As a genuine Internet old-timer, I often find myself in a position rather like Socrates complaining about the damage that this new-fangled writing is doing to human societies. When I’m in a curmudgeonly mood about online culture, I’m prone to mostly-inaccurate recollections of how conversations online used to be more thoughtful, more emotionally meaningful and above all else real, that you were sure you were talking to a real person even if the platform was pseudonymous or anonymous.
Mostly-inaccurate but not entirely so. I’m still in touch with a lot of real people from my early online engagements, people from Usenet and early commercial providers like GEnie and forums from the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as from my early blogging. I rarely interacted with anyone whose identity was completely unknown to me. It’s not that there were no such people in those platforms but someone who showed up suddenly as a troll who was just trying to get a rise out of the regulars was usually obvious and generally easy to avoid unless you were in a mood to cross swords with them. I can remember, however, as the density of people coming into online culture began to grow dramatically that you had to have more doubts both about regulars and about new arrivals. In one forum I frequented, for example, there was a named participant who was prone to tell woeful stories about their marriage, family and health where the rest of us began to think we were dealing with someone inventing a persona or possibly someone who was mentally ill. That’s become a commonplace experience online in the years since, but even that unreality was once more grounded in a single real person’s life than the fakery and manipulation that commercial social media has enabled, both deliberately and unwittingly, in the last fifteen years.
I kept thinking about this personal sense of history, with all its temptations to unwarranted nostalgia, while reading the New York Times’ expose of the role of Russian disinformation operatives in stoking division within the progressive opposition to Trump. My reservations about whether my own sense of online history is meaningfully true collided with what I know as a historian of the modern world, particularly the Cold War, as I tried to make sense of the story.
Deception and imposture in modern media environments, after all, have been common since the advent of modern print culture in the 18th Century, including the creation of faked documents intended to destabilize political movements or provide a false basis for the faker’s own political campaign. There are innumerable famous consequential and important examples of forgeries and fakeries, some of them still haunting us to this day, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is at least some reason to believe that for every famous example, there are others that either made little impact or whose uncertain truths remain contested (or have never been detected or suspected).
The NYT article consults experts who talk about Russian disinformation and its roots in Cold War approaches. I was a bit struck that these experts don’t observe that the United States and the United Kingdom also had sophisticated, wide-ranging disinformation-spreading practices. There was an entire secret branch of the UK’s Foreign Office called the Information Research Department dedicated to such activities, many of them focused on suppressing anti-colonial movements rather than countering Soviet activities.
Perhaps more importantly, in certain contexts, it was common for Western governments and powerful interests to refer to disinformation and subversion as an explanation of political dissent and social movements in order to de-legitimate them as well as to justify surveillance and suppression directed against them. “Outside agitators” was the rallying cry again and again among those opposed to the civil rights movement, to anti-colonial movements, to feminist protest, to anti-war protests, to the nuclear disarmament movement, and so on. In a more diffuse way, this has been the default explanation that political parties on both the right and left in Western democracies have chosen to explain the causal roots that produce their oppositions: that the people would naturally be aligned with them but for the capture of some intervening mechanism or institution that comes from outside “the people”: schools, churches, popular culture, commercial institutions, workplaces, which have somehow been suborned by unnatural or external interests for the purpose of making “the people” think thoughts and have sentiments other than those which should naturally be theirs.
However, the NYT article and the experts cited do point out that even when it’s historically true that there were Soviet-paid or directed individuals or messages attempting to provoke dissent or stoke divisions in either Western societies or recently decolonized nations in the developing world, it’s frequently hard to claim that those attempts made much of a difference. When I was reading some archival materials about discussions within the Johnson Administration about the Soviet interest in using the civil rights movement and anti-colonial movements in Africa to their own advantage, everybody in those discussions understood that those movements arose from legitimate grievances and that the only way to keep them from helping the Soviets was to solve the problems that produced the movements in the first place. Disinformation was just minor mischief unless you were looking for an alibi to excuse actively reproducing unjust systems and structures.
In between that moment and the present, is there any reason to think that there is a real difference that requires a different kind of mindset or response? I honestly grapple with profound uncertainty on this point.
A few thoughts:
It’s hard to ignore that the scale of disinformation has changed along with the general scale of online communication. The proportion of disinformation, my nostalgic feelings notwithstanding, might not have changed that much but if there are multiple exabytes of data being created every single day, then that’s a lot more disinformation even if it’s a tiny proportion of the whole, and a lot more people exposed to it in a much wider variety of contexts.
Analog practices of editorial control over print culture and other forms of mass communication prior to the advent of online culture provided a substantial chokepoint for disinformation coming from anywhere but locally hegemonic or or official sources. E.g., if you were reading the New York Times around the time Raymond Bonner was reporting from El Salvador about the El Mozote massacre, you were reading what turned out to be accurate information, but it was choked off by the paper’s own editor to satisfy his personal vision of anti-Communism. The relative absence of this chokepoint arguably frees most or all kinds of disinformation to flow freely to any audience willing to consume it.
Anonymity or imposture aren’t new at all in modern mass communications, but the dramatic increase in scale combined with the creation of bots or other forms of automation in digital communications means that it is possible to flood most contemporary commercial social media with accounts that purport to be real individuals who are either authoring or disseminating disinformation and thus also to simulate some of the signs of mass approval of a particular claim or idea. In an analog context, I would pay very different attention as I walked through a city to a lone person with a megaphone shouting strange ideas at me and everyone else passing by versus coming across a large rally in a public space where thousands of people were cheering on the same sentiments.
The relatively greater awareness that many people have about disinformation’s history may paradoxically make it much harder to convince people that something they’re reading is disinformation. E.g., this is not a problem that stems from online media per se, it stems from the dramatically greater knowledge that we have in 2022 of the unreliability and manipulation of information by governments and private interests since 1950. When people come to the conclusion that “everybody does it” that has some basis in fact, one natural outcome is to stop caring about any particular accusation of misconduct. If you look back at various episodes in post-1950 American history that have focused on revelations about official or influential lies and disinformation, there have been consistent warnings about the dangerous consequences of widespread distrust following such breaches. You could say that we live in the world that we were being warned against and there’s no way to undo that.
All of that said, it’s hard to simply ignore the activities that the NYT recounts. If nothing else, the massification and automation of those troll factories produces a kind of mingled sense of horror and awe in me. It’s a bit like watching the WOPR computer in the film WarGames try to brute force the nuclear arsenal launch codes. They threw every bit of mud they could think of at every wall they could find and took note of what stuck, then refined the approach further.
Can any of us swear we’d know better than to get involved in a controversy that rested on some of the ‘evidence’ or provocations that these troll operations have grown increasingly sophisticated about generating? Not a day goes by on Twitter any longer without something roiling people up where even the slightest pause to consider the basis for strong responses (on any side) should create a feeling of doubt. I know for a fact that in my time blogging there have been moments where I’ve stepped into something only to discover later on that there were things I didn’t know. Not so much a case of having been trolled, but at least evidence of vulnerability to such. And yet, to obdurately resist any alliance or entanglement with all such disputes or controversies is its own kind of error—at the least it means a sort of acceptance of the status quo as it stands and a vision of what constitutes meaningful evidence on an issue of public concern that stacks against vulnerable, marginalized or dissenting people. The best affordances of social media are about listening to voices with different sensibilities than your own and hearing about situations that are either new to you or that you have seen from only one angle. The openness that the best potential of online culture demands puts us in danger all the time, but we have to endure that risk.
It might be that the best answer to the sophisticated trolling the NYT chronicles is to consistently and honestly audit our known points of vulnerability. Our sensitive intersections are sensitive for a reason. Just as Cold War politicians and their advisors conceded in their private deliberative spaces that racism, imperialism, inequity and so on were real liabilities in a geopolitical struggle with an enemy who knew how to perform sympathy for the victims of those injustices and provoke their justified anger, then any movement or community that knows its unity is fragile and its coalitions prone to fragmentation can’t afford to look away from the sites of potential fracture or to traffic in fake-happy rhetoric about itself.
For example, in retrospect, it’s hardly surprising that the flinging of tens of thousands of mud-tweets at the walls of progressive and liberal opposition to Trump should find a point of especially acute vulnerability around Israel and Palestine. That’s not a sensitivity created by the trolls that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s a domain where there are already numerous long-standing forms of disinformation and a site of political and emotional feeling where ordinary people, political movements, and governments are all extremely proficient at lying about the facts as they stand and at concealing their own affinities and preferences, on all sides. It’s an area of dispute where inconsistencies in strongly held ethical or political positions are virtually mandatory, where intensity of feelings expressed and unexpressed are dialed up to eleven, and where there are organizations that don’t hesitate to monitor, subvert and persecute individuals they see as enemies. It’s also an established area of disagreement where people who are already heavily invested generally don’t accept that anybody can have a relatively neutral or uncommitted view of the issues involved. (The moment I say something like “on all sides”, I’m provoking people who either see me as a deceptive partisan or who think that kind of shallow rhetorical equanimity is itself a morally indefensible and phony sort of ‘moderation’.)
In this sense, the failure points where trolls don’t gain any traction are just as interesting as the vulnerabilities that they swarm over. Whether trolls are the primary cause of any meaningful events in our political and social lives is to me still an open and important question. But they at least might help us to think about where we know the difference between a phony provocateur trying to stir up trouble and a real person and why we know in those cases. We know sometimes because the phony is saying something we’ve never heard from anyone real in our lived worlds, something that doesn’t match anything in the cultural and emotional infrastructure that we know, something that comes from nowhere. Or perhaps, something that comes from the wrong place and the wrong people. When we have trouble making the distinction, it may be an important indicator of unfinished business: a problem that needs to be faced and worked out, a mistake that needs to be owned and fixed, a costly avoidance. Whatever trolls cause, the one that that has changed is that they can now be counted on to relentlessly find and exploit any open wound or unresolved conflict.
Image credit: "Trolls" by tsparks is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Very helpful dissection. One person I know on FB almost never posts, always reposts. Followed on with waves of quick approvals, apart from me and one of his buddies who called him every time for the BS. , it became clear to me that the reposts could almost invariably produce the effect of getting people really mad at each other with no other clear purpose, which I was reminded of by the NYT article. Whether it is internet or phone stuff, I’m not sure why there aren’t standards that posters/callers are identified by their actual names. Admitting that this horse left the barn way back.😢