Russian troll farms

The U.S. military budget, at $800 billion, is more than the next 9 countries combined. When a head-on battle is suicide, you have to find a way to “subdue the enemy without fighting”, as Tzu advised. The solution is what Scott calls ‘chaos operations’ – using misinformation on social media to sow discord throughout society. In a weakened state suffering from internal strife, your enemy is too busy fighting itself to worry about you. Out of chaos new policies can arise, power can change hands and groups with extreme agendas can advance their ambitions. “Chaos is a ladder.”

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence accused Russia with interfering with elections, with the intent to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” They disseminated fake news both in support of, and against, divisive candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They also targeted groups from Black Lives Matter to Christian groups and gun rights advocates, arranging opposing rallies to occur at the same time to increase the chance of conflict. They follow a basic process, indistinguishable to modern marketing best practices. 1) psychographic profiling of your target audience, 2) rapid creative testing to see what triggers a response, 3) insert messaging into viral stories about real or fake events. Yet Russia is just one of the players in this field. Special interests in Myanmar, the Philippines, and even the UK have used similar tactics. As a Polish troll farm insisted, they promote “products and services like any other agency of its kind.”

The Internet Research Agency, Russia’s troll propaganda arm, would sow social division by infiltrating groups using affirming identity-based language, for example “As Texans, we…”, “As veterans, we...”. Black Americans. Mexican Americans. Women. etc. They pitted these groups against each other not by manufacturing reasons for each group to hate each other, but by emphasising real grievances expressed by each side. Within every group there are malcontents, extemists, propagandists. What’s effective is not persuading people to be more polarized, but to find and activate those who already are, and incite them towards destructive action.

These techniques are nothing new: in many ways they’re inherited from the KGB playbook, a hangover from the Soviet age. Split the country along real or imagined boundaries, and sit back as factions fight each other. These are the same tactics employed by Russia in Ukraine, where they divided the population into ethnic Russian and Ukrainian groups, and funded extremists to manufacture conflict, softening the country up and giving them grounds for a future invasion. What’s different this time is the use of social media, which is a powerful tool for identifying existing ideological divisions, disseminating propaganda at scale and low cost, as well as recruiting and radicalizing extremists within each partisan group. This is a new battlefront, and yet most people don’t know they’re involved, unknowingly sharing fake news, or responding to fake profiles.

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