We are being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective most people realise, the product of which is making people hateful, depressed, angry, polarised and much more.
Nation states all across the globe are involved in a psychological war, but the tide is currently in favour of Russia and its allies.
Disinformation and propaganda is not a new weapon, but with the use of social media, bots, and AI – it has become an incredibly powerful one.
Russia utilises orchestrated influence networks to swamp social media platforms to make us angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. The goal of these networks is simple: to cause those living in Western countries (especially America) to give up on social cohesion and to forego learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.
And you probably don’t realise how well it’s working
Troll farms – How Russian networks fuel societal wars
Russia began using troll farms almost a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the heart of their enemies. Back in 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin – The Russian oligarch, and mercenary leader of The Wagner group – founded the Internet Research Agency (IRA) – Russia’s first coordinated facility designed to disrupt Western society and politics through social media.
The Agency, A.K.A. Glavset, A.K.A. The Trolls from Olgino was created to engage in online propaganda and influence operations on behalf of Russian business and Russia’s political interests.
The Agency is housed at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg, and in the early days employed roughly 90 staff. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment is to use those false social-media accounts to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mock ad hominem arguments that incite Western audiences.
The agency was mentioned in a 2015 New York Times article by Adrian Chen, which detailed its operations, and it gained further attention when Russian journalist Andrey Zakharov published his investigation into Prigozhin’s “troll factory“.
The report suggests that the troll factory played a role in the US election campaign and its aftermath, organising as many as 40 US rallies and protests, including a rally held in Charlotte on 22 October 2016, against police violence. The event was held in the name of “BlackMatterUS,” and it seems probable many of the activists who took part did not understand the rally was not connected with Black Lives Matter.
The report also identifies 120 different groups and social media accounts used by the Russian trolls between 2016-2017. “The farm” it suggests, concentrated on divisive social issues for the US, particularly civil rights.
Facebook advertising campaigns also focused on divisive messages, the report says. Facebook confirmed 55 Savushkina Street was responsible for buying $100,000 (£75,000) worth of pre-election posts.
Facebook blocked the accounts used by the trolls, but they simply opened new channels and switched to more sophisticated anonymous mechanisms of using the platform. The authors of the report say 55 Savushkina St kept about a million subscribers on various channels even after the main Facebook accounts were closed
Another 2017 report issued by the United States Intelligence Community, titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” also described the agency as a troll farm, and stated that “they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine, and started to advocate for candidate Trump as early as December 2015.“
Prigozhin commented about the IRA’s efforts to disrupt the 2022 US election by stating “Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”
In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly portrayed America as racist, and urged black users to reject major candidates.
In November, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist’s Twitter urged Black Americans: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.“
Another example of Russia’s efforts to sew discontent between societal groups was back in September 2018, where a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel and subsidiary of RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin-run TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.
The video featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading.
The video got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Some users started posting that it had turned them against the principles of feminism.
But there was one problem: The video was staged. It was designed to cause unrest and polarization between feminists and non-feminists. The video was posted by activist Anna Dovgalyuk, but does not feature her, or any other real people – they are all actors, as reported on the Russian site paper – https://paperpaper.ru/peterburgskaya-studentka-provela-akc/
Sewing seeds of hatred
The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Westerners to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, animosity against the older generations (boomers), and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it’s not just an effort to boost the right wing; it’s an effort to radicalise everyone.
Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named “My Baby Daddy Aint Shit.” It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.
MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.
But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.
In January 2017, just after the first Women’s March, the New York Times found that the IRA began a coordinated attack on the movement. Staff at 55 Savushkina Street, using models derived from advertising and public relations used copywriters to craft social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.
They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.
These teams realised that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused the Women’s March co-founder, Arab-American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite, and carefully, over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour, eventually driving the Women’s March movement into disarray and ultimately crippling the organisation.
More is more
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons why these tactics work is that of amplification; Russia doesn’t need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that Western users begin amplifying their content.
The term “disinformation” undersells the problem. Because much of Russia’s social media activity is not trying to spread fake news, but rather, its goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme; Sometimes, through brigading and trolling, other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the West over and over, until readers assume that’s how most people feel.
The RAND think tank explained that the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates them.
How many “Karen” videos do you see on social media – are there really thousands of middle-aged women out their who’s only joy in life is to destroy other peoples day? Or is this another tactic to divide the youth from their elders
The strategy of volume and repetition is called the Propaganda of Noise and was coined by Joseph Goebbels, the head of propaganda for the Nazis.
It essentially said that it doesn’t matter what the truth is, it only matters what is repeated over and over again until it becomes the truth. It’s how countries like North Korea have entire swathes of population that believe that the supreme leader is this God like being.
It refers to a strategy of overwhelming people with information, both true and false, to the point where they become sceptical, indifferent, or reliant on specific information channels, effectively creating a form of censorship through noise – sometimes termed an “Echo Chamber“
There are two distinct approaches to the Propaganda of noise:
- Overwhelm and Indifference: The core idea is that by bombarding people with a constant stream of information, it becomes difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood, leading to widespread scepticism and potentially apathy towards information in general.
- Censorship Through Noise: This strategy can be seen as a form of censorship, not through direct suppression of information, but by making it so difficult to process and find reliable information that people become disengaged or reliant on specific sources
The illusion of truth
Also known as the illusory truth effect, the illusion of truth describes how, when we hear the same false information repeated again and again, we often come to believe it is true. Troublingly, this even happens when people should know better—that is, when people initially know that the misinformation is false.
After believing the information we see repeatedly, we often start sharing these inaccurate details ourselves. How many times have you heard people quoting these fallacies?
“We only use 10 percent of our brains”
“Goldfish only have a memory of 3 seconds”
“Vaccines cause autism”
“MSG is harmful to your health”
Even if you have a hunch that these “facts” are not so scientifically accurate, it’s easy to repeat them to others because the familiarity makes it feel true. This shows how even well-meaning individuals can become unknowingly complicit in the spread of myths and misconceptions.
In 1969, Polish-born American social psychologist – Robert Zajonc conducted an experiment illustrating the mere exposure effect. He placed advertisements in student newspapers at two Michigan universities over a period of a few weeks. Every day, the front page of each paper featured one or more Turkish words. Some words appeared more frequently than others, and the frequency of each word was also reversed between the two papers, so that the most-frequently appearing word in one paper would be the least-frequently appearing one in the other.
After the exposure period was over, Zajonc sent out a questionnaire to both communities, asking respondents to give their impressions of 12 “unfamiliar” words. Some of the words were the Turkish words that had run in the newspapers. Participants rated each word from 1 to 7 based on whether they thought the word meant something “good” or “bad.” The results showed that, the more frequently participants had been exposed to a given word, the more positively they felt about it.
An article on CNNs website from 2017 shows the most common words and phrases used by Donald Trump – “Believe me” was said in 26 speeches, “We’re going to make…” was said in 12 speeches, “A lot of money” was said in 9 speeches, and “Winning again” was said in 5 speeches.
The future of Russia
The rise of Russia, and the destruction of the West has been outlined since 1997 in the publication “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia” by Aleksandr Dugin – a far-right political philosopher and the leading theorist of Russian neo-Eurasianism and advocate of ultra-nationalism and neo-fascism ideologies.
The book has had significant influence within the Russian military, police forces, and foreign policy elites, and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military
Former speaker of the Russian State Duma, Gennadiy Seleznyov, urged that Dugin’s geopolitical doctrine be made a compulsory part of the school curriculum
In the book, Dugin calls for the “Atlantic societies”, primarily represented by the United States, to lose their broader geopolitical influence in Eurasia, and for Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances.
The book also declares that “the battle for the world rule of Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution”.
The book strongly advocates a sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian secret services. These operations should be assisted by a tough, hard-headed utilisation of Russia’s gas, oil, and natural resources to bully and pressure other countries.
The book sets out how Russia should influence countries all across the globe, and what roles they would play in the future (if any) – among the proposed strategies:
In Europe:
- Germany should be offered the de facto political dominance over most Protestant and Catholic states located within Central and Eastern Europe. The Kaliningrad Oblast could be given back to Germany. The book uses the term “Moscow–Berlin axis”.
- France should be encouraged to form a bloc with Germany, as they both have a “firm anti-Atlanticist tradition”.
- The United Kingdom, merely described as an “extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.”, should be cut off from the European Union
In the Middle East and Central Asia:
- The book stresses the “continental Russian–Islamic alliance” which lies “at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy”. The alliance is based on the “traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilisation”
- Iran is a key ally. The book uses the term “Moscow–Tehran axis”.
In East and Southeast Asia:
- Dugin envisions the fall of China. The People’s Republic of China, which represents an extreme geopolitical danger as an ideological enemy to the independent Russian Federation, “must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled”.
- Russia should manipulate Japanese politics by offering the Kuril Islands to Japan and provoking anti-Americanism, to “be a friend of Japan”.
In the Americas, United States, and Canada:
- Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke “Afro-American racists” to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada.
- Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilising internal political processes in the U.S.
- It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.
When you examine these strategies, it becomes fairly plain to see that these actions are already becoming real – and disinformation is a major weapon, utilised to great effect already.
This Youtube video “How to radicalize a normie” explains how seemingly normal, level-headed people can unwittingly be sucked into believing the disinformation being spread by online actors
So what can we do?
We are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make us more resentful, bitter, and depressed. Real-life human writers and advanced bot networks are working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.
This is why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across all social media platforms.
Never forget, many of those trolls are actual, “professional” writers whose job is to sound real, and to get inside your head
So what can you do? To quote the 1983 film, WarGames: The only winning move is not to play.
Don’t accept “facts” from social media accounts you don’t know. Manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths, or spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.
As Mark Twain said – “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Resist the hive mind; Remember, a key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support.
When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it’s easy to think the crowd is right. But “the crowd” could be fake accounts, and even if they’re not, the brilliance of these manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They’ll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal platform.
Don’t let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts and the opinions you see across social media are not reliable.
If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.
The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you’re talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you politically or emotionally.
