The Big Lie Didn’t Begin with the 2020 Presidential Election
It began six years earlier at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg
Photo by Dušan veverkolog on Unsplash
When planning a successful grift it’s important to establish the groundwork well ahead of the main event. No one understands this better than Donald J. Trump — except perhaps, Vladimir Putin.
Some have called Trump a marketing genius — I beg to differ. It’s not genius that makes Trump the most successful con man in the history of America — it’s psychosis. Trump can’t bear to lose at anything. It’s not healthy competition that drives him, as his niece documents in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world’s most dangerous man.
What drives Trump is a pathological need to be seen as a “winner.” When he loses, he goes into denial, and he stays there until people around him agree to his claims of victory. Anyone who refuses is shunned, discredited, and/or threatened. This is how Trump has operated since childhood.
Back then, it wasn’t such a big deal. No one cared if he insisted he’d won a golf game he’d clearly lost. When he decided to run for president, however, the stakes were considerably higher.
In June of 2015, when Trump rode the infamous golden escalator down to the lobby of Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, few considered him a serious contender. His inflammatory statements about Mexicans being rapists, how we should have taken the oil reserves from Iraq during the war, and how “The American Dream is dead,” would have been enough to derail any other candidate’s chances of success — why not Trump’s?
Believe it or not, it all started with ISIS.
In Richard Stengel’s book Information Wars: How we lost the global battle against disinformation & what we can do about it, Stengel provides an inside look at how the disinformation tactics of ISIS and the Russians paved the way for both the presidency of Donald Trump and his ability to perpetuate the Big Lie after his loss in 2020.
Stengel, who was then Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, takes us back to 2014, and the Department of State during the Obama Administration. At the time, they were trying to fight the war on terror on a totally new kind of battlefield: the internet. ISIS was using social media to radicalize new recruits and Stengel wanted to do something about it.
Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department was slow on the uptake. While ISIS was flooding the internet with disinformation about the American government and our way of life, the government’s response was to pass around suggested tweets to gain consensus on content among people with no understanding of social media or how to use it effectively. Too often the result was either a failure to respond or a response so ineffective (or so damaging) they might as well have done nothing.
ISIS was well ahead of us in the information war, and we understood why.
For one thing, they moved quickly. While our people were flailing around trying to find the perfect response, ISIS was in rapid-fire mode. It didn’t matter if half their tweets were nonsense, the volume, and speed with which they infiltrated social media made up for the quality of their content.*
Besides, we now understand that social media algorithms thrive on the ludicrous — it’s what keeps eyes glued to the screen. It’s like tapping directly into the limbic system — primal urges are triggered, and basic instincts, targeted.
The old “garbage in/garbage” out adage doesn’t only apply to computers — it’s also the key to manipulating people.
While Stengel and his colleagues focused on countering messages from ISIS, Putin was focused on creating fake news for American consumption.
In the language of the KGB, Trump was a ‘useful idiot.’ His need for adoration was obvious and it created an equally obvious susceptibility to manipulation by anyone Trump considered strong and virile — enter Vladimir Putin.
Like Trump, Putin is a successful con man. His weapon of choice, like Trump’s, is disinformation. The difference is Putin is much better at it. Just as ISIS learned to use social media to recruit and radicalize future members, Putin learned to control the hearts and minds of the majority of the Russian people by manipulating the information they receive.
Unlike Trump, whose tweets were comically childlike and demonstrated a level of ignorance that was surprising for a grown man, Putin developed a system for disseminating disinformation that was intelligent, targeted, and effective.
So, when Putin decided to put the full force of The Internet Research Agency (IRA: the hub of Putin’s disinformation machine) behind Trump’s campaign for the presidency, what was originally a lost cause became a guaranteed victory.
Beginning in 2014, Russian efforts to discredit the United States using sophisticated disinformation tactics were well known. As Stengel describes it, the effort was organized and well-executed. Funded by one of Putin’s allies, a tycoon with seemingly unlimited resources, the IRA was able to crank out “hundreds of pieces of fake and misleading content an hour.” At the time, their political focus was discrediting Democrats and, specifically, Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department was focused on fighting the disinformation war with ISIS. We were getting off to a slow start, but progress was made.
Unfortunately, the battle we were fighting left us vulnerable on another front. As Stengel wrote, “Even though we monitored Russian media coverage of Trump and saw the occasional pro-Trump tweet, the truth was that we were not at all focused on Russian messaging within the U.S. And, frankly, even if we were aware of it there wasn’t much we could have done. By law, State Department communications had to direct its messaging toward foreign audiences.”
In other words, if disinformation is spreading here in America, the State Department can’t counter it here. We have no law that gives our State Department the authority to message us.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, no one expected the IRA to become so single-mindedly devoted to pushing the Republican candidate. It was, as the saying goes, a “failure of imagination.” We didn’t consider what a boon to Putin a Trump victory would be or what would happen to our democratic system if half the people who voted suddenly decided to believe in lies.
While we knew Trump would never win the presidency in a free and fair election, we did not realize that with the power of Putin and the IRA behind him, Trump’s victory was a foregone conclusion.
What’s described below comes from documents leaked by employees of the IRA, which Stengel was able to access:
TROLL. The purpose of the troll is to produce a quarrel which offends his interlocutor. It is worth remembering that trolling is not writing articles to order. It is a deliberate provocation with the goal of ridiculing your opponent.
The IRA is a troll farm — it is dedicated to discrediting enemies of Russia (meaning, Putin) and promoting those favorable to Russia (meaning Putin). To troll effectively, you need a persona — someone with credibility — to create the provocation that allows the disinformation to flow.
Prior to trolling, IRA employees were told to create a variety of personas. One memo suggested each employee should have “at least three Facebook accounts.” Each account was to represent a specific persona, designed to give the impression that the user has hobbies or other interests that would allow them to form a bond with other online users.
They would need to post photos as well as provide various personal details to build credibility as a ‘like-minded’ individual who could then use that bond to influence others. To be most effective at influencing operations within the U.S., employees created personas that claimed to be American citizens. Employees were told to mix mundane personal information about tastes in music or art with very strong political opinions designed to create distrust in the American government.
Each day, the employees at the IRA were given “themes” to focus on. For example, when the theme was Ukraine, they were given the following text to guide them in posting comments that would be in line with their directive.
“The news from Ukraine is becoming sadder and sadder. The country is in a state of deep crisis. No wonder Russia was worried. Ukraine is indeed coming under the influence of the West and the United States. The West took advantage of Ukraine and sparked a conflict between Ukraine and Russia.”
When the theme was Putin, the following was suggested.
“Putin’s policies have a positive effect on Russia. Our country is flourishing despite the sanctions. Putin is the greatest diplomat of our time.”
In addition to fake personas, the IRA created a variety of fake news agencies to give added validity to their disinformation campaigns. When they wanted to spread a particular story, they would first report it on a phony news channel they’d created. After it had been seen/heard by a portion of the public, they’d follow up with a comment by a well-known figure who would add further validity to the false information. The comment by the public figure would then find its way into legitimate media.
One such agency, The Kharkov News Agency was supposed to be located in Ukraine but was actually housed in the same building as the IRA, in St. Petersburg. From their purported location, they could easily spread lies about the West’s interference in Ukraine politics in a way that gave the impression that the information came from people living there, who were witnessing this interference first-hand.
As obvious and crude as these messages seem now, they were successful because they tapped into a basic human desire to have our own ideas and emotions validated and to trust sources of information blindly if we agree with the content.
This is partly what made the IRA personas so powerful. First, they would build rapport based on common interests, then they would gradually introduce information and opinions designed to influence others. Once they had earned the trust of those they met online, their influence was rarely questioned.
As Stengel explains, “Russian propaganda tapped into all the modern cognitive biases that social scientists write about: projection, mirroring, anchoring, confirmation bias.”
The result of such deliberate manipulation on such a massive scale was the brainwashing of an entire sector of American society — the angry, disgruntled, or disenfranchised were given a focus for their anger: immigrants.
Or anybody non-white. Or anybody non-male. Or Jews. You get the picture.
Once the IRA had enough personas interacting on social media, the Americans they targeted were fully indoctrinated. They even fooled members of Congress, some of whom have been promoting Russian propaganda ever since Trump was elected. (It’s mostly the rich white guys though. They’re the ones unhappy with Black people and women who they now see as capable of taking their jobs). The angry white guys were easy targets — and they are the ones backing The Big Lie today.
Trump didn’t win the election in 2016 — Putin and the IRA (with a little help from Q) won it for him — just as Putin ensured the Brexit vote would triumph. Though you won’t get the Brits to admit this. They are the ultimate champions of denial as a defense mechanism, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that anti-immigration sentiment was at the heart of that vote despite studies proving that Britain’s economy benefited from immigration.
As with the Trump victory in the U.S., the Brexit vote defied logic. And just as with the tragic consequences of Trump’s disastrous four years in office, Britain is still reeling from its misguided decision to leave the European Union.
Meanwhile, Putin is positioning troops for war in Ukraine while attempting to ensure NATO will never include Ukraine or any other former member of the Soviet Union. His goal seems clear: Break up all Western European alliances and reunite the Soviet Union.
The only question is, how far will he get before the rest of the world wakes up?
*This describes the earliest days of Stengel’s tenure — as he also describes in his book, there was a comprehensive effort to combat disinformation and impressive alliances were formed to ensure success. This piece is meant only to highlight how far behind we were in the beginning and the steps Putin took that put him in the lead.