The 2016 American Presidential Election saw unprecedented interference in the electoral process by Russian operatives.¹ It has been established that Russians created at least four technologically persuasive elements of the election: social media memes,² fake organizations,³ fake events,⁴ and the use and prevalence of bots.⁵ At its basic level, the election propaganda was no more than an old-fashioned Soviet-style disinformation campaign; however, this essay will argue that because of our relative inexperience dealing with unique information through digital devices, the information spread quickly and seemed credible.  In essence, it is precisely the specific communication technology that Americans used during the election that further contributed to the persuasive appeal of the Russian attempts to affect the election.

In an interview in Vox, in 2019, one of the authors of the book, Bored, Lonely, Angry Stupid, described the emotional impact of social media postings. “Bloggers told us they wanted to express themselves, but it only meant something to them if other people liked it. So the tension between individualism and communitarianism is a longstanding one in American life. And it’s playing out anew in social media, as people try to get their individual voices out there while seeking the affirmation and approval of others.^”6

In their study Susan J. Matt and Luke Fernandez ask “Are we masters of our tools, or are our tools masters of us? … Technological design is a kind of legislation. Some want to regulate technology in order to control its cultural, social, and political effects, but we should also talk about redesigning technology to bring a different kind of emotional culture into being.”⁷ Digital devices, such as smartphones, are ubiquitous and becoming literal extensions of ourselves.⁸ The question of whether technology is, in fact, the master of us has been asked in many ways that we shall explore in this essay.  For the moment, however, consider any American with a smartphone during the 2016 election.  If the person strongly disliked Democrat Hillary Clinton as a candidate, he or she would be able to see memes on facebook or twitter accounts that would support Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Bernie Sanders, or would simply denigrate Clinton.  At that time, few if any people knew the memes had been created by Russian operatives who were hoping to exploit American divisions. However, if those memes struck a particular emotional chord in a person, they could be shared quickly, the information spreading like a virus in the cybersphere.  The person might understand the memes were political propaganda, but would not realize they were manufactured by an enemy whose goal was to disrupt the election and capitalize on our emotional reactions.  The fact that the message arrived on a smartphone from a friend or a trusted source increased the credibility of the message.  The source of the message, the Russians, used the smartphone for that very reason.  So is the user the master?  Or is the master the tool, the smartphone, the connection to the internet, using a conduit—the smartphone’s owner—to persuade others of the message by encouraging the emotional stimulus that would lead to sharing the message?  Before an answer is provided, it is best to examine what theorists have suggested.

It would be easy to assume a human sender sends the message to a human receiver—an established, if not outdated, communication model, SMR.⁹ However, that model, when applied to human communication is inadequate because it does not take into account human emotion. Misunderstandings occur because human communication is much more complex than the simple electronic delivery of a message.  SMR also does not take into account the medium. Marshall McLuhan begins Understanding Media with an observation. “In operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”¹⁰ Medium in this instance is meant any extension of ourselves—a smartphone for example— and by message is meant “the change of scale or pace or pattern.”¹¹

So the “message” is not necessarily the content— but is rather how the content is interpreted, overtly or subtly, through the specific medium.  With a smartphone, information is perceived as smaller, faster and communicated through social media or other platforms.  For example, Twitter had been limited to 140 characters and now 280.  Similar to when the telegraph had been created, messages became more concise and brief.  In fact, the act of messaging is faster-paced, allowing nearly instantaneous communication across the world.  The role a communicator plays in such a scenario is less reasoned, cautious or responsible.  The communicator touches a screen in a specific pattern and the message is merely passed along.  Such communications have changed how we communicate and how we perceive our place in the process.  To a propagandist using such technology, we are merely a conduit through which the real message passes; the real message, despite the content, is that authority resides in our smartphones.  Indeed, as was indicated above, our emotional attachment to the smartphone is little different from any addiction.  The choice is not ours.  Authority rests wherever our emotional addiction is placed.

There is an ontological description of this technological place we find ourselves inhabiting.  Martin Heidegger’s term Das Gestell, meaning “the framework,” is essentially the technological world in which we live.  The technology shapes (frames) the world and how we communicate.  Therefore, those who are born into the world, are formed by and embedded in the patterns, the “mode of ordering.” “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”¹² Enframing may shape the technological world, but by doing so, it eliminates other possibilities.  Technologies, then, shape how people think of technologies, and subsequently develop new technologies.  In that sense the prevailing technology becomes self-perpetuating with the assistance of human effort— or with the assistance of robots.

Social media was a battleground in the 2016 election.  Twitter was the election’s Gettysburg.  There were 51,000 casualties at Gettysburg.  By 2018 Twitter had removed more than 50,000 Russian bot accounts.¹³ Bots are “algorithmically driven entities that on the surface appear as legitimate users.”¹⁴ Essentially bots are fake accounts created by internet-savvy scammers who use their skills for a particular agenda.  Because they are algorithmically driven they can disseminate information at rapid speeds.  In 2017, Clint Watts, a former FBI agent described to the Senate Intelligence Committee how Russian bots targeted swing-voters. “So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true, it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures”¹⁵ Bots, with their numbers and speeds, help frame the issues for whomever wishes to persuade the public— in this case for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Americans would go on various sites and see their opinions heavily bolstered by people who seemed just like them.  So they were convinced their opinions were popular.  Yet the opinions were fake. They were disseminated by robots.  Americans were being used by a foreign power using algorithms.

Jacques Ellul describes sociological propaganda as “the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context.”¹⁶ A definitive description of any given context would depend to a great extent on the technology in use.  Ellul says in such propaganda, whatever the existing conditions, pressures would be placed on groups and individuals to conform to the prevailing authority — in this case—an authority with use of technology.  Furthermore, in this context society is saturated with technology. “Sociological propaganda produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things, a certain concept of human relations, which unconsciously molds individuals and makes them conform to society.”¹⁷

Unlike Plato’s conception of techne,¹⁸ which emphasizes a craft-like making of something or doing something—working with the hands as such— Ellul’s definition of La Technique ¹⁹ stresses rationality and efficiency.  He lists a number of characteristics that must be in place (monism, for example) for the society to be rational and efficient in order to work within a particular technological society.  Techne would be humans creating a world with their inspiration, talent and practicality—although in his day it was not considered a practice of the “best” of society, who worked with their minds.  Ellul’s technique means everyone is playing a part to keep the technological society, the wheels, turning.  People are not so much creating as feeding the beast of technology.  Consequently, they have created an artificial world that increasingly excludes the natural world.  It was in this cyber world, within the artificial world, where the 2016 election battles were fought.

Cyberspace is essentially a world of isolation.  Within Ellul’s artificial world, we have smartphone devices that appear to make it easier to communicate and gain information.  We understand we have a vast amount of knowledge at our fingertips, although we generally spend more time on social media believing we are “hanging out” with friends in this vast and virtual public place.  Yet social media is constrained. It limits human contact by virtue of its function, its message per McLuhan.  Physically having lunch in a restaurant with a good friend, sharing perceptions and emotions, is not the same as posting on a friend’s timeline. A vast amount of potential information is not available on social media.  Essentially, an artificial communication grid has been placed on Ellul’s artificial world, which has been placed on the natural world.  The device, into which users dive, intending to find a connection with someone, ironically makes one, in fact, more isolated.

Borgman’s “device paradigm” explains the phenomenon.  The device, the smartphone, is a “compound of commodity and machinery.”  Therefore, the device paradigm is “the distinctive pattern of division and connection between its components.”²⁰ Information now is everywhere, but our worlds are growing smaller as we focus on the phone’s display.  The more we focus on the display, the greater authority we give it.  We become more connected with our phones just as we lose interaction with friends and family around us.  We have lunch with a friend at a restaurant but both of us are texting others.  The paradigm has shifted toward the virtual.  Sometimes in retail there may be a long line to check out but the store’s phone rings and your checker answers it. That customer, not even within the vicinity, suddenly has priority. That technology has more authority than you.

Two of the ways Russians disrupted the 2016 election was by creating fake organizations and fake events.  A 2017 CNN headline declared, “Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government.”²¹ The Russians apparently created false political websites for the purpose of sowing division.  They tried to manipulate Americans by inciting rage over the shooting of black men by police officers.  In a related method, on such websites or social media sites, the Russians would organize a fake event. This 2018 headline from The Verge sounds ominous: “Fake news evolved into fake events, and the consequences are scary: An ongoing influence campaign is undermining our shared reality.”²² The article explains it is difficult to tell a fake grassroots event from a real one.  The bottom-line is that credibility is not a given— fake news, fake events, fake people. Using such technology makes it more difficult to know what is real.  The lack of experience communicating with real people in a real environment does not allow a user to develop a natural suspicion that arises when one detects signals of falsehood.  Conversely, the same user may have unreasonable trust in a device that allows access to social media or obvious propaganda. The user spends most of his time on that device.

Neil Postman makes a good point about communication in Technopoly.²³ Postman describes English as an aggressive language.  He shows how we ask questions, in turn, guides the answers.  So in some sense any sort of communication helps form the reality in which we believe we are operating. Add to that the technological element.  Postman then proceeds to describe how we tend to grant authority to “scientism.”  It becomes clear by the way Postman frames his argument that we are more than willing, unconsciously much of the time, to grant authority to anyone or anything that demands it, especially if the persuader uses numbers— at least until we realize what is really at issue.

The issue, however, is not necessarily visible unless we step out of the digital zone to be able to see what the digital zone is doing to us, which is understood to be a metaphysical action rhetorically. I am not intending to dive into the supernatural with this statement, but only to suggest an American’s willingness to grant authority to a larger, relatively unseen force of persuasion is an effect of unintended priming.  Edward Bernays wrote his book, Propagandain 1928.  It was a time when many of the leaders of the western world were watching with concern at the growing power of the masses.  Only 11 years earlier the Bolshevik Revolution removed the ruling class in Russia.  World War I had effectively destroyed the power of the aristocracy throughout Europe.  Bernays understood propaganda to be a simple matter of persuasion — simple, but needed and effective.  The first words of the book spell it out. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”²⁴ Of course, it would take a member of the elite class to literally view the rest of the citizenry as “the masses,” yet that is how Bernays framed his position—as a man who had the knowledge to manipulate the masses in service to the various leaders who, by authority of some sort, led the masses.  Rather than call his service “propaganda,” he became a Counsel of Public Relations.  By working for corporations and government agencies interested in marketing or persuasion, he helped prime generations of Americans who came to accept the pervasiveness of appeals to their pocketbooks or their political positions, as part of the invisible metaphorical air they breathe.  Furthermore, his initial belief that propaganda was not only benign but necessary, helped to encourage what became the ubiquity of commercialization in the American consciousness—essentially, living in a world of pervasive marketing, made Americans particularly accepting of the phenomenon.  It is the gestell of the American experience. The marketing model—that everyone should be marketing themselves, as well as what they do and believe—made the Russian propaganda techniques used in the 2016 election particularly unremarkable to social media users.  Like a good spy, the memes and websites and bots blended in to the scenery.  They were simply common appeals to our political consciousness.

Skrbina, referring to Ellul’s technique, indicates that when it is no longer external—the hands using tools—it becomes our substance.  Everything we do is in service to the technology. “The transformation, so obvious in modern society, is a result of the fact that technique has become autonomous.”²⁵Skrbina, unlike Ellul, does not believe in a separation of the natural world and technology.  He claims they are the same; but not being a technological absolutist, Skrbina writes that human agency has a role in resisting technological determinism.  Nevertheless, “The system thereby becomes a greater determinant of our action, imposing physical and psychological pressures to think and act in certain ways.  Over time it takes progressively more effort to resist the technological pressure.  Over time we are less and less able to act in a truly free manner.”²⁶

Skrbina’s analysis is a more pessimistic consideration of technological persuasiveness that could accurately be described as a dystopian vision of the future.  Or it could be a call for human action.  It is included in this essay because it represents an absolutist perception of the technological phenomenon described by the other theorists.  In that sense it represents a potential underlying process that is being recognized by observers. It is not meant to explain why Russian propaganda was so effective, but to enlarge the picture of the power of technological persuasion.

Within the virtual world is a new set of rules determined, apparently, by users’ desires, but who are limited by the constraints of the technology.  The technology, not being human, is considered impartial, a machine, after all.  It is given great authority because it has no emotion.  It is a machine.  Yet that machine has been programmed by humans, using algorithms created by yet more humans using other technologies in corporations whose reason for the creation of the machine is to monopolize as much of a user’s attention as possible. The design of the technology encourages just that.²⁷

Many attempts have been made to determine how the Russians were so successful disrupting our election.  Many researchers look toward psychology or sociology or politics, hatred or fear or ignorance.  They are all probably accurate to some degree, except for those whose research is quantitatively based.  If one can break down the technique with numbers with absolute accuracy, then indeed, technology has taken us over and everything is predictable.

I have listed these theorists in this way to show how the psychological and social stage could have been set for a successful invasion of American political cyberspace by Russian disinformation.  Russians did not create propaganda but the Soviet Union certainly ran disinformation and misinformation campaigns on its enemies and on its own people. At a 2017 bipartisan U.S. Senate Committee hearing, researchers came to the conclusion that “Russian President Vladimir Putin himself ‘ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.’ [They] described Russia’s tactics as a modern version of Cold War ‘active measures,’ a Soviet-coined tactic for disrupting and influencing the politics of its enemies.”²⁸ There is a very simple phenomenon that occurs when people doubt the truth.  People will not know whom to trust.  As humans we place a lot of authority in the truth.  The Biblical John asserts to know the truth and it will set you free.  To that end, within a Christian tradition at least, knowing the truth is the path to freedom.

A democracy is dependent upon knowing the truth.  Falsehoods, lies, disinformation, misinformation and fake news, all work to undermine the authority of the truth by muddying the water.  Framing and spinning, the modern versions, have been created by the public relations industry to muddy the water (make clients look better.) Not recognizing the truth makes any political system weaker in the long run because it is apparently a human need to know the truth.  The Russians know this.  They probably did not know their strategies would be so successful.  To them they were employing old techniques through a new technology. That new technology has been shaping a new technique that we have yet to fully understand.  Consequently, when we saw the various propaganda messages on our smartphones it did not occur to us we were being used by a foreign adversary through our trusted smartphones.  We were confident we could recognize scams, lies or manipulations because in the real world we usually can.  There is more information being communicated.  On our smartphones the various limitations that restrict communication did not help us recognize the truth.

However, there is more to it than that.  Because we live in a society that has been inundated with persuasive appeals, we have grown much more cynical about the truth.  Folks with agendas claim everyone has an agenda.  Fake news is real news is fake news.  The purpose of propaganda is to sow doubt.  We all place our authority in something, even if it is only ourselves.  The compass that guides us has historically been the definition of truth.  Now, perhaps, we are reinterpreting truth as technology. If we are, in fact, becoming emotionally connected with our smartphones, as the authors of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid suggest, it becomes much more likely we will be persuaded by who or what we love.

Endnotes

1. Molly Mckew. “Did Russia affect the 2016 election? It’s now undeniable.” February, 16, 2018. Accessed from: https://www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-election-its-now-undeniable/.

2. Scott Shane. “These are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016.” The New York Times November 1, 2018. Accessed from: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-election-facebook.html.

3. Donie O’Sullivan and Dylan Byers, “Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government.” CNN, 28, 2017. Accessed from: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/28/media/blacktivist-russia-facebook-twitter/index.html

4. Casey Newton. “Fake news evolved into fake events, and the consequences are scary.” The Verge. August 3, 2018. Accessed from: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/3/17646302/fake-events-facebook-russia-influence-campaign-free-speech.

5. Jon Swaine, “Twitter Admits Far More Russian Bots Posted on Election than It Had Disclosed,” The Guardian, 19, 2018 Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-admits-far-more-russian-bots-posted-on-election-than-it-had-disclosed.

6. Sean Illing, “Bored and Lonely?Blame Your Phone.” May 5, 2019. Accessed from: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/2/18510958/social-media-addiction-boredom-loneliness-society-technology-smart-phones.

7. Illing, “Bored and Lonely? Blame Your Phone.”

8. Russell W. Belk. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 2 (1988): 139-68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489522.

9. E. Shannon, and W. Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication,(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).

10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964) 8.

11. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

12. Aaron Wendland, Christopher Merwin, and Christos Hadjioannou, Heidegger on Technology. (New York: Routledge,1964.)

13. Swaine, “Twitter Admits Far More Russian Bots Posted on Election Than it Had Disclosed.”

14. Allessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara. "Social bots distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential election online discussion" First Monday[Online], Volume 21 Number 11 (November 3, 2016.)

15. Gabe O’Conner, “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” NPR , April 3, 2017, Accessed from: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how-russian-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election.

16. Jacques Ellul. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner.( New York: Knopf, 1965) 63.

17. Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.

18. Gorgias. Project Gutenberg. Accessed from: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1672.

19. Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. (New York: Knopf, 1964.)

20. Albert Borgmann, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003) 18.

21. Donie O’Sullivan and Dylan Byers, “Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government.”

22. “Fake news evolved into fake events, and the consequences are scary.”

23. Neil Postman, Technopoly, (New York: Vintage Books 1993.)

24. Edward Bernays, Propaganda, (Brooklyn: IG Publishing, 2005.)

25. David Skrbina, The Metaphysics of Technology. (New York: Routledge, 2015)191.

26. The Metaphysics of Technology. 204.

27. John Wu. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.)

28. Carroll. “Four things to know about Russia’s 2016 misinformation campaign.” Politifact. Accessed from: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/apr/04/four-things-know-about-russias-2016-misinformation/.

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