Reference no: EM13490264

Part A: Russia is well known to be amongst the most adroit nations at manipulating public opinion in other countries via its foreign influence operations. A Russian SVR agent has 45 million dollars which he can spend to bribe academics (professors), politicians, and bloggers to spread disinformation and to promote anti-American propaganda. He has budgeted 15 million to "funding" academics, 25 million for journalists, and 5 million for bloggers. Assume an academic "grant" for an academic is 1 million dollars, 5 million dollars to fund a journalist, and 1,000 dollars for a blogger. The agent is considering potentially paying 500 different academics, 200 different journalists, and 10,000 different bloggers, but he is constrained by his budget. In how many different ways can he bribe academics, journalists, and bloggers? Part B: Effective propaganda works by graduallly reinforcing themes or ideas which sway people's opinions in a particular direction, or often simply away from a certain view. Assume that a popular community based news website allows users to post links to suggested articles which has been compromised by an FSB operative. 200,000 people view a propagdanda article, which has a .05 probability of swaying a persons opinion to support the desired viewpoint the operative wants. What is the probability 10% of the readers change their opinion to support the desired viewpoint? What is the probability the first 50,000 people all change their view, and then 40,000 of the remaining people change their viewpoint?