If you're interested in whether this Russian hacking stuff has any weight to it, I suggest you go and read the report yourself. From my perspective and the research I've been doing for the last year or so, I see a lot of unsubstantiated claims, zero actual falsifiable evidence.

This is probably going to annoy only me, but their estimate of the effectiveness of social media campaigning seems ludicrously unbounded.

That is, they do not define a model for understanding the probability of a given user not only encountering a piece of propaganda but believing it, and crucially acting on that belief in a measurable way.

If you can't even quantify a threat model, you can't claim that any particular actor is worth paying attention to.

It should come as no surprise whatsover that the Intelligence Committee, which includes members of the Conservatives, Labour and the SNP, is calling for nebulously defined 'new legislation' to further empower the UK's spy agencies in response to these threats they have conjured.

Hard to argue against any kind of repressive apparatus when its being set up against a vague paranoid intuition.

Here's some selected highlights:

From the report: "it has been widely reported that the Russians were behind the cyber-enabled ‘hack and leak’ operation to compromise the accounts of members of the French political party En Marche!"

Note that this claim is footnoted, but the footnote explains what the claim means, rather than who made these "wide reports", how credible they were, the methodology involved in doing so, or anything else we would need to evaluate this claim.

This happens *constantly* through the report.

Also, this happens a great deal: "The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has advised that there is *** Russian cyber intrusion into the UK’s CNI"

Besides the redaction, which makes the claim mostly illegible, since we don't know if these are state, private or other actors, this is again a completely anonymous comment attributed to the very spy agencies who would benefit from great legal laxity and funding.

Any such claims should be scrutinised minutely for this very reason ("weapons of mass destruction" anyone?), but there is no evidence that the committee did so, or considered at all the motivations for UK spies to inflate threats from traditional enemies.

"‘bots’ and ‘trolls’: open source studies have identified significant activity on social media"

Which studies? I've read most of them, and the cases they make for a) identification of state direction of influence networks and b) political outcomes traceable to their activity are extremely weak.

Zero marks, cite your sources next time.

At one point they cite a report from the Institute of Statecraft, which they define as: "a UK-based think-tank and charity".

This is an outright lie, the IoS is a UK government disinfo organisation run out of a shed in Fife. A simple search would provide you with ample evidence of this.

Oh, and it presents the opinion that the Russian state was behind the DNC email hijack as a fact: "It was only when Russia completed a ‘hack and leak’ operation against the Democratic National Committee in the US".

This is pure speculation, which the Committee apparently don't think merits a footnote.

Anyway, I can't look at this any more, I'm too angry that supposedly intelligent and critical 'journalists' in this country have sucked down this piece of blatant propaganda with barely a whisper of dissent.

It seems likely this is because it mirrors their own completely unexamined prejudices about who is at fault for the collapse of mainstream liberal hegemony in this country.

Don't bother looking at the increasing unfitness of a liberal or even social democratic consensus in a neoliberal world order, it's the bloody proles believing all these perfidious Slavic lies and voting for Brexit that are the problem!

If only we could dissolve the people and elect a new one, I think someone once tweeted.