What Can We Learn from Moldova?

A victory for the Pro EU party. Another victory for Democracy!

I would like to share some good news. According to a BBC article, Moldova’s Pro-EU, anti Putin party won the election. That is good news for Europe and good news for Democracy! Yay! We should be celebrating.

We should also be learning from Maia Sandu who has been telling everyone every step of the way that there was blatant Russian interference. We need to be calling it out too. It is treated as no big deal in the USA. I wish we had treated any sign of Russian interference as a reason to redo our elections the way that Romania did. Calling out Russian information helps democratic parties. It appears that when people are told they are being manipulated, and know that Russia does that, they will be more wary of absorbing the Russian propaganda. I did not see any sign of anyone addressing Russian disinformation directly to the voters, although I did read articles that Russian bots were targeting pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian voters in the US by saying to each side that Kamala would be bad for their side. We know that many who had been protesting Gaza’s treatment stayed home from voting. That is what Russia wants. They did not see themselves as being manipulated. They also did not seem to understand that a democratic government is more likely to be swayed by public opinion.

I have an example of that. Germany has put halts on shipments of weapons to Israel and then resumed. German politicians cannot seem to get past 80 years of allowing the State of Israel to define what is pro-Jewish, or supportive of Jews. Jews in Germany who protest against the State of Israel are not given a voice. However, they join with people from all sorts of groups who do not want to be funding genocide in Gaza, where the numbers of protesters and organizations backing this protest over the past year have grown, and we hear at least it is being considered. There is pressure from the EU too. All of the protesters in Democratic countries are making their voices heard. This is not allowed in Russia, or other authoritarian countries.

Moldovians have the added reality of seeing the war Russia has launched against Ukraine. They do not want that war to come to them, and their only way not to be a vassal state of Russia is to join the EU. Even EU states that are not members of NATO get added protection from being part of this union.

Some of the Russian interference is Russian vote buying, cyber attacks, plans to cause a mass riot, disinformation campaign, and bomb threats. We also had in swing states during our elections. These bomb scares were in precincts that vote heavily democratic and yet, polls were held open longer in some cases, but not opened up the next day to make up for people who could only vote during those hours. How could we allow that to happen?

We have not heard much about other Russian attempts to interfere and certainly not much from politicians. Here is a piece from NBC News on Russian disinformation. Legacy media is not mainstream anymore. I certainly did not receive this report because I don’t watch television news. I do know about Russian disinformation because I read books, and articles on the topic. This piece tells us,

Russia is the most active foreign threat to the 2024 election, according to U.S. officials. A pair of indictments unsealed in September alleged an expansion of Russia’s influence operation: from crude, fake social media posts and bot networks in 2016 to more ambitious and successful recent campaigns. That includes laundering propaganda through seemingly independent U.S. actors, according to one of the indictments. It was a scheme that entangled several popular right-wing creators, including Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, who all said last month they had been unaware their employer was working with Russia.

We should have been hearing from the candidates about Russian disinformation as much as possible like Maia Sandu did with her audience during this election. Trump knows that repeating something sticks. Repeating this every day is a story that will stick. Then, ask the question, “Should a Russian Bot farm tell you how to vote?” We should be told “That is foreign interference.” This should be a huge problem.

At this point we can forget about Republicans under Trump’s thrall to seek fair elections. Democrats should be investigating every way that there is interference. It is not just the gerrymandering, or the disinformation spread by MAGAs, and that so many media platforms are owned by the far-right. People are seeking their own information and it is there to be had. Politicians with a platform like a podcast or Youtube should be telling us of Russian disinformation. Russians are the masters of spreading deceit, and have their fingers in all the elections because they want to win countries over to their side as they have helped to win our country. Paranoid Putin has been practicing this craft his entire career. We know he does it, it should be made more obvious.

After the German elections I attended a talk by the EU based organization Europe Calling in which two professors shared their research about disinformation attempts on the German election by X(USA) and TikTok (China). I wrote about it in two parts.

Did Bots and Right Wing Media Platforms Influence How Germans Voted Part 1

Did Bots and Right Wing Media Platforms Influence How Germans Voted Part 2

However, Germany also has not analyzed how Russian influence affects their elections. It is interesting that the parts of Germany formerly under Soviet influence are the most influenced to vote for the Russia friendly AfD party. I imagine that people who have lived in the Former East German states and were part of the DDR might be easily influenced by dossiers that the government collected on them. As these archives were made public, who is to say Putin did not make sure to gather the data as well?

There is a pull to provide

There has been such a desire to treat the elections as normal that there was not a big hue and cry over bomb threats forcing polling places to close. There was not a big hue and cry over Russian disinformation. Normalizing foreign interference is not helpful. We should not allow this to happen again. We need to be scrappy, not gracious. We need to teach how Russian disinformation works, ask people to find examples and report them, so you focus their attention on what it looks like. We should not accept that Russia is spreading disinformation and treat it like a point of interest and not a big thing to protest against. Our children deserve that we protect their future and take the bull by the horns and spell it out. Russians manipulate people with disinformation and this is what it looks like.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2rdlj8ejgo

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-voting-bomb-threats

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/moldovas-pro-eu-party-leads-polls-in-election-fraught-with-russian-interference-claims

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/04/a-new-window-into-russian-disinformation-ops-00187261