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Before social media foreign subversion became a staple of partisan politics in the U.S., the first journalist to write about the topic for a big mainstream audience was Adrian Chen. He published a piece in The New York Times Magazine in June 2015. It was called “The Agency” and it told the story of the Internet Research Agency, the government-linked Russian troll farm which would become a centerpiece of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the long investigations that came after it. The IRA was owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner Group whose star would continue to rise over the next decade until he mounted an ill-fated rebellion against Moscow and later died “mysteriously” in a plane crash.
In an instance of uncanny timing, Chen published his piece only a couple weeks before Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign and began his semi-hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Trump and that Russian troll farm would be permanently linked. The original piece didn’t intersect with partisan politics. At one point, the trolls were spreading panic about an entirely fictitious chemical spill in Louisiana. In the fall of 2014, they were hyping the eventually-contained U.S. Ebola outbreak. The accounts seemed simply intent on sowing panic or distrust in official institutions, perhaps a proof of concept for something more ambitious in the future. Only a few months later, Chen noticed that the list of troll farm accounts he’d followed for the original piece had suddenly rebranded as Trump superfans.
The rest, as they say, is history. Things turned out much better for Donald Trump than Yevgeny Prigozhin. But I was reminded of this in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and in advance of Hurricane Milton. There is abundant evidence that Trump, his campaign and his followers are going to town inventing and amplifying a range of conspiracy theories about the hurricane aftermath. But it seems almost certain that they’re sharing the arena with latter-day versions of the IRA, whether they’re housed in Russia or China or Iran or various other countries. This was the original aim of these efforts, quite possibly the deeper aim than assisting Donald Trump, which was more a means to an end: creating confusion and panic, sowing division within the United States and weakening trust in civic institutions. But weak social trust and division isn’t something foreigners can do themselves on Twitter any more than they can create a social and political flesh eating bacteria like Donald Trump. These are social weaknesses at the heart of American society. They may be more or less unique to the contemporary U.S., or something more general in global early 21st century life. But they are strategic weaknesses for the U.S. on a global stage and are recognized as such by unfriendly foreign powers.
The socio-political tendencies which give rise to conspiracy theories or events like January 6th or election denialism are native to the U.S. But they can be helped along, fanned, amplified. Big public disasters are the perfect seedbed for them. Big natural disasters are harrowing. They demand vast public and civic response which will almost always fall short of what is needed in some ways. It is hard to get information in and out. There have been countless stories over the last week about towns destroyed, crises of looting, shootings and violence. Most of these things turn out either not to be true or are greatly exaggerated. But these places are cut off from travel, often cut off from internet and there are countless examples of these things happening all at once. If someone on the internet says there’s a mass fatality incident in a town in central Jersey, reporters can go and see if that’s true. If it’s not true, someone goes there and reports that it’s not true and mostly that’s it. But in the midst of a major natural disaster, the fakes have a huge head start on the truth. So much is going on at once that false reports just become a part of the background hum of chaos, social disintegration and disappointment. As I said, disasters are the perfect seedbed for misinformation, foreign and domestic, due in part to the fog of war that is endemic even when no one is intentionally doing more than passing on what they heard.
The news that Donald Trump continues to talk, with some regularity, with Vladimir Putin reminds us that we had and may again have a President compromised at a basic level by the man and country that are likely our main foreign adversary. The biggest win for Trumpism probably over the last eight years was convincing mainstream press opinion that saying that Trump’s relationship with Russia was and remains a big deal is something on the order of that guy who’s still talking about a second shooter of JFK. It was and is real. And it’s a mammoth gap — we still don’t quite know what “it” even is or was. But this issue of social media and the ability of foreign actors and domestic actors to play about with the vulnerabilities and divisions in American society is real and a big deal quite apart from anything to do with Donald Trump. It won’t be going away.