From The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder, 2018) p244-9
RUSSIA ENABLED and sustained the fiction of “Donald Trump, successful businessman,” and delivered that fiction to Americans as the payload of a cyberweapon. The Russian effort succeeded because the United States is much more like the Russian Federation than Americans would like to think. Because Russian leaders had already made the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, they had instincts and techniques that, as it turned out, corresponded to emerging tendencies in American society. Moscow was not trying to project some ideal of their own, only to use a giant lie to bring out the worst in the United States.
In important respects, American media had become like Russian media, and this made Americans vulnerable to Russian tactics. ‘The experience of Russia shows what happens to politics when news loses its moorings. Russia lacks local and regional journalism. Little in Russian media concerns the experiences of Russian citizens. Russian television directs the distrust that this generates against others beyond Russia. In the weakness of its local press, America came to resemble Russia. The United States once boasted an impressive network of regional newspapers. After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse. Every day in 2009, about seventy people lost their jobs at American newspapers and magazines. For Americans who lived between the coasts, this meant the end of reporting about life and the rise of something else: “the media.” Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.
It was an American and not a Russian innovation to present the news as national entertainment, which made the news vulnerable to an entertainer. Trump got his chance in the second half of 2015 because American television networks were pleased with the spectacle he provided. The chief executive officer of a television network said that the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” In providing plentiful free airtime for Trump, American networks granted the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” a far broader viewership. Neither Trump nor his Russian backers spent very much money during the campaign. Television did the advertising for them free of charge. Even the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC mentioned Trump twice as often as they mentioned Clinton.
Unlike Russians, Americans tend to get their news from the internet. According to one survey, 44% of Americans get their news from a single internet platform: Facebook. The interactivity of the internet creates an impression of mental effort while impeding reflection. The internet is an attention economy, which means that profit-seeking platforms are designed to divide the attention of their users into the smallest possible units that can be exploited by advertising messages. If news is to appear on such platforms, it must be tailored to fit a brief attention span and arouse the hunger for reinforcement. News that draws viewers tends to wear a neural path between prejudice and outrage. When each day is devoted to emotional venting about supposed enemies, the present becomes endless, eternal. In these conditions, a fictional candidate enjoyed a considerable advantage.
Though internet platforms became major American news providers, they were not regulated as such in the United States. Two Facebook products, News Feed and Trending Topics, purveyed countless fictions. The people who were in charge of Facebook and Twitter took the complacent position offered by the American politics of inevitability: the free market would lead to truth, so nothing should be done. This attitude created a problem for the numerous American users of the internet, who, having lost access to local press (or preferring news that seems free of charge), read the internet as though it were a newspaper. In this way, the American internet became an attack surface for the Russian secret services, who were able to do what they liked inside the American psychosphere for eighteen months without anyone reacting. Much of what Russia did was to take advantage of what it found. Hyperpartisan stories on Fox News or outbursts on Breitbart gained viewership thanks to retransmission by Russian bots. Russian support helped fringe right-wing sites such as Next News Network gain notoriety and influence. Its videos were viewed about 56 million times in October 2016.
The “pizzagate” and “spirit cooking” fictions show how Russian intervention and American conspiratology worked together. Both fictions began with the Russian hack of the emails of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign. Some Americans wished to believe that what is private must be mysterious, and they were coaxed along by Russia. Podesta was in touch with the owner of a pizza restaurant — itself no great revelation. Trolls and bots, some of them Russian, began to spread the fiction that the pizzeria’s menu was a code for ordering children for sex, and that Clinton ran a pedophilia ring from its basement. InfoWars, a leading American conspiracy site, also spread the story. This fiction ended with a real American shooting a real gun in a real restaurant. The popular right-wing internet activist Jack Posobiec, who had himself spread the Pizzagate lie on Twitter, claimed that the American who fired the shots was an actor paid to discredit the truth. Podesta was also in touch with someone who invited him to a dinner party that he did not attend. The hostess of the dinner party was an artist who had once titled a painting Spirit Cooking; Russian trolls and bots spread the story that the dinner party was a Satanic ritual involving the consumption of human bodily flu- ids. This idea was then passed on by American conspiracy theorists, such as Sean Hannity of Fox News and the Drudge Report.
Russian platforms served content to American conspiracy sites with enormous viewership. For example, in an email hacked and stolen by Russia, Hillary Clinton wrote a few words about “decision fatigue.” This term describes the increasing difficulty of making decisions as the day goes on. Decision fatigue is an observation of psychologists about the workplace, not an illness. Once it was stolen by Russia, the email was released by WikiLeaks, and then promoted by the Russian propaganda sender Sputnik as evidence that Clinton was suffering from a debilitating disease. In this form, the story was picked up by InfoWars.
Russians exploited American gullibility. Anyone who paid attention to the Facebook page for a (nonexistent) group called Heart of Texas should have noticed that its authors were not native speakers of English. Its cause, Texas secession, perfectly expressed the Russian policy of advocating separatism in all countries except Russia itself. (the South from the U.S., California from the U.S., Scotland from the United Kingdom, Catalonia from Spain, Crimea from Ukraine, the Donbas from Ukraine, every member state from the EU, etc.). ‘The partisanship of Heart of Texas was extremely vulgar: like other Russian sites, it referred to the Democratic presidential candidate as “Killary.” Despite all this, the Heart of Texas Facebook page had more followers in 2016 than those of the Texas Republican Party or the Texas Democratic Party—or indeed both of them combined. Everyone who liked, followed, and supported Heart of Texas was taking part in a Russian intervention in American politics designed to destroy the United States of America. Americans liked the site because it affirmed their own prejudices and pushed them just a bit further. It offered both the thrill of transgression and a sense of legitimacy.
Americans trusted Russians and robots who told them what they wanted to hear. When Russia set up a fake Twitter site that purported to be that of the Tennessee Republican Party, Americans were drawn by its edgy presentation and abundant fictions. It spread the lie that Obama was born in Africa, for example, as well as the spirit-cooking fantasy. The Russian version of the Tennessee Republican Party had ten times more Twitter followers than the actual Tennessee Republican Party. One of them was Michael Flynn, who retweeted its content in the days before the election. In other words, Trump’s candidate for national security advisor was serving as a conduit for a Russian influence operation in the United States. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s press spokesperson, also retweeted fake Russian content from the same source. She thus assisted the Russian intervention in an American election—even as her campaign denied that there was such a thing. (She also tweeted “love you back” to white supremacists.) Jack Posobiec was a follower and retweeter of the same fake Russian site. He filmed a video of himself claiming that there was no Russian intervention in American politics. When the Russian site was finally taken down, after eleven months, he ex- pressed confusion. He did not see the Russian intervention, since he was the Russian intervention.
In 1976, Stephen King published a short story, “I Know What You Need,” about the courting of a young woman. Her suitor was a young man who could read her mind but did not tell her so. He simply appeared with what she wanted at the moment, beginning with strawberry ice cream for a study break. Step by step he changed her life, making her dependent upon him by giving her what she thought she wanted at a certain moment, before she herself had a chance to reflect. Her best friend realized that something disconcerting was happening, investigated, and learned the truth: “That is not love,” she warned. “That’s rape.” The internet is a bit like this. It knows much about us, but interacts with us without revealing that this is so. It makes us unfree by arousing our worst tribal impulses and placing them at the service of unseen others.
Neither Russia nor the internet is going away. It would help the cause of democracy if citizens knew more about Russian policy, and if the concepts of “news,” “journalism,” and “reporting” could be preserved on the internet. In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.
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