The Second Troll War

The Internet is now a shadowland of smoke and phantoms, where nothing is quite what it seems. The Age of Innocence is gone, and with it hope for the “healing power” of universal communication. Much of what remains is a moonscape of conflicting memes—“a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.” (words of poet Matthew Arnold).

Unbeknownst to many, we are already knee deep in the Second Troll War. The first was barely acknowledged. America lost. Putin won.

We may never know how for sure, although evidence may still exist in “backup” recordings of Internet traffic and other, more random records. But we do know two decisive things: (1) Putin established huge troll farms to push the Demagogue’s 2016 candidacy on the Internet, and (2) the Demagogue won.

That may have been the first time in human history that one major power’s surreptitious propaganda in another’s domestic democratic election achieved its desired result. The newness and darkness of the Internet and social media hid most of the process from view.

The Mueller Report and the failed first impeachment entirely missed the point. It didn’t and doesn’t matter whether malign forces are working in tandem—in “concert,” “communication,” “collusion” or “conspiracy” according to legal parlance. If they use the same means toward the same end, and if they achieve that end, the result is their joint doing. Although now in desuetude, American antitrust law recognizes this simple truth, condemning “parallel” but unconcerted action among members of an oligopoly.

So it was in the 2016 election. Russian trolls, Fox and other private American propaganda firms all worked to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect the Demagogue. And they won. Although they couldn’t have known and perhaps (except for Russia) never so intended, that result has put American democracy in its greatest peril since our Civil War, perhaps ever.

You can see what happened in old newsclips of Putin and the Demagogue together. Turn the sound off, and you can see it in their body language and their facial expressions. There is absolutely no question who is the alpha dog, and who has (or doesn’t have) the other’s respect. Hint: it’s not the big guy.

Again, internal motivations don’t matter. The Demagogue may have been in Putin’s pocket. Putin the master spook may have had (and may still have) something on him. Putin may have dangled vague promises of property loans from Moscow or Russian oligarchs. The Demagogue may simply have been in awe of Putin’s ability to preside over a nationwide Mafia-like kleptocratic oligarchy like the one the Demagogue seems eager to build here. Or, most likely of all, the Demagogue may have been grateful for help in his surprise electoral victory and eager for the help to continue. But whatever the reason, the power relationship between the two men is obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

Putin’s current motives are far from hidden. He would like, once again, to have a man in the White House who admires him unconditionally, who thinks like him, and for whom constraining Putin or Russia in any way is far down the list of priorities. Secondly, Putin is happy for the Demagogue’s ongoing efforts to divide and distract American voters and so weaken America. In that respect, the Demagogue, Putin and his trolls are on the very same page.

The whole scene is just a throwback to the imperial age, with one autocrat supporting a loyal and like-minded pretender to power in another land. The division, distraction and weakness that the pretender sows today is just a pleasing bonus. But today’s method is completely different: instead of influencing and corrupting members of the royal family or key apparatchiks, the troll wars act directly on ordinary people, in their capacity as voters.

This direct “operative-to-people” influence is something new in human history. Only the Internet made it possible. Specifically, the Internet made possible direct “many to many” communications, in which malign forces and propaganda organs can hide under the pseudonyms of thousands of faux individuals and faux companies.

And so we find ourselves in the midst of the Second Troll War. You needn’t focus on Facebook (now Meta Platforms) and its “jolt the amygdala” algorithms to see evidence. Just peruse readers’ comments to relevant pieces in national online news media, like this one or this one in the Washington Post. There you will see evidence of intense polarization among our people and among American Democrats.

If you look more closely, you will also see evidence of troll activity, ranging from the crudest and most outrageous to the smoothest and most clever. The tipoffs range from the absence of any new facts or reasoning, through deliberate and repeated pressing of emotional buttons, to revealing nonuse and misuse of English articles (“a” “an” and “the”.) (Russian, like Chinese and Japanese, has no articles. English and most European languages have them.)

Incessant repetition of conflicting memes and themes is another tell-tale. When you get to the point where virtually all commenters appear, like those “ignorant armies,” not to have read any previous comments, the lot begins to look like the product of a troll farm.

Promoting the Demagogue’s second term is just one of the enemy’s aims. So is advancing division and distraction among our people. Others include advancing vaccine resistance, getting people to take their masks offs as omicron rears its head, and promoting extremism, white supremacy (and violent counter trends), and other political violence. No doubt careful investigators will find Putin’s fingerprints, as well as the Demagogue’s and his enablers’, on propaganda leading up to the January 6 Insurrection, as well as to ongoing efforts to encourage its repetition, or its entrenchment in voting laws.

Although individual trolls may not seem clever—and some seem designed to project stupidity, perhaps as cover for the cleverer ones—make no mistake about it. Vladimir Putin is an highly intelligent master spy and brilliant manipulator. He plays the long game, and he works in mysterious ways.

One of the ways that I suspect right now has to do with Ukraine. If Putin, as he claims, is concerned about the West placing strategic weapons in Ukraine, why is he not pressing that wholly reasonable concern privately in Ukraine, NATO and the EU? Why is he ostentatiously putting this international geopolitical issue on President Biden’s plate? And why are the military vehicles that he has assembled near the Ukrainian border all painted in light colors, not camouflage, and assembled in neat rows that are easily captured on satellite and reconnaissance photos?

The “invasion threat” may be a manufactured “crisis” designed to undermine Biden’s presidency and re-election prospects. No matter what Biden does in response, he will lose supporters. If he risks war, his progressives will accuse him of squandering money and his chances for transformational domestic change. If he doesn’t risk war in an attempt to make the Russian Bear back down, conservatives will, as is their wont, tar him as “weak.” Either way, Biden will lose support, and Putin’s preferred candidate will get a step closer to a second term. And whatever the outcome re Ukraine, focusing on what may be a bogus invasion threat will distract the President from what he must do so save our democracy: fight the pandemic, get more people vaccinated, pass his key legislation, protect voting rights, address global warming, and curtail inflation.

So what can we do? We can’t shut down the Internet. It’s far too deeply embedded in our national and global commerce, wealth, and innovation. We can’t control it and censor it as do Russia, China and Iran. That would be unconstitutional. We probably can’t even shut down the most egregious social media, such as Facebook, although a legislative feint in that direction might facilitate less drastic fixes.

Perhaps the best we can do is improve the education of our youth, in both high school and college. Maybe we can even teach seniors a new trick.

In my 1960-1961 high-school course on “social studies,” we had a two-week unit on propaganda and totalitarianism. This was long before the Internet and even a bit before Xerox machines. So copying from mass media was difficult to impossible.

But my teacher was a pack rat. He and/or his family had accumulated stacks of the great picture magazines of that era, including issues of Life and Look. His stash went all the way back to World War I. So he was able to pass around a photographic feature published some time during WWI.

The feature showed a “patriotic” poster, with a normal American civilian’s head on top, and a Prussian soldier’s head, in a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet, below. Both were in profile. Like most people’s, the American head had a bulge protruding well back beyond the neck. The German soldier’s, with his ramrod-straight posture, did not. The upper picture had an arrow pointing into the bulge, showing where the “soul” is. A similar arrow for the German soldier pointed into empty air. The conclusion: the Kaiser’s soldiers were soulless demons.

Crude? You bet! But so are a lot of things you’ll read today on social media, especially in reader comments. Effective? Probably much more so then than it would be now. Among other things, the “no soul” meme fed off a then-popular pseudoscience called “phrenology,” which held that the shape of and bulges on people’s heads reveal their personalities.

This lesson from sixty years ago left me with two lifelong impressions. First, propaganda can appear in any medium, no matter how respected. Second, we do it, too. It’s not just our enemies, the dictators and other “bad guys.”

Today, our educators could give our youth (and senoirs!) much-needed troll-spotting practice. They could do worse than have students look over and analyze reader comments on the two WaPo pieces linked above. Even apart from troll spotting, that exercise would sharpen critical-thinking skills all by itself.

If our voters can learn these two lessons in time, we just might survive, if not win, the Second Troll War. Otherwise, the Internet, which we invented, and whose software protocols we gave the whole world for free, might become the suicide gun of our democracy.


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