZ Myers or Ken Ham were Russian plants, but all the qualities of the present situation were already there back when they were the biggest fish of memetic warfare. And this was made possible just by academics with a lot of time vs. small-time evangelical tax evasion bucks; we still only have a sketchy understanding of how much the public epistemology was polluted by American corporate interests.