Anne Applebaum, the award-winning historian and Washington Post columnist, was at the forefront of covering a plethora of nefarious Russian-orchestrated cyberattacks that have sought to distort political outcomes around the globe. Long before the 2016 presidential election, she made Americans aware of the Russian government’s online efforts to propagandize and deceive.
Her recent column notes that bad actors have perpetuated substantial online mischief and fraud by exploiting the difficulty we all face in distinguishing humans from automatons on the Internet. Robotic online mobs posing as humans and targeting real people through the Internet is a threat posed by “artificial intelligence” that has not been addressed in many dystopian science-fiction stories, but it is a growing real-world problem.