Countering Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections
This RAND report, the fourth in a four-part series for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, examines how U.S. voters respond to Russian-sourced memes designed to inflame domestic divisions and to a public service announcement warning them about that kind of manipulation. The core finding from focus groups and interviews is that adversary IO is not inventing new conflicts—it's recycling existing U.S. partisanship at scale, and most participants mistook clearly Russian content for organic American discourse until they were told otherwise.
A nonpartisan PSA jointly attributed to FBI and CISA landed well with participants and felt especially relevant once they learned the content they had just viewed was foreign-sourced. The authors recommend that Cal OES collect open-source intelligence on social media ahead of election cycles to spot interference trends early, that federal and state officials release simple, authoritative PSAs during campaign seasons, and that Cal OES coordinate with platforms to flag the foreign provenance of political content.