You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/

created by walkandtalkk on 16/03/2024 at 00:54 UTC*

35207 upvotes, 174 top-level comments (showing 25)

*TL;DR:** You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

*How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another**

In September 2018, a video went viral[1] after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

1: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.4855614/viral-video-of-feminist-pouring-bleach-on-manspreaders-debunked-as-russian-propaganda-1.4855973

There was one problem: The video was staged.[2] And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

2: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/viral-manspreading-video-is-staged-kremlin-propaganda/

As an MIT study found in 2019, **Russia's online influence networks** **reached 140 million Americans**[3] **every month** -- the majority of U.S. social media users.

3: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

**Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States***

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say[4] about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

4: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-prigozhin-internet-research-agency-intl/index.html

Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media[5]. By 2015, hundreds[6] of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag[7], and other platforms -- **to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments** **that incite American users.**

5: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-prigozhin-internet-research-agency-intl/index.html

6: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-whistle-blowing-troll-gets-her-day-in-court/27047858.html

7: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43255285

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that **Blacktivist**, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia[8]. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged[9] Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

8: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/28/media/blacktivist-russia-facebook-twitter/index.html

9: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/28/media/blacktivist-russia-facebook-twitter/index.html

**Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion***

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to **aggressively attack men.** According to MIT[10], in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "**My Baby Daddy Aint Shit."** It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

10: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network[11] in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

11: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack[12] on the movement. Per the Times:

12: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

**They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.**

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

*Russia doesn't need a million accounts**, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this[13]:

13: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html

**It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.**

As the New York Times reported[14] in 2022,

14: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html

There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, **[Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.**

*China is joining in with AI**

Last month, the New York Times reported[15] on a new disinformation campaign. **"Spamouflage"** is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

15: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/business/media/chinese-influence-campaign-division-elections.html

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained[16] about Soviet disinformation, **the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”**

16: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html

*The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit**

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called **Fabrika**. Fabrika's operators have bragged[17] that social media platforms catch **only 1%** of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

17: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/16/russia-disinformation-discord-leaked-documents/

But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages[18] for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit[19].

18: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

19: https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumblr-to-troll-the-2016-election

*It's not just false facts**

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem. Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, **the goal is to divide and conquer** by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

As the RAND think tank explained[20], **the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts,** to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it's not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

20: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. ... **According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.**

*What this means for you**

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real.

*So what can you do?** To quote *WarGames*: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that **you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users.** Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

**Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know.** Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.
**Resist groupthink.** A key element of manipulate networks is volume[21]. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right. But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.
**Don't let social media warp your view of society.** This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the *opinions* -- you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose *job* is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

Edited for typos and clarity.

21: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

*P.S. Apparently, this post was removed several hours ago due to a flood of reports. Thank you to the** r/GenZ **moderators for re-approving it.**

*Second edit:**

This post is not meant to suggest that r/GenZ[22] is uniquely or especially vulnerable, or to suggest that a lot of challenges people discuss here are not real. It's entirely the opposite: Growing loneliness, political polarization, and increasing social division along gender lines is real. The problem is that disinformation and influence networks expertly, and effectively, hijack those conversations and use those real, serious issues to poison the conversation. This post is not about left or right: Everyone is targeted.

22: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ

Comments

Comment by AutoModerator at 16/03/2024 at 00:54 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

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Comment by AdComprehensive7879 at 16/03/2024 at 02:13 UTC

1066 upvotes, 5 direct replies

Guys read the whole thing for once, it’s actually a pretty good read.

Comment by SavantTheVaporeon at 16/03/2024 at 02:21 UTC

2338 upvotes, 23 direct replies

I feel like everyone in this comment section literally read the first couple words and then skipped to the bottom. This is actually a well-researched essay with references and links to original sources. And the whole comment section is ignoring the post in order to make cringy jokes and off-topic remarks.

What a world we live in.

Comment by MerfAvenger at 16/03/2024 at 02:55 UTC

83 upvotes, 3 direct replies

People need to touch grass and spend less time absorbing all their perception of reality from social media. Especially the people who think this sort of post is so long that they need to have someone/something else summarise it for them because they're incapable of critical thought.

Talking to real people is substantially less taxing than getting into arguments all the time on Reddit. It's not perfect, but it's universally less toxic.

Comment by Jupitereyed at 16/03/2024 at 04:04 UTC

37 upvotes, 1 direct replies

If anyone thinks this isn't happening, or that it's not happening to them, they haven't been paying any fucking attention since 2012.

Comment by CummingInTheNile at 16/03/2024 at 02:40 UTC*

301 upvotes, 11 direct replies

wayyyy too many of yall take what you see/hear on tiktok as gospel, just because conventional media lies doesnt mean unconventional media is some bastion of truth

Comment by [deleted] at 16/03/2024 at 02:18 UTC*

469 upvotes, 8 direct replies

And the problem is that it works-people online think that they’re avoiding misinformation by not getting their information from mainstream media, and then simultaneously walk into a trap of online grifters, trolls, and foreign agents that want to create division by any means necessary, and generally the information they put out is more short-form, entertaining, and exciting than what the actual facts of a given situation are.

You can just scroll through this subreddit and see that the online generations primary ideologies are anti-Americanism and cynicism. It can’t just be because of struggle; the greatest generation went through several wars and the great depression, and they didnt come to the same conclusions. Clearly there’s a different factor at play here.

Comment by [deleted] at 16/03/2024 at 09:17 UTC

26 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by Animeguy2025 at 16/03/2024 at 03:16 UTC

26 upvotes, 4 direct replies

I feel like I'm living in the second Cold War.

Comment by w33b2 at 16/03/2024 at 03:23 UTC

55 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thank you for posting this. Too many people don’t realize how dead the internet is, it’s all just to skew opinions.

Comment by YaliMyLordAndSavior at 16/03/2024 at 02:53 UTC

142 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Are people really being anti skeptic just because Russia and China are mentioned?

What happened to questioning the establishment and authoritarian overstep? The US government can be fucked up, along with the governments of countries who actively try to fuck with American society. Recognizing that the average joe is being preyed on by a lot of different people who might hate each other isn’t a conspiracy, it’s pretty normal for most of the world and we are especially susceptible to

Comment by Scroticus- at 16/03/2024 at 02:32 UTC

332 upvotes, 10 direct replies

They intentionally fuel extremist race and gender ideology to make people fight and hate each other. They know the only way to beat the US is to make Americans hate America, and to turn against each other.

Comment by Alexoxo_01 at 16/03/2024 at 02:35 UTC

231 upvotes, 12 direct replies

Literally it’s terrifying how insidious this was. It was right under our noses. It was proven that in early 2016 most trump supports were Russian bots spreading influence. And how coincidentally these “cringe feminists lol” all came out at the same time to enrage people and turn them against any good ideologies. And I used to eat cringe compilations like that up back in the day. Cuz I didn’t know any better

Comment by Tommi_Af at 16/03/2024 at 02:39 UTC

213 upvotes, 3 direct replies

The Russians are already in the comments

Comment by Lifeispainhelpme4 at 16/03/2024 at 03:36 UTC

31 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I legit said this in a reply and got downvoted for it. Don’t forget that they are working with big companies as well to commit unimaginable white collar crime.

Comment by dontevenfkingtry at 16/03/2024 at 03:57 UTC

11 upvotes, 0 direct replies

My motto is: question everything. I don't care whose mouth it came from, you question it. Is it true? Check your facts, check your numbers, check your sources.

Comment by Unlucky-Scallion1289 at 16/03/2024 at 03:10 UTC

43 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Foundations of Geopolitics

I’ve been saying this for years, it’s not Russia’s military that we need to be worried about.

This is all intentional and op is absolutely correct about pretty much everything.

Comment by Alexoxo_01 at 16/03/2024 at 02:52 UTC

146 upvotes, 4 direct replies

This generation is so cooked man 😭 fuck all of you and your 3 second attention spans can’t even read a few paragraphs instead you have to joke because big words scary.

Wouldn’t be surprised if some are bots too.

Comment by anondoge27 at 16/03/2024 at 02:50 UTC

93 upvotes, 2 direct replies

R/GenZ is one of the worst infiltrated sites by Russia. I would be skeptical of any of these comments above or any post on this site about dating.

Comment by digibri at 16/03/2024 at 02:53 UTC

15 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I have a quote that I've kept close to me for a long time now:

"I learned in Korea that I would never again, in my life, abdicate to someone else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is."

- Utah Phillips

In my mind, these words keep me wary of anyone I encounter who suggests in some way I should hate some person or group of people. Instead, I immediately become suspicious of the speaker.

Comment by JohnMcDickens at 16/03/2024 at 04:15 UTC

9 upvotes, 1 direct replies

“What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.”

-MGS2

This has been predicted since 2001

Comment by SweetLilylune at 16/03/2024 at 04:55 UTC

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The sad thing is the american government also benefits from division! they love it! 🦅 when vicious dogs fight they both die!

Comment by [deleted] at 16/03/2024 at 02:47 UTC*

93 upvotes, 3 direct replies

This really must be a generational phenomenon, but it’s not limited to only gen z. In my experience, the people who base their world views and opinions almost entirely on things they’ve seen online are the young and the old, meaning gen-z and boomers. As a millennial, I can say that my myself and most of my peers are pretty well rooted in reality and form our opinions based on fairly well established facts and our own real world experiences. We grew up being told “don’t believe everything you see on the internet/tv” and yet I’m having to constantly debunk all the “facts” that my parents throw at me that they find on Facebook.

Edit: just to clarify, I don’t believe that these types of problems are only affecting gen-z and boomers. I am fully aware that there are plenty of people from gen-x/millennial generations that fall victim to misinformation campaigns and propaganda as well. I’m strictly speaking from my own personal experience and from my peers of my same age group.

Comment by Nemo3500 at 16/03/2024 at 03:02 UTC*

47 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Yep, this is a huge issue that they've been using to destabilize democracy for a while now because democracy is anti-thetical to the Russian State's model of governance. The RAND Corporation, which has researched this extensively has called it the firehose of falsehood where they spread so much disinformation so quickly that it's impossible to refute all of it and so it spreads easily.

The Mueller Report also highlighted how they infiltrated both BLM and MAGA activists to sow discord during the 2016 election to extremely powerful effect.

Please remain skeptical of all the things you see on the internet, and do your best to vet your research with trustworthy news organizations like Reuters and the Associated Press, and to also do additional vetting, after you've done that.

Edit: Do your best to search for primary sources, not other news, which are secondary. Thanks commenter below.

Remember: Critical thinking is not innate. It is a skill and one you must practice.

Comment by [deleted] at 16/03/2024 at 03:10 UTC

43 upvotes, 3 direct replies

[deleted]