We are being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than all of us realize. We are being divided by the likes of Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern disinformation networks. The information they put out there is making us more hateful and depressed. You probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you and I didn’t realize it either until I started tracking what I have witnessed online.

I used to be a photojournalist for The Bellingham Herald and covered the small community of Lynden. In 2016 a Trump Rally took place there and had a decent amount of support. That did not surprise me knowing the conservative-leaning community. What surprised me was the large amount of Lynden residents who were on Twitter saying awful things to people. None of the names sound familiar and the accounts were very suspicious, to say the least. This was the first time I encountered a group of misinformation/disinformation influencers and knew what they were.

These misinformation influencer networks are using social media platforms to make you and me, individually, angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Their goal is to cause Americans and other Westerners, especially the youth, to give up on learning the truth and social cohesion so that Western countries will fall authoritarians and extremists.

I have tried to break down what I have read and seen over the past decade in hopes of educating the public.

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin and head of the Russian private military company Wagner, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government’s first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

“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.”

The IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those fake social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, etc to spread conspiracy theories, mock others and partake in ad hominem arguments that would make American users angry and create more conflict

November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 United States presidential election, the Blacktivist’s Twitter urged Black Americans to “choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement oage was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to reject major political candidates.

The United States is a very diverse company in terms of gender, race, and religion and those topics are easy topics for foreign trolls to play both sides to divide us further. Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

Overall, these professional trolls are very good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases for their own purposes and this is a big reason our country is divided as it is.

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it’s not just an effort to boost the right wing; it’s an effort to radicalize everybody.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women’s March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement.

Per the New York Times:

“More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out 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.”

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest:  They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite.  Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour.  That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked:  They drove the Women’s March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

As the New York Times reported in 2022, there is a routine: Arriving for a shift, Russian disinformation workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men.

According to a MIT study 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 provote black men into online arguments.

MIT found that this page is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

“They identify an issue that they know that the American people feel passionately about on both sides and then they take both sides and spin them up so they pit us against each other,” Wray said. “And then they combine that with an effort to weaken our confidence in our elections and our democratic institutions, which has been a pernicious and asymmetric way of engaging in … information warfare.” said FBI Director Chris Wray. 

Russia Trying to Stoke U.S. Racial Tensions Before Election, Officials Say

Leading up to what happened with George Flyod the Russian intelligence services were trying to incite violence by white supremacist groups to sow chaos in the United States, American intelligence officials said.

Last month, the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. “Spamouflage” is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake.  Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

Remember the kid in the MAGA hat and his classmates from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky yelling at the old Native American man? That video clip was cut in different ways to make different groups upset. The American public saw the video first as the kids taunting the Native American man. Then another view of the altercation came out and showed another group taunting the students with disparaging and vulgar language. The group of black men, who identify as members of the Hebrew Israelites, also shout racist slurs at participants of the Indigenous Peoples Rally and other passersby. These events get altered to put people against each other. That is their goal. Turn Americans into their own worst enemy.

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika.  Fabrika’s operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts?  By 2020, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. Russia doesn’t just target angry boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Don’t accept facts from social media accounts you don’t know

Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform.  Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths.  Or they’ll 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.

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 like the Associated Press. It is not always right.  Journalists are people and do make mistakes, but they will issue corrections and admit when they are wrong. Social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

If you would like to learn more about how to detect disinformation feel free to check out my Guide To Fact Checking in SaveJournalism.com

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed.  It’s not just disinformation; it’s also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It’s why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms.  And a lot of those trolls are actual, “professional” writers whose job is to sound real.

People online think that they’re avoiding misinformation by not getting their information from mainstream media, and then simultaneously walk into a trap of online grifters, trolls, and foreign agents that want to create division by any means necessary, and generally, the information they put out is more short-form, entertaining, and exciting than what the actual facts of a given situation are. 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 like The Associated Press, Reuters, and local newspapers. It is not always right. Even professional journalists mess up sometimes. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure we are deceived, angry, and divided.