Each Friday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Mike is off this week, so Nicole Perlroth, who covers cybersecurity, took his place.

Russians Harnessing American Tech

Farhad: O.K., it was a big week in tech. We should probably start with the thing we’ve been talking about every week for, what, 300 years now? Facebook and Russia. In a report this week, a couple of our colleagues found that when Russian operatives set out to sow civil unrest in America on Facebook, they turned to an obvious source — political messages posted by Americans.

The Russians created Facebook pages that had names like “Being Patriotic” and “Blacktivist,” and they populated their pages with videos and memes created by Americans — for instance, a hoax story about Muslim men collecting welfare checks for multiple wives. I found the story fascinating because the whole thing is so banal. You have this picture of foreign spies using James Bond-type technology to go after an enemy’s political system. Nope, turns out they went about it exactly how you or I might do it — they found some videos online and posted them on Facebook.

Nicole: Yup. It turns out the Kremlin has found their sweet spot in the ugly fault lines in American politics. They’ve truly exploited our country’s political grievances, cultural resentments, news literacy and diminishing faith in once-trusted institutions like the news media to bring out the worst in us, simply by creating some Facebook pages. Who would have thought that Russians would be behind a pro-Texas fan page disseminating pro-secessionist Texas messages, or a “Blacktivist” page advocating for more protests against racial inequality?