Should We Attribute Less? Foreign Interference Claims & the 2024 U.S. Election
Want to reconnect with the public, revitalize your cyber threat business, or just get some clicks? Try Making a Foreign Interference Claim™ today. Yes, it's always nice to shine a light on foreign meddling. But could it be that the claims have gotten a little too breathless or loud? In our quest to do the right thing and get a little credit, might we be turning a manageable problem into a bigger one?
This lightning talk will address the frequency and credibility of foreign interference claims in the 2024 U.S. election, as well as how these claims mapped (or didn't) with public attention on the issue. It will draw on findings from the DFRLab's 2024 Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker, a meta-analysis of the substance and media impact of dozens of foreign interference claims made over the past year. This project builds upon similar analysis conducted during the 2020 U.S. election (and available at interference2020.org). Instead of presenting the entire project, we will zero in on the specific question of when attributions matter and when they really might not.
We will make three points:
Government speaks loudly and also carries a big stick. Based on our 2020 and 2024 findings, government claims drive the vast majority of public attention. This is good when you have something to say, but the number of "steady-state" updates may have tipped into oversharing, resurfacing the specter of foreign interference without much in the way of substance. By comparison, corporate and civil society attributions are drops in the ocean.
Attributions are political. Even the most transparent, credible allegation may spark a wildly disjointed news cycle. This is because of how politicized the foreign interference discussion has become. In 2024, for instance, Russia tried to spin credible allegations of Russian interference into a new (way less credible) claims of *Ukrainian* interference.
Attention doesn't go where you'd expect. Your company's careful documentation of a dangerous and highly consequential TTP probably didn't move the needle of public discourse. A gubernatorial candidate's claims about Chinese Super AI probably did.
Our conclusion will likely be that the foreign interference discourse has become superheated and that, as our institutions focused on this challenge have matured, we can start to be more deliberate in our approach to 2026 and beyond.*
*But since our monitoring is still ongoing and the election hasn't happened yet, this conclusion is very much subject to change!