Robert Mueller. (c) James Berglie/Zuma Press/PA Images. All rights reserved.It's Mueller time, again. Or rather, it's time to charge up the headline generators about Russian interference and Putin's "master plan" to undermine the west. In the wake of the recent indictments of 13 Russians for attempted meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections, the international media produced a hail storm of articles and op-eds about Russian trolls and bots on social media apparently capable of influencing political outcomes and more in the west.
It doesn't seem to matter that most of the revelations were already known and first reported on by Russian media. Instead, it appears that the "Russian threat" is now more real than ever and will impact anything from the upcoming elections in Italy to the mid-term elections in the United States. Even Silicon Valley's Tech Giants are now apparently dismayed that their products might have indeed changed the world, though not in the way they intended. But this should not be surprise us. After all, we are living in an era of "hybrid war" in which social media are a "tool" for Russian bots and trolls to succeed in what the erstwhile Soviet propaganda and intelligence network could only have dreamed of during the Cold War.
The techno-fetishism surrounding social media, compounded by the hours per day millions of us spend on Twitter or Facebook, has managed to blur the lines between wishful thinking and reality, between the "virtual world" and the real world beyond the immediate vicinity of our screens. Could it not be that we are giving social media too much credit, from inciting mass protests and even "revolutions" to enabling hostile foreign election meddling?
