"The tried and tested way of active measures is to use an adversary's existing weaknesses against himself, to drive wedges into pre-existing cracks," Thomas Rid, a professor of war studies at King's College London, told Politfact. "The more polarized a society, the more vulnerable it is. And America in 2016, of course, was highly polarized, with lots of cracks to drive wedges into, but not old wedges, improved high-tech wedges that allowed the Kremlin's operatives to attack their target faster, more reactively and at a far larger scale than ever before."