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I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.
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Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race)