Russian Disinformation Still Targets America and What It Means for 2025

 

Disinformation From Russian Trolls Hijacks American Politics and Public Opinions

Russian disinformation used to feel like a Cold War relic, but it never went away. It just got slicker, louder, and far better funded. And remember when the DOJ was digging into Rudy Giuliani’s Russia-linked dealings and the FBI had to warn members of Congress and certain media outlets that they were being manipulated by Kremlin operators? That moment wasn’t an outlier. It was a snapshot of how deeply Moscow understands the American mind and how boldly it tries to bend it.

     What makes this whole thing surreal is that the warnings are not subtle. U.S. intelligence agencies have had to tell powerful people inside our own government that they are being manipulated by Russian information ops. It is like watching someone walk into an obvious scam, and you cannot stop them.

     I started tracking all of this years ago while researching my Corey Pearson – CIA Spymaster Series. The series grew out of one question: what if we looked at Russian disinformation not as background noise but as the central threat it really is? The more I dug, the more disturbing it got.

     Take the notorious troll farm in St. Petersburg that never sleeps. It has turned disinformation into a full-scale industry. Between early 2016 and mid-2018, the Internet Research Agency burned through over $35 million crafting fake personas, fake arguments, and fake news designed to push Americans into real anger. During one six-month stretch in 2018, the operation spent almost as much as it had the previous year. That kind of budget is not for casual mischief. It is for influence.

     And the reach keeps growing. A decade ago it was basic memes and clumsy sock-puppet accounts. Today it is high-end deepfake videos, AI-generated audio, and content factories that can crank out fake news faster than most real newsrooms. We now live in a world where a convincing video of someone saying something they never said can be made in minutes. Russia knows exactly how powerful that is, which is why U.S. Cyber Command is actively identifying individual operatives and letting them know they are being watched.

     This all ties directly into a real-world example from one of my spy thrillers, Mission of Vengeance, where a former KGB officer defects and tells Corey Pearson about a Russian troll operation hiding behind a DVD bootlegging business in the Dominican Republic. That storyline was fiction, but only barely.

     In the novel, Bocharov pushes his phone across the table and reveals what he knows:

     “Putin has rejuvenated the KGB mindset. The old ‘Active Measures’ strategy is back. They are flooding the Caribbean with disinformation about U.S. exploitation. Spetsnaz teams are in place. And the same bloggers and hackers who interfered in your 2016 election are working out of my estate in the Dominican Republic.”

     That scene was pulled straight out of real Russian playbooks. The old Soviet KGB planted the idea that the CIA killed Martin Luther King Jr. In the eighties, they spread the rumor that AIDS was a U.S. bioweapon created at Fort Detrick. Today, instead of whisper campaigns and forged letters, they use Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and thousands of coordinated bots.

     Bocharov’s estimate in the novel that “roughly 146 million Americans and Caribbean citizens” are exposed to Kremlin-backed lies may sound dramatic, but it is not far from reality. Facebook admitted that as many as 126 million American users saw Russian-generated content by 2017. Twitter found tens of thousands of Russian bots pushing political tweets during the 2016 election cycle. And that was before AI supercharged the strategy.

     Why does it matter? Russian disinformation is not just an election problem. It is a mindset problem. It is designed to make Americans doubt everything, including each other. That confusion is the real win for Moscow. When trust collapses, steering public opinion becomes easy.

     You can see the impact most clearly outside of politics. Public health is a prime example. Years before COVID hit, Russian troll farms were already pumping out contradictory vaccine content aimed at Americans. Some posts pushed extreme pro-vaccine arguments, others pushed anti-vaccine conspiracies, and many played both sides at once. The goal wasn’t to promote a position. It was to trigger outrage, make people fight, and weaken public trust in science and medical institutions.

     Researchers at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins discovered that Russian-controlled accounts from the Internet Research Agency quietly ran thousands of these contradictory vaccine posts from 2014 to 2017. They weren’t trying to sway anyone toward a single belief. They were trying to make vaccines themselves feel suspicious and divisive. By the time COVID arrived, a lot of that groundwork had already taken hold. Americans weren’t just disagreeing. They no longer trusted information sources that had once been reliable.

     That is the power of Russian disinformation. It isn’t about pushing one lie. It is about eroding the shared reality that keeps a society grounded. Once people start doubting institutions, experts, and even basic facts, they become easier to manipulate, easier to provoke, and easier to fracture. That is the true battlefield, and it goes far beyond elections.

     That is exactly why Corey Pearson keeps running into these operations in the  Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster Series. The threat is not a relic. It is a pressure point that keeps shaping American politics and public opinion, and it is only getting more advanced.Top of Form

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). He also writes the Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster Series, which blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His thrillers reveal the shadowy world of covert missions and betrayal with striking realism.