Countering Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections

ABSTRACT

In this report, the last in a four-part series on the topic, we explore how foreign disinformation efforts on social media are successfully exploiting divisions among Americans and whether public service announcements can help mitigate the damage. The California Governors Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) asked the RAND Corporations National Security Research Division to help analyze, forecast, and mitigate threats by foreign actors targeting local, state, and national elections. This final report addresses two research questions 1. What do people think and feel about Russian-sourced content during an election year? 2. Could a public service announcement (PSA) affect these views? To answer these questions, we conducted a series of focus groups and interviews with volunteers from a prior experiment who held favorable or unfavorable views of Republicans or Democrats or no strong views of either. We wanted to hear, in their own words, what focus group participants thought and felt about actual Russian memes and about a PSA warning of disinformation efforts by foreign actors. We also conducted one-on-one interviews with 15 other people who consume news from different types of sources. Most participants mistakenly assumed that the source of the content they were shown was fellow Americans, not Russia or its proxies. This result suggests that Americans are vulnerable to foreign disinformation. Although many participants had a positive view of a PSA warning about foreign election interference, the announcement tended to become more relevant to them after we explicitly told them they had just viewed partisan content sourced from Russia, suggesting that PSAs might be effective at preventing foreign disinformation from taking hold.