Russian propaganda is cacophonous. This is its single most important distinguishing feature, and it is the one that never fails to confound Americans. Americans assume that propaganda serves a clear, actionable objective: campaign propaganda is intended to make you vote a certain way, and war propaganda is intended to make you hate the enemy and support the troops. The same assumptions, Americans think, hold for totalitarian propaganda: it is probably intended to make everyone support the regime. In fact, the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality. To their credit, the writers of the New Knowledge report understand this. The Internet Research Agency’s effort, they state,
was absolutely intended to reinforce tribalism, to polarize and divide, and to normalize points of view strategically advantageous to the Russian government on everything from social issues to political candidates. It was designed to exploit societal fractures, blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself.
Totalitarian propaganda is overwhelming and inconsistent. It bombards you with mutually contradictory claims, which often come packaged in doublethink pairs. The Russian dissident singer-songwriter Alexander Galich sang about one such pair: “We stand for the cause of peace and we are preparing for war.” In a talk I gave with the historian Timothy Snyder, he cited more recent examples: “There is no such thing as a Ukrainian language” goes with “Ukrainian authorities are forcing everyone to speak Ukrainian.” Russian propaganda is a direct descendant of totalitarian Soviet propaganda. Far from promoting a single guiding ideology, this kind of propaganda robs you of your bearings. The regime gains a monopoly on reality, and can make any claim whatsoever. Hannah Arendt famously described the totalitarian ruler’s ascendance this way: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. . . . Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
After a while, the audience and the propagandists are no longer distinct. The propagandist also holds every statement to be a lie—not just every statement he makes but every possible statement. Values are fictions. Facts do not exist. Mutual understanding is always an illusion.
The Russian trolls brought this world view to their work in American politics. The New Knowledge report uses a beautiful phrase to describe the virtual universe of connections and reflections that the Russian trolls created: “media mirage.” But contemporary Russians generally think that all media is a mirage—in a world in which there is no possibility of a stable shared reality, it would have to be.
The task of the New Knowledge report was clearly difficult: to make sense of a thing that at its core had no meaning; to identify the objectives of activities that assumed that nothing is the function of anything else. Both the New Knowledge report and the other, prepared by Oxford University researchers, observe that troll efforts targeted specific groups, including African-Americans, right-wing conservatives, and L.G.B.T. people. Their messaging to likely Democratic voters seemed aimed at discouraging voting altogether; messaging to conservatives was purely incendiary and trafficked primarily in the fear of immigrants. They also observe that the trolls amplified messages that were already circulating among these audiences. Indeed, the trolls’ messaging solidified before Trump emerged as the front-runner, and their activities intensified after the election. A lot of what the trolls did seemed to have no political import at all—it was noise, from which the authors of the reports isolate certain comprehensible messages. But, to a large extent, pure noise was the point.
In a book called “How Propaganda Works,” from 2015, the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley identifies and debunks two common assumptions about propaganda: that “a propagandistic claim must be false” and that “a propagandistic claim must be made insincerely.” As the New Knowledge report notes, some of the trolls’ claims weren’t false, and some, on the face of them, were unproblematic. It can also be said that the trolls’ memes and posts weren’t proffered insincerely—in a world where nothing is sincere, nothing is insincere, either. Everything is noise.
