Russian Trolls and Permission Effects

 Buried in the nightly analysis from Adam Silverman is this nugget:

And I think that’s a good entry point to a brief attempt to satisfy your curiosity regarding how to counter information warfare. The entire point of information warfare is to influence the targets. Sometimes that is to try to mobilize that audience to do something they might want to do, but ordinarily wouldn’t. In social learning we’d call this the promotion of definitions that neutralize prohibitions against certain behaviors. A good chunk of the Russian information warfare directed at Americans over the past eight years or so has been intended to create a permissive environment for some Americans to act on their most extreme, negative, and destructive impulses. Other messaging is intended to demoralize and thereby demobilize the audience from taking action. This would be the equivalent to what is referred to in social learning as creating definitions unfavorable that then prevent action.

Bolding mine.

The defense of Ukraine is - in and of itself - an absolute good. Allowing Russia to seize Ukrainian territory and otherwise violate the post-war order would be a horrible precedent and lead to other wars elsewhere. Some of the subtext of Russia's invasion has been China observing how the world reacts.

However, it's worth noting that Russia just plain old sucks.

A somewhat unknowable variable in our descent into Trumpistan has been the impact of Russian trolls on social media. Part of the horror of Trump's past and present has been the wretched cruelty that has become standard operating procedure for the GOP. Ron DeSantis's human trafficking scheme is cruel and needless, but it really, really plays with a segment of the GOP electorate. Trump's barrage of insults during the GOP primary was what endeared him to this segment of the populace.

However, we have to consider that there is a permission effect that occurs when norms are violated. Norms exist because we tacitly agree they exist. The n-word is not OK to use because we have sort of evolved into a place where you can't use it if you're White. It's ubiquitous in rap music, but it's really not OK for White people to casually drop the n-word. As Ta-nehisi Coates put it, the word doesn't belong to White people any more. 

What the Russian troll operation set out to do we create a permission space for people who just don't "get" that to start dropping the n-word again. 

Twitter is full of terrible takes. It's sort of the métier of the site. And terrible takes on how to make tacos with Velveeta cheese are...whatever. But being Twitter's "main character" for the day when you say something like "Women over 30 who don't have kids aren't truly women" is not something normal people aspire to. I would never want to be dragged for a horrible take that inflamed people's anger.

And yet.

What we don't really know, but we have some hints about, is that the Russians have been systemically trolling the rest of the world, and it's not just for shits and giggles. Russia's only hope for global relevance is if the western world fractures, so they make it a priority to keep us yelling at each other.

Putin's recent decision to push bogus referenda in occupied territories to annex them so that he can threaten NATO and mobilize Russian troops in defense of "Russia" is pretty desperate. Dictatorships are brittle, and both mobilization and defeat in Ukraine could imperil his grip on power. (And sadly, what comes after could be worse.) 

But if there was a way to oust Putin from power while denying the even worse elements in Russia from taking over, and therefore neuter the Russian trolls...That would be an amazing development for the world.