If country's own citizens do the voting, I'm personally fine with anyone influencing them. If we postulate that people are responsible and reasonable enough to have a say in the elections, it is an insult to assume that they are some weak-minded fools who can be easily swayed by a hostile foreign government.
Insulting or not, we already have Exhibit A: the US 2016 Presidential election.
In all seriousness, I think you're framing it the wrong way. It's really: they are normal human beings with fallible intellect and emotions who can be swayed by the sophisticated propaganda campaigns of a hostile foreign government.
Yeah, the US 2016 Presidential election. The losing side is so devastated by the loss, that it still can't accept that it's their own compatriots who didn't elect their rather questionable candidate, so they are desperately grasping any other explanation, why she lost.
Americans did the voting, not Putin. If $200k of ads did the job, well, Dems should have spent $201k to counter that.
Also, are you suggesting that any foreign power can cheaply puppeteer the feeble-minded US population? Of so, maybe you need some form of authoritarian rulership to protect the people. Or else, I'm sure, even Iran and North Korea will find a few million bucks to install their own presidents.
It's not an insult, the other way around, it's naive to think that the general population acts intelligently with respect to information available to them on an ad-hoc basis.
All nations media outlets are absolutely protected and controlled industries for this very reason.
Information can be wrong, totally misrepresented, hyperbolic, it can reach large numbers of individuals wherein contrasting information cannot.
The objective of a 'foreign actor' is not to 'inform' citizens, it's the opposite - it's to use 'information' possibly 'truthy' to manipulate elections towards their desired outcomes.
If a foreign state wants to release 'important information' to 'inform' citizens, then it can be released with enough time for that to be vetted, digested and disseminated properly.
More than 1/2 of the vote is based on emotional decision making around specific subjects, were the media open to influence by other parties, it would be possible to control electoral outcomes when margins are +/- just a few points, as so many elections are these days.
If Putin is behind the 'Hunter Biden leaks' - that's fine, the truth is the truth, but not 10 days before an election it isn't.
> that's fine, the truth is the truth, but not 10 days before an election it isn't.
Why not? It's like watching a romantic movie, when a good guy crashes a wedding of a loved one in a last minute, and instead of "speak now or forever hold your peace" tell him "but not in 10 days before the wedding!"
Trust me, living in Russia, I know a lot more about Putin than you do. However, the truth is the truth.
On an unrelated note: seing fisthand how Putin's propaganda is working in the internet, it is beyond laughable how much power and influence you americans ascribe to Putin. His internet 'troll' factory is not a sophisticated tool for propaganda, it's a blunt factory that simply floods every comment section with low-quality noise. Of all money that were meant to influence the elections, 99% were, without any doubt, simply stolen. Trump's victory in 2016 is not a consequence of some elections meddling, but simply a coincidence.
As one prominent member of russian opposition said (btw I know him personally, as in 'shaking hands personally'), “What is happening with ‘the investigation into Russian interference,’ is not just a disgrace but a collective eclipse of the mind.” [1] [2]
