© Leah Mills - Reuters
Dan Coates speaks on Capitol Hill on Feb. 13.
The big story that broke Friday was news of 13 Russians being charged with interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Federal officials said the campaign of disinformation to inflame divisions in the U.S. involved ads and posts on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram and Google.
The lead story on A1 of the Union-Tribune on Wednesday was U.S. intelligence officials predicting Russian meddling to occur again in the midterm elections this fall.
"We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States, Dan Coates, the director of national intelligence, said during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, according to a New York Times story published in the U-T.
Based on what happened in the 2016 elections and the warnings last week,
consumers of news need to be wary of what they are reading in social media, on the web and in items forwarded in emails.
Comment: So these inept Russians were more successful getting anti-Trump supporters than they were getting pro-Trump supporters. In other words, they did Hillary Clinton a favor. That's some mighty effective collusion right there.