How do we stop countries from meddling with U.S affairs?

Jacob Walls

How do we stop countries from meddling with U.S affairs?

Last Friday, Robert Mueller and his team indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly meddling with the 2016 presidential election. These Russian nationals are hackers who were hired by businesses in Russia (under the guidance of Russian government officials like Putin) to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. These hackers were paid to make posts on various social media sites that were negative towards Hilary Clinton. In contrast, they were also supposed to make positive posts about candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. These hackers main goal was to defame Hilary Clinton’s name and make her first years as President controversial. However, these hackers exceeded this expectation by interfering so much that Donald Trump ended up winning the 2016 presidential election who was favored by the Russian government. It was no surprise that the Russian government denied all allegations of meddling with our 2016 presidential election. Nonetheless, Mueller’s team found an abundance of evidence that showed these 13 Russian nationals created fake social media accounts and divided the American public. These 13 indictments however is not the big takeaway from this story. These Russian hackers don’t live in the U.S and will likely never come back to the United States if they’re smart. Plus, Russian will never extradite these individuals. So, this means that this investigation won’t likely have any type of punishment handed on these people. The big takeaway from this investigation is that another country interfered with our presidential election and ultimately shaped the outcome. So, the big question is how do we stop this from happening again? There is already evidence that Russian hackers are trying to inflame the U.S public on hot button issues. For example, hackers have been posting about gun violence right after the horrific murders of 17 students at Douglas High School in Florida.  We are virtually under attack and it is not by drones, tanks, or missiles. This is a type of warfare that is being carried out online. The only way to stop these hackers from meddling with our affairs is to regulate political ads.

Political ads have become very prevalent over the past few decades. Some political ads have catapulted candidates to the White House while destroying other candidates’ chances at the presidency. For example, look at the 1988 election between George H.W Bush and Michael Dukakis. Former Vice President Bush was losing some ground to his opponent Dukakis. This was until a negative ad was ran against Dukakis. This infamous and controversial “Willie Horton Ad” showed that Dukakis was soft on crime. This ad wasn’t made nor paid for by the Bush administration. Instead this ad was funded by the National Security PAC. This ad single-handedly gave Bush the 1988 presidential election. This ad tapped into the publics’ fear of criminals being loose in the streets and showed that Dukakis wouldn’t keep the people safe. However, as I stated above this ad wasn’t funded by Bush’s campaign but by a Political Action Committee. These PAC’s don’t have limitations on what they spend. This is due to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that corporations and unions have the same political speech rights as individuals under the 1^st amendment. This means that money is essentially speech and with this money, PAC’s can use it to fund negative ads towards other candidates. Because of this, political ads are virtually unregulated and are funded by outside sources. This opened the door for Russian hackers to create ads on social media that completely bashed Hilary Clinton. Ways to regulate political ads is to limit the amount of negative ads being aired on media outlets. This means that Citizens United should be overturned so it is harder for outside sources to fund and create negative ads. If candidates want to make negative ads against their opponents they surely can. But, corporations and outside sources shouldn’t be involved in this process.

We as a country looked very weak in the light of this investigation. No outside country should be able to infiltrate our elections and possibly change the outcome of them. By regulating political ads we can limit the amount of access these outside sources have to our political elections. This then doesn’t make us look vulnerable to foreign countries.