Media weapons [can] actually be more potent than atomic bombs.
—PROPAGANDA HANDBOOK OF THE ISLAMIC STATE
“YOU CAN SIT AT HOME AND play Call of Duty or you can come here and respond to the real call of duty . . . the choice is yours.”
It would be an unusual slogan for any army, much less the fanatical forces of the Islamic State. But Junaid Hussain was an unusual recruiter. As a stocky Pakistani boy raised in Britain, he was what one would call a nerd. But in the underground world of hackers, he was cool. “He had hacker cred,” one of his old acquaintances recalled. “He had swagger. He had fangirls.” But Hussain was also reckless—and he got caught. In 2012, at the age of 18, he was jailed for breaking into the emails of an assistant to former British prime minister Tony Blair.
In prison, Hussain was transformed into a holy warrior. He became consumed with radical beliefs, and when his sentence was up, he fled to Syria, becoming an early volunteer for the jihadist group that would eventually become ISIS. He also took a new online handle, “Abu Hussain al-Britani,” and posted a new profile picture of himself cradling an AK-47.
But the rifle was only a prop. The weapons that were far more valuable to ISIS were his good English, his swagger, and his easy familiarity with the internet. He helped organize the Islamic State’s nascent “Cyber Caliphate” hacking division, and he scoured Twitter for potential ISIS recruits.
Hussain’s online persona was infused with charm, pop culture, and righteous indignation. He persuaded hardened radicals and gullible teenagers alike to travel to Syria. It was a striking contrast to how Al Qaeda, the predecessor of ISIS, had bolstered its ranks. The original members of Al Qaeda had been personally known and vetted by bin Laden and his lieutenants. Indeed, the name “Al Qaeda,” translated as “the base,” had been taken from the name for the Afghan mountain camps where they’d all trained together. By contrast, some 30,000 recruits, urged on by Junaid Hussain and his team of recruiters, would travel from around the world to join a group that they’d never met in person.
Hussain also reached out to people who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State but never left home. He recruited at least nine ISIS converts in the United States who would later be killed or arrested there. From thousands of miles away, Hussain served as a bizarre mix of leader, recruiter, and life coach. In one case, he directly organized a shooting at a Texas community center by two self-proclaimed “soldiers of the Caliphate.” “The knives have been sharpened,” Hussain bragged on Twitter scarcely an hour before the attack began. “Soon we will come to your streets with death and slaughter!”
Becoming, in effect, a super-spreader of the terror virus, Hussain achieved celebrity status. He even took a wife—a British punk rock musician in her early 40s, whom he met online. However, his growing fame also made him infamous in U.S. military circles. By 2015, the 21-year-old Hussain had risen to become the third most important name on the Pentagon’s “kill list” of ISIS leaders, ranking only behind the group’s self-declared caliph and top battlefield commander.
Ironically, it was Hussain’s nonstop internet use that enabled his execution. The hacker formerly known as “TriCk” was reportedly tricked into clicking a link that had been compromised by British intelligence. His web use allowed him to be geolocated and dispatched by a Hellfire missile fired by a drone. Working at an internet café late at night, Hussain had thought it safe to leave his stepson—whom he frequently used as a human shield—at home.
In the case of Junaid Hussain can be seen the wider paradox of the Islamic State. When ISIS first seized global attention with its 2014 invasion of Mosul, many observers were flummoxed. The word of the day became “slick.” Indeed, terrorism analysts Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger found “slick” was used more than 5 million times online to describe the Islamic State’s well-doctored images and videos. How could a group of jihadists from a war-torn corner of the world be so adept at using all the tricks of modern viral marketing?
The answer was grounded in demography—and one made almost inevitable by social media’s wildfire spread. On the one hand, ISIS was a religious cult that subscribed to a medieval, apocalyptic interpretation of the Quran. It was led by a scholar with a PhD in Islamic theology, its units commanded by men who had been jihadists since the 1980s. But on the other hand, ISIS was largely composed of young millennials. Its tens of thousands of eager recruits, most drawn from Syria, Iraq, and Tunisia, had grown up with smartphones and Facebook. The result was a terrorist group with a seventh-century view of the world that, nonetheless, could only be understood as a creature of the new internet.
“Terrorism is theater,” declared RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins in a 1974 report that became one of terrorism’s foundational studies. Command enough attention and it didn’t matter how weak or strong you were: you could bend populations to your will and cow the most powerful adversaries into submission. This simple principle has guided terrorists for millennia. Whether in ancient town squares, in colonial wars, or via ISIS’s carefully edited beheadings, the goal has always been the same: to send a message.
If there was any great difference between the effectiveness of the Islamic State and that of terror groups past, it wasn’t in the brains of ISIS fighters; it was in the medium they were using. Mobile internet access could be found even in the remote deserts of Syria; smartphones were available in any bazaar. Advanced video and image editing tools were just one illegal download away, and an entire generation was well acquainted with their use. For those who weren’t, they could easily find free online classes offered by a group called Jihadi Design. It promised to take ISIS supporters “from zero to professionalism” in just a few sessions.
Distributing a global message, meanwhile, was as easy as pressing “send,” with the dispersal facilitated by a network of super-spreaders beyond any one state’s control. This was the most dramatic change from terrorism past. Aboud Al-Zomor was one of the founders of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad terror group and a mastermind of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Thirty years later, he wondered if—had social media had been around at the time—the entire plot might have been unnecessary. “With the old methods,” the aged killer explained, “it was difficult to gather so many people with so much force.” Back then, it took a dramatic, high-profile death to seize public attention. Now all you needed was YouTube.
Viral marketing thus became the Islamic State’s greatest weapon. A ghastly example could be seen in August 2014, when the American journalist James Foley was murdered on camera as he knelt in the Syrian sand. The moment was carefully choreographed to maximize its distribution. Foley was clothed in an orange Guantanamo Bay–style jumpsuit, the symbolism clear to all. His black-clad killer spoke English, to ensure his message was understood beyond the Middle East. Unlike the videos of killings done by earlier groups like Al Qaeda, the clip was edited so that the image faded to black right as the knife was pulled across Foley’s throat. It ripped across the web, propelled by some 60,000 social media accounts that ISIS had carefully prepared in advance, and American public opinion about the wisdom of becoming involved in a third war in the Middle East in a single generation shifted almost overnight. In short order, the U.S. air campaign against ISIS intensified and crossed over into the conflict raging inside Syria. For ISIS, the clip stood among the cheapest, most effective declarations of war in history.
Following the video’s release, there was initial puzzlement as to why the brutal ISIS militants hadn’t made it even more gruesome. Why had the clip faded to black right as the execution began? Some news outlets unwittingly provided the answer when they linked to the full video. Others filled their stories with dramatic screengrabs of Foley’s final seconds, each piece ricocheting onward with more “shares” and comments. The imagery was disturbing, but not too disturbing to post. Even as terrorism experts and Foley’s own family members urged social media users, “Don’t share it. That’s not how life should be,” images of Foley in his orange jumpsuit blanketed the web. One aspiring politician, running for a U.S. House seat in Arizona, even incorporated the clip into her own campaign ads. ISIS was using the same tactics as Russia’s information warriors: Why shoulder all the hard work of spreading your message when you could count on others to do it for you?
Whenever the attention of global audiences ebbed (as it did when ISIS began to run out of Western hostages), the self-declared caliphate turned to ever crueler displays—akin to how online celebrities continually raise the stakes by feeding their followers a diet of surprises. There were videos of prisoners executed by exploding collars or locked in burning cars. One set of prisoners was trapped in a cage and submerged in a pool, their drowning captured by underwater cameras. The Islamic State also used social media to encourage audience engagement. “Suggest a Way to Kill the Jordanian Pilot Pig,” ISIS-linked accounts asked of supporters following their capture of a Jordanian fighter pilot. He was burned alive.
Like any savvy marketer (and Russian sockpuppets), ISIS sought to hijack trending hashtags and inject itself into unrelated stories. “This is our football, it’s made of skin #World Cup,” bragged one ISIS supporter’s tweet, whose accompanying image was exactly what you’d expect. ISIS soon shouldered its way into trending topics as disparate as an earthquake in California (#napaearthquake), and a question-and-answer session with a young YouTube star (#ASKRICKY).
But the Islamic State didn’t simply use the internet as a tool; it also lived there. In the words of Jared Cohen, director of Google’s internal think tank, ISIS was the “first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital territory.” This was where all the accumulated ISIS propaganda resided; where ISIS fighters and fans could mingle; the perch from which it could track and manipulate global opinion; and the locale from which the group could fight on even after it lost its physical turf.
By networking its propaganda, ISIS pushed out a staggering volume of online messaging. In 2016, terrorism analyst Charlie Winter counted nearly fifty different ISIS media hubs, each based in different regions with different target audiences, but all threaded through the internet. These hubs were able to generate over a thousand “official” ISIS releases, ranging from statements to online videos, in just a one-month period. Each then cascaded outward through tens of thousands of ISIS-linked accounts on more than a dozen social media platforms. Such “official” voices were then echoed and supplemented by the personal accounts of thousands of ISIS fighters, who, in turn, were echoed by their tens of thousands of “fans” and “friends” online, both humans and bots.
The price of this online presence was real—and deadly. In Iraq, at least 30,000 civilians would be killed by the group; in Syria, the deaths were literally incalculable in the chaos of the civil war. Beyond the self-declared caliphate, a new recruiting pool of lonely and disenchanted people (a third of whom lived with their parents) fell into the subterranean world of ISIS propaganda, steered toward murdering their own countrymen. Some did so with the help of ISIS taskmasters (“remote-control” attacks), while others did so entirely on their own (“lone wolves”). In the United States, 29-year-old Omar Mateen called 911 to pledge his allegiance to ISIS in the midst of slaughtering forty-nine people in an Orlando nightclub. As he waited to kill himself, he periodically checked his phone to see if his attack had gone viral.
In the West, ISIS’s mix of eye-catching propaganda and calculated attacks was designed with the target’s media environment in mind. Each new attack garnered unstinting attention, particularly from partisan outlets like Breitbart, which thrived on reporting all the most lurid details of ISIS claims, thus stoking outrage and raking in subsequent advertising dollars. Similarly, the militants’ insistence that their actions were in accordance with Islamic scripture—a stance opposed by virtually every actual scholar of Islam—was parroted by this same subsection of far-right media and politicians, who saw it as a way to bolster their own nationalistic, anti-Islamic platforms.
ISIS militants had internalized another important lesson of the social media age: reality is no match for perception. As long as most observers believed that ISIS was winning, it was winning. On the battlefields of Libya and Iraq, it concealed its losses and greatly exaggerated its gains. Far from the battlefields of the Middle East, it could take credit for killings that it had nothing to do with—such as the 2017 Las Vegas shootings in the United States and a mass murder in the Philippines—simply by issuing a claim after the fact.
Soon ISIS had so penetrated the popular imagination that any seemingly random act of violence across Europe or the United States brought the group immediately to mind. Daniel Benjamin, a former U.S. counterterrorism official, noted that mental health had ceased to factor into discussions of Muslims who committed violent crimes. “If there is a mass killing and there is a Muslim involved,” he concluded, “all of a sudden it is, by definition, terrorism.”
By successfully translating its seventh-century ideology into social media feeds, ISIS proved its finesse in what its supporters described as the “information jihad,” a battle for hearts and minds as critical as any waged over territory. It did so through a clear, consistent message and a global network of recruiters. It also did so through a steady rain of what it called media “projectiles,” online content intended to “shatter the morale of the enemy” (or sometimes simply to anger its critics). In the process, ISIS did more than establish a physical state; it also built an unassailable brand. “They have managed to make terrorism sexy,” declared a corporate branding expert, who likened ISIS to a modern-day Don Draper, the Kennedy-era adman of the TV series Mad Men.
ISIS’s legacy will live on long after the group has lost all its physical territory, because it was one of the first conflict actors to fuse warfare with the foundations of attention in the social media age. It mastered the key elements of narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation, each of which we’ll explore in turn. Importantly, none of these elements are unique to terrorism or the Middle East. Indeed, anyone—digital marketers, conspiracy theorists, internet celebrities, politicians, and national militaries—can employ them.
Whatever or wherever the conflict, these are the weapons that win LikeWar.
Spencer Pratt is Southern California personified: blond-haired and blue-eyed, a bro who speaks in bromides. But beneath his surfer-dude appearance, Spencer is also a keen student of people: how they act, how they think, and how to keep their attention. “I always wanted to work for the CIA growing up,” he explained. “I’d be a CIA operative in Hollywood that made movies to manipulate the masses.
“But then,” he added with a laugh, “I became a reality star.”
By his freshman year at USC, he’d figured out how to make $50,000 for a photo he’d taken of Mary-Kate Olsen. But what fascinated him back then in the early 2000s was the bizarre, emerging landscape of reality television. “I saw The Osbournes on MTV,” Spencer recalls. “I saw that they were getting 60 million viewers to watch—with due respect to Ozzy—a British guy mumbling and his wife yelling, cleaning up dog poop. I was like, ‘This is what reality television is? I could make one of these shows.’”
And so he did. Pratt became the creator and producer of The Princes of Malibu, an early reality show on Fox that followed two rich brothers who were notable only because of their celebrity father, Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner. The show fizzled after a few episodes, but not before unleashing the brothers’ stepfamily, the Kardashians, upon the world.
As he faced the prospect of going back to college, Pratt had a better idea. He was telegenic, charming, and shameless. Why not try to be in one of those shows instead?
The year was 2006, and MTV was in the midst of launching another reality-television saga, The Hills, about four young women trying to make it big in Beverly Hills. So Pratt sought out the venues where The Hills was filming. At a nightclub called Privilege, the intrepid hustler sat himself in a booth, surrounded by Playboy Playmates. This tableau caught the eye of Heidi Montag, The Hills blonde costar; she stole him away from the Playmates for a dance. They hit it off, and Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag soon became “Speidi.”
Pratt had gotten on TV, but now he had to figure out how to stay there. So he gave the supposed reality show what it had lacked: a villain. In short order, The Hills’ story line shifted to a seemingly psychopathic boyfriend and a woman who kept coming back to him. Each episode brought new shocks and new lows. He flirted with other women in front of Montag and gleefully scorned her family. He stoked rumors about a costar and a supposed sex tape, which was roundly condemned by the entertainment press, but which generated a season’s worth of fireworks as friendships exploded.
Of course, the vast majority of it was fake, as most of the “reality” show was staged. Still, it worked and ratings soared. But to gain further fame and fortune, Spencer realized he needed to do something more. “I got into manipulating the media,” he told us.
Between seasons, the couple worked to stay in the news by releasing a steady stream of scandalous photographs and shocking interview quotes. “What took us to the next level was working with the paparazzi,” Pratt recalled. At a time when most celebrities eschewed the paparazzi, the Hills villains embraced them. “I just figured that we could come up with these stories, and work with the magazines, and give them that juicy, gossipy stuff that they usually have to make up,” Pratt explained. “Why not help make it up with them . . . and get paid for it?”
By learning how to give the media and audiences what they wanted, Speidi soon ranked among reality television’s highest-paid and most visible stars. They were also the most despised. Pratt was twice nominated as the Teen Choice Awards’ “Best Villain,” an award typically reserved for fictional characters (among his competitors was Superman nemesis Lex Luthor). This was the price of fame: people couldn’t look away, but they also hated him for it. Sounding a little remorseful, Pratt described filming a fake pregnancy scare with Montag that ended (on camera) with him stomping on the gas after throwing her out of the car. “We shot that scene like twelve times,” he said. “I didn’t think anything of it. I should have, because every woman on the planet was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s the worst person on the earth!’ Really, my wife and I just drove away and went to dinner. But the audience sees this guy leaving his girl on the side of the street in tears.”
Pratt and Montag had constructed a story line—a remorseless, psychopathic man and a manipulated, unhappy woman—that clung to them long after The Hills had ended. They had captivated millions of people and grown famous in the process. But they had also created a kind of cultural gravity they couldn’t escape. As he explained, “I was getting paid so much money to be just an awful asshole. You start doing your interviews like that, and next thing is, you’ve got to stay in character. You’re getting paid so much money to not care, it’s like, ‘Whatever.’ But then you forget, like, ‘Wait. No. Middle America doesn’t get this is all fake.’”
In other words, they’d built a “narrative.” Narratives are the building blocks that explain both how humans see the world and how they exist in large groups. They provide the lens through which we perceive ourselves, others, and the environment around us. They are the stories that bind the small to the large, connecting personal experience to some bigger notion of how the world works. The stronger a narrative is, the more likely it is to be retained and remembered.
The power of a narrative depends on a confluence of factors, but the most important is consistency—the way that one event links logically to the next. Speidi wasn’t merely insufferable once or twice; they were reliably insufferable, assembling a years-long narrative that kept viewers furious and engaged. As narratives generate attention and interest, they necessarily abandon some of their complexity. The story of Spencer Pratt, the vain villain, was simpler—and more engaging—than the story of the conflicted self-promoter who pretended to leave his girlfriend on the curb in order to pump the ratings.
Human minds are wired to seek and create narrative. Every moment of the day, our brains are analyzing new events—a kind word from our boss, a horrible tweet from a faraway war—and binding them into thousands of different narratives already stowed in our memories. This process is subconscious and unavoidable. In a pioneering 1944 study, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel produced a short film that showed three geometric figures (two triangles and a circle) bouncing off each other at random. They screened the film to a group of test subjects, asking them to interpret the shapes’ actions. All but one of the subjects described these abstract objects as living beings; most saw them as representations of humans. In the shapes’ random movements, they expressed motives, emotions, and complex personal histories. The circle was “worried,” one triangle was “innocent,” and the other was “blinded by rage.” Even in crude animation, most observers saw a story of high drama, while the one who didn’t was an oddity.
By simplifying complex realities, good narratives can slot into other people’s preexisting comprehension. If a dozen bad things happen to you on your way to work, you simply say you’re having a “bad day,” and most people will understand intuitively what you mean. The most effective narratives can thus be shared among entire communities, peoples, or nations, because they tap into our most elemental notions.
Following World War II, for instance, some U.S. statesmen advocated the massive aid package known as the Marshall Plan because of its “psychological political by-products.” They saw that the true value of the $13 billion program was the narrative it would build about the United States as a nation that was both wealthy and generous. This single story line was valuable in multiple ways. It not only countered Soviet narratives about whose economic system was best, but it also cast America as a great benefactor, which linked the U.S.-European relationship to other narrative themes of charity, gratitude, and debt. In the slightly less grand case of Speidi and The Hills, Spencer was no less strategic in using his villainy. By playing a familiar role, he created outrage against the couple that was shared almost universally, but that gave him a path to fame and fortune.
Today, Spencer and Heidi are a little wiser, older, and poorer. Pioneers in the world of self-made celebrity, they’ve watched the development of modern social media with fascination. They described to us how much the game has changed in just a few years. Montag marveled that, in a world of smartphones, “everyone’s an editor,” tweaking each word and image until it conforms to an idealized sense of self. “Now everyone is a reality star,” Pratt added. “And they’re all as fake as we were.”
The challenge now is thus more how to build an effective narrative in a world of billions of wannabe celebrities. The first rule is simplicity. In 2000, the average attention span of an internet user was measured at twelve seconds. By 2015, it had shrunk to eight seconds—slightly less than the average attention span of a goldfish. An effective digital narrative, therefore, is one that can be absorbed almost instantly.
This is where the simple, direct hip-hop vernacular of Junaid Hussain proved so effective in reaching out to millennial youth, compared with the book-length treatises of earlier jihadist recruiters. Donald Trump also capitalized on the premium that social media places on simplicity. During the 2016 election, Carnegie Mellon University researchers studied and ranked the complexity of the candidates’ language (giving it what is known as a Flesch-Kincaid score). They found that Trump’s vocabulary measured at the lowest level of all the candidates, comprehensible to someone with a fifth-grade education.
This phenomenon might seem unprecedented, but it is consistent with a larger historic pattern. Starting with George Washington’s first inaugural address, which measured as one of the most complex overall, American presidents communicated at a college level only when newspapers dominated mass communication. But each time a new technology took hold, the complexity score dipped. It started with the advent of radio in the 1920s, and again with the entry of television in the 1950s, and now once more with social media. To put it another way: the more accessible the technology, the simpler a winning voice becomes. It may be Sad! But it is True!
This explains why so many modern narratives exist at least partially in images. Pictures are not just worth the proverbial thousand words; they deliver the point quickly. Consider one popular photograph, of a shark swimming down a flooded street, supposedly taken from a car window. For years, the (fake) picture has popped up during every major hurricane, captivating social media users and infuriating the biologists who keep having to debunk it. Yet, its longevity makes a lot of sense. For people inundated with news about the latest storm’s severity and “record-breaking” rainfall, the image—a shark swimming where it clearly doesn’t belong—instantly tells a story with scary consequences. It is fast, evocative, and (most important) easily shared. It is also influential, helping inspire the Sharknado franchise.
The second rule of narrative is resonance. Nearly all effective narratives conform to what social scientists call “frames,” products of particular language and culture that feel instantly and deeply familiar. In the American experience, think of plotlines like “rebel without a cause” or “small-town kid trying to make it in the big city.” Some frames are so common and enduring that they might well be hardwired into our brains. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythologist Joseph Campbell famously argued that one frame in particular—“the Hero’s Journey”—has existed in the myths of cultures around the globe. Quite often, these frames can merge with the real-life narratives our brains construct to explain ourselves and the world around us. A resonant narrative is one that fits neatly into our preexisting story lines by allowing us to see ourselves clearly in solidarity with—or opposition to—its actors. Social media can prove irresistible in this process by allowing us to join in the narrative, with the world watching.
Spencer and Heidi achieved resonance by being what every hero or heroine needs—a villainous foe—which they played to caricature. Among its opponents, ISIS achieved resonance by being similarly cartoonishly evil. Among its supporters, it achieved resonance by promising the mystery, adventure, or lofty purpose they’d been hoping for their entire lives. Even for members of Congress, there is a powerful correlation between their level of online celebrity and a narrative of ideological extremism. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the more unyieldingly hyperpartisan a member of Congress is—best fitting our concept of the characters in a partisan play—the more Twitter followers he or she draws.
This also explains why conspiracy theories have found new life on the internet. It’s innately human to want to feel as if you’re at the center of a sweeping plotline in which you are simultaneously the aggrieved victim (such as of the vast global cabal that oversees the “deep state”) and the unlikely hero, who will bring the whole thing crashing down by bravely speaking the truth. The more an article claims that it contains information that governments or doctors “don’t want us to know,” the more likely we are to click on it.
The third and final rule of narrative is novelty. Just as narrative frames help build resonance, they also serve to make things predictable. Too much predictability, though, can be boring, especially in an age of microscopic attention spans and unlimited entertainment. The most effective storytellers tweak, subvert, or “break” a frame, playing with an audience’s expectations to command new levels of attention. At the speed of the internet, novelty doesn’t have time to be subtle. Content that can be readily perceived as quirky or contradictory will gain a disproportionate amount of attention. A single image of an ISIS fighter posing with a jar of Nutella, for instance, was enough to launch dozens of copycat news articles.
These three traits—simplicity, resonance, and novelty—determine which narratives stick and which fall flat. It’s no coincidence that everyone from far-right political leaders to women’s rights activists to the Kardashian clan speaks constantly of “controlling the narrative.” To control the narrative is to dictate to an audience who the heroes and villains are; what is right and what is wrong; what’s real and what’s not. As jihadist Omar Hammami, a leader of the Somali-based terror group Al-Shabaab, put it, “The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalm, and knives.”
The big losers in this narrative battle are those people or institutions that are too big, too slow, or too hesitant to weave such stories. These are not the kinds of battles that a plodding, uninventive bureaucracy can win. As a U.S. Army officer lamented to us about what happens when the military deploys to fight this generation’s web-enabled insurgents and terrorists, “Today we go in with the assumption that we’ll lose the battle of the narrative.”
And yet, as we’ll see, narrative isn’t the only factor that drives virality, nor are narratives forever fixed in place. Speidi may have been boxed in by their self-created villainy, but they’re now writing a new story line. They’ve rebranded themselves as wizened experts on fame, melded with one of the oldest narratives of all: loving parents. Soon after we spoke with them, the couple proudly announced Montag’s pregnancy—for real this time.
But they’ve not forgotten their old lessons. They chose their new son’s name (Gunner Stone) based, in part, on which social media handles were available at the time.
“When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”
The writer T. S. Eliot was despairing over the death of literary criticism thanks to the nineteenth century’s “vast accumulations of knowledge.” Yet his words are even more applicable in the twenty-first century. What captures the most attention on social media isn’t content that makes a profound argument or expands viewers’ intellectual horizons. Instead, it is content that stirs emotions. Amusement, shock, and outrage determine how quickly and how far a given piece of information will spread through a social network. Or, in simpler terms, content that can be labeled “LOL,” “OMG,” or “WTF.”
These are the sorts of feelings that create arousal, not the sexual kind (at least not usually), but the kind in which the heart beats faster and the body surges with fresh energy. Arousal can be positive or negative. A baby dancing, a politician standing up for what she believes in, the story of a disabled man being robbed and beaten, and an awful flight delay are things that people will likely consume and forward to others in their network. A decade’s worth of psychology and marketing studies, conducted across hundreds of thousands of social media users, have arrived at the same simple conclusion: the stronger the emotions involved, the likelier something is to go viral.
But the findings go further. In 2013, Chinese data scientists conducted an exhaustive study of conversations on the social media platform Weibo. Analyzing 70 million messages spread across 200,000 users, they discovered that anger was the emotion that traveled fastest and farthest through the social network—and the competition wasn’t even close. “Anger is more influential than other emotions like joy,” the researchers bluntly concluded. Because social media users were linked to so many others who thought and felt as they did, a single instance of outrage could tear through an online community like wildfire. “The angry mood delivered through social ties could boost the spread of the corresponding news and speed up the formation of public opinion and collective behavior,” the researchers wrote. People who hadn’t been angry before, seeing so much anger around them, feel inclined to ramp up their language and join in the fury.
A year later, an even larger and more insidious study confirmed the power of anger. Partnering with Facebook, data scientists manipulated the newsfeeds of nearly 700,000 users over the course of a week, without the knowledge of the “participants.” For some, the researchers increased the number of positive stories to which they were exposed. For others, they increased the number of negative stories. In each case, Facebook users altered their own behavior to match their new apparent reality, becoming cheerier or angrier in the process. But the effect was most pronounced among those whose newsfeeds had turned negative. The scientists dubbed this an “emotional contagion,” the spread of emotions through social networks that resembled nothing so much as the transmission of a virus. “Emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people,” the scientists concluded, “and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.” Just seeing repeated messages of joy or outrage was enough to make people feel those emotions themselves.
Anger remains the most potent emotion, in part because it is the most interactive. As social media users find ways to express (or exploit) anger, they generate new pieces of content that are propelled through the same system, setting off additional cascades of fury. When an issue has two sides—as it almost always does—it can resemble a perpetual-motion machine of outrage. The graphic online propaganda of ISIS, for instance, served a dual purpose. Not only did it elicit waves of shock and outrage in the West; it also drove a violent anti-Islamic backlash, which ISIS could use to fuel renewed anger and resolve among its own recruits.
Anger is not necessarily bad. After all, nearly every political movement that has risen to prominence in the social media age has done so by harnessing the power of outrage. Sometimes, activists fight for better government policy, using a single, viral moment as their rallying cry: a deadly 2011 train derailment in Zhejiang, China; a massive 2017 apartment building fire in London; or a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Other times, the cause is social or racial justice. In 2013, Alicia Garza posted a passionate message about police shootings of African Americans on her Facebook page. She closed it with a simple note: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” A friend then reposted the resonant message on his page, adding the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. It quickly went viral, fueling a new type of civil rights movement that united 1960s activism with twenty-first-century media platforms. In a matter of days, #BlackLivesMatter would evolve from a mere hashtag to nationwide protests, online organizing, and successfully lobbying for scores of local- and state-level police reforms.
But the bigger picture is grim. If attention is the thing that matters most online—and as we saw in the last chapter, it is—brazen self-promoters will go to any lengths to achieve it. Because anger is so effective at building and sustaining an audience, those who seek viral fame and power have every reason to court controversy and adopt the most extreme positions possible, gaining rewards by provoking fury in others. “Anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering,” observed the wise Master Yoda. And that suffering leads to the Dark Side: what is better known on the internet as trolling.
Although the word “troll” conjures images of beasts lurking under bridges and dates back to Scandinavian folklore, its modern internet use actually has its roots in the Vietnam War. American F-4 Phantom fighter jets would linger near North Vietnamese strongholds, taunting them. If eager, inexperienced enemy pilots took the bait and moved to attack, the Americans’ superior engines would suddenly roar into action, and the aces would turn to shoot down their foes. American pilots called this deception “trolling for MiGs.”
Early online discussion boards copied both the term and the technique. “Trolling for newbies” became a sport in which experienced users would post shamelessly provocative questions designed to spark the ire of new (and unwitting) users. The newbies would then waste time trying to argue a point that was simply designed to make them argue. An article from a digital magazine of the time succinctly described the appeal of trolling: “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
While early trolling was characterized by wink-and-nudge humor, as more and more people (and real-life problems) penetrated digital sanctuaries, the good-natured joking part soon died. Today, we know trolls as those internet users who post messages that are less about sharing information than spreading anger. Their specific goal is to provoke a furious response. The substance of their messages varies so widely as to be essentially irrelevant. Trolls do everything from slinging incendiary lies about political foes to posing as cancer patients. The only consistency is their use of emotional manipulation. Indeed, the words that best capture this trolling ethos were, appropriately enough, laid down in 1946 by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in describing the tactics of anti-Semites:
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words . . . They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
The modern version is perhaps best expressed by one of the internet’s better-known trolls, “Ironghazi,” who explained, “The key to being a good troll is being just stupid enough to be believable, keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is making people mad online.”
In many ways, the Russian sockpuppets masquerading as American voters and venting fog into the geopolitical system in 2016 were trolls—just paid ones. Most trolling behavior, however, bears little resemblance to that of trained, professional provocateurs. Although a small number of trolls are pathological (exhibiting actual psychopathy and sadism), the vast majority are everyday people giving in to their rage. In a report titled “Anyone Can Become a Troll,” a team of researchers found that mounting anger turns users toward trolling behavior. And just like conspiracy theories, the more the anger spreads, the more internet users are made susceptible to it.
After people have trolled once, they’re twice as likely to engage in trolling behavior than those who’ve never done it. And as non-trolls engage with trolls, many embrace trolling tactics themselves. “Such behavior can . . . spread from person to person in discussions and persist across them to spread further in the community,” the team wrote. “Our findings suggest that trolling . . . can be contagious, and that ordinary people, given the right conditions, can act like trolls.”
There’s no doubt that trolling makes the internet a worse place. Trolling targets livelihoods and ruins lives. It silences voices and drives people into hiding, reserving special cruelty for women and racial minorities. Even those who escape the trolls’ ire must still contend with a digital environment that amplifies outrage and effectively mutes everything else. The power of trolls—which really represents the power of anger—transforms the internet into a caustic, toxic swamp.
But the worst online trolling doesn’t necessarily stay online. Think back to the online battles of American street gangs—their “cybertagging” and “Facebook drilling”—or the deliberate antagonism of people from one government or ethnic group against another. These angry flame wars are trolling by another name, intended to grab attention and stir outrage. Such trolling too often ends in real-life violence and tragedy. Or it can yield political power.
Whether the case is swaggering street-fighters or the everyday people who revel in harassing someone after a tweet falls flat, anger is the force that binds them together. Anger is exciting. Anger is addictive. Indeed, in a digital environment suffused with liars and fakes, anger feels raw and real in a way that so many other things never do. This authenticity carries an additional power of its own.
Taylor Swift’s Instagram comments fell with the power of precision air strikes.
“You have the prettiest, wildest, most child like eyes,” the superstar wrote to a young fan dealing with boy troubles. “Feel good about being the kind of person who loves selflessly. I think someday you’ll find someone who loves you in that exact way.”
And to another, a 16-year-old fan who’d just gotten her driver’s license: “YES! You passed!!!!!!!! So stoked for you. ‘Don’t text and drive’ is an obvious piece of advice but people usually forget to tell you 1) don’t eat and drive 2) don’t apply mascara and drive 3) never let a small animal such as a cat roam free in your car. I’m not saying any of this from personal experience. I repeat. None of that happened to me.”
Comments like these felt real because they were real. It really was Taylor Swift scrolling through her Instagram feed, learning about the lives of her fans, and tapping out thoughtful comments. She even coined her own hashtag to describe this practice: #Taylurking.
It also was a strategy designed around Swift’s intuitive grasp of how social media had changed the cultural landscape. Reflecting on her first record-label meetings, Swift explained how she’d wowed the stodgy music executives by “explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace.” She added, “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.”
By recognizing this change, Swift transformed from a young millennial with a smartphone and a great voice into the ruler of a billion-dollar music empire, empowered by millions of “Swifties,” her army of fervent online fans (a name she strategically copyrighted). She sold 40 million albums, shattered digital streaming records, and, at 26 years old, was named the youngest of Forbes magazine’s wealthiest self-made women.
Was her virtual authenticity all an act? It was certainly true that Swift penned her Instagram missives with the knowledge that anyone could read them. All those “candid” shots of her celebrity-stuffed parties weren’t very candid at all. And whenever Swift fell into a feud that stirred anger online, it was cleverly folded into the marketing for her next album. “Asking whether or not Taylor Swift is genuine is like asking if Kylie Jenner’s had plastic surgery, or if Calvin Harris is a real musician,” mused entertainment reporter Amy Zimmerman. “There’s no simple answer out there—just a whole lot of conflicting opinions.”
Yet Swift’s online success also showed that question didn’t matter. “Authenticity” was becoming as dual in meaning as “fact” or “reality.” It really was her dour white cat featured on her Instagram account; it really was her dropping in on a World War II veteran (and Swift superfan) for an impromptu concert or sending out random Christmas gifts with sweet, handwritten notes. But it was also true that each of these actions fed and expanded her juggernaut brand. Swift had married her fame to a sense of intimacy and openness, to a cascade of endless surprises. As she explained, “I think forming a bond with fans in the future will come in the form of constantly providing them with the element of surprise. No, I did not say ‘shock’; I said ‘surprise.’ I believe couples can stay in love for decades if they just continue to surprise each other, so why can’t this love affair exist between an artist and their fans?”
Swift hadn’t built a fake life; she’d built a performative one. She could approach her fans on their level, and fit the perception of her life into theirs, by uploading a post that spotlighted what made her most relatable: fun with friends, thoughts on the nature of love, and lots of cat pictures. In so doing, Swift harnessed the power of online authenticity and cemented her fame. She also cleared a path toward viral success that today’s enterprising marketers—celebrities, corporations, politicians, livestreamers, and terrorists—all seek to follow.
Achieving a sense of authenticity has become an important milestone for any online operation. In bland corporate jargon, this is called “brand engagement”—extending an organization’s reach by building a facsimile of a relationship between an impersonal brand and its followers. The Islamic State, for instance, expanded its influence not just through propagandists like Junaid Hussain, but through a general sense of authenticity—a feeling that the terrorist group was somehow more “real” than its rival militant organizations. ISIS fighters proved this by living their lives online, posting images not just of their battles but also of their birthday parties and (naturally) their cats. Like Taylor Swift’s clever marketing, ISIS’s professionally choreographed videos were complemented by chaotic, seemingly candid footage—albeit taken from Syrian battlefields instead of celebrity-studded Fourth of July parties. And like Swift’s strategy, this mix of carefully curated media promotion and surprisingly roughshod moments eventually merged, becoming part of the same identity.
These qualities lay at the heart of ISIS’s success in online recruiting. Its fighters would talk up the glory of the caliphate but also muse about their sadness over the death of the actor Robin Williams and their childhood love of his character in the movie Jumanji. This authenticity won and inspired followers in a way that government press releases could not. Plenty of radicalized Westerners, pulled back from the brink of recruitment, described online relationships that unspooled over weeks or months. In time, the jihadists living on the other side of the world seemed less like recruiters than friends.
Where this internet-age authenticity has proven most crucial, however, is in electoral politics. Since their very invention in ancient Greece, democracies have been guided by a special class of people discussed in Aristotle’s Politika: politicians, people who seek to rise above their fellow citizens and to lead them. But this created an enduring paradox of democracy. To gain power over their peers, politicians have often had to make themselves seem like their peers. In the United States especially—a nation whose aversion to a noble class is written into its Constitution—the politician who seems most down-to-earth has long carried the day.
The irony, of course, is that most people who run for political office aren’t very relatable at all. They’re quite often rich, elitist, and sheltered from voters’ daily problems. As a result, American politics has long been a tug-of-war over who seems most authentic. In the nineteenth century, even the wealthiest candidates published newspaper biographies that played up their humble farmer’s roots. The twentieth century saw the birth of “photo ops”—first painfully staged photographs, then even more painfully staged televised campaign stops, taking place in a seemingly limitless number of Iowa diners.
With the rise of social media, however, the fight to be real turned to what it meant to be real online. When Trump first stormed into the 2016 U.S. presidential race, few political analysts took his run seriously. He broke all the cardinal rules of American politics: he didn’t try to be an “everyman”; he bragged about being rich; he violated every social taboo he could find; he made outlandish statements; and he never, ever apologized. As “expert” analysts shook their heads in disgust, however, millions of American voters perked up and paid attention. This was a politician who was well and truly authentic.
At the heart of Trump’s authenticity was his Twitter account. Clearly his own creature, it was unpredictable and hyperbolic and full of id. Even Trump’s most ardent critics found something captivating about a presidential candidate staying up late into the night, tapping out stream-of-consciousness tweets in his bedclothes. “It’s a reason why Trump’s Twitter feed is so effective,” observed reporter Maggie Haberman. “People feel like he’s talking to them.” This was in stark contrast to his opponent Hillary Clinton, whose tweets were sometimes crafted by a team of eleven staffers. And it was a platform Trump came to love. “My use of social media is not Presidential,” he tweeted in response to negative headlines about his continuing Twitter obsession, “it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.”
It was both a real sentiment and a planned-out strategy that Taylor Swift and Junaid Hussain alike would have immediately recognized.
Internet-age authenticity doesn’t just empower an idea or person. It also draws us into contact with others who think and act as we do.
“In the end, what people want is to be united in something bigger than them . . . a sense of belonging,” explained a 43-year-old Canadian postal worker when asked why he’d joined a close-knit, 50,000-person Facebook group called La Meute. After all, Facebook’s very mission statement is to “bring the world closer together.”
But this meeting of the minds illustrated a larger problem: La Meute (The Pack) was an ultra-right-wing extremist group based in Canada and dedicated to fighting Islam and immigrants via paramilitary tactics and hate speech. It was exactly the sort of “interactive community” once prophesied by Licklider and Taylor back in 1968—except that it was one bonded by hate.
The term “community” connotes a group with shared interests and identities that, importantly, make them distinct from the wider world. In the past, a community resided in a specific location. Now it can be created online, including (and perhaps especially) among those who find a common sense of fellowship in the worst kinds of shared identities that exclude others.
As it has with so many other movements, social media has revolutionized white nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups, spiking their membership and allowing their views to move back into mainstream discourse. In the United States, the number of Twitter followers of such groups ballooned 600 percent between 2012 and 2016, and the Southern Poverty Law Center now tracks some 1,600 far-right extremist groups. Through the web, these groups can link up globally, American neo-Nazis connecting with Hungarian anti-Semites and British fascists.
As these extremists have banded together, they have carved out online spaces where they are encouraged and empowered to “be themselves.” They have found warmth and joy in each other’s company, even as they advocate for the forced deportation of those whose skin color or religion is different from their own. Beyond hatred of immigrants and Muslims, they have few consistent positions. But hate is enough to draw these communities together and propel some of their members toward lethal violence. In the United States alone, from 2014 to the end of 2017 fifty people were killed and another eighty-two injured by young white men fueled by alt-right ideology and white nationalist social media.
Ironically, in their aggressive recruiting, inspiration of lone wolf killers, and effective use of authenticity to build a community, these far-right extremists resemble nothing so much as the Islamic State. In northern Europe, the mothers of children who ran away to join the Islamic State recalled how their sons and daughters—reckoning with the social isolation that faces the offspring of many Middle Eastern migrants—looked to ISIS to fill the void. A lonely girl in Washington State—a volunteer Sunday school teacher and part-time babysitter—described how ISIS recruiters gave her the attentive friends she’d always craved. (Only a sharp-eyed grandmother stopped her from boarding a plane to Syria.) ISIS promised adventure and a sense of belonging. “It’s a closed community—almost a clique,” explained terrorism analyst Seamus Hughes. “They share memes and inside jokes, terms and phrases you’d only know if you were a follower.”
In each case, recruits to extremist causes are lured by a warmth and camaraderie that seems lacking in their own lonely lives. In each case, such recruits build communities that attract people from across the world but that show almost no diversity of thought. “Isolation may be the beginning of terror,” political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in a 1953 essay about the origins of totalitarianism. “It certainly is its most fertile ground.” If people come to believe that their radical notions are unassailably true—and if they believe that only other people who share the same opinions are “real” or worth protecting—they open the door to violence and bloodshed.
Not by coincidence, the field of study that seeks to counter this process of radicalization, known as countering violent extremism (CVE), also focuses on the powers of community-building. Farah Pandith is a pioneer of this field. Born in the restive Kashmir region of India, Pandith moved to Massachusetts as a young girl. Two moments changed the trajectory of her life. One took place at Smith College, where as a student in 1989 Pandith gave a speech attended by school alumnae, including Barbara Bush. The First Lady was impressed and soon became her pen pal. The other occurred a few years later, back in her birthplace of Srinagar, Kashmir. One family member, who was working to bring peace to the region, was assassinated by extremists. Then, the very same day, another died in violence that broke out during the funeral procession. Pandith’s life became guided by a simple question: How could she prevent such tragedy from happening to others?
With the help of her new friend in the White House, Pandith joined the U.S. government. Over the next two decades, she served in various roles in both Republican and Democratic administrations, eventually being appointed the first-ever U.S. special representative to Muslim communities. In this position, established to engage in the post-9/11 “battle of ideas,” Pandith traveled to eighty countries and met with thousands of young, disaffected Muslims in places ranging from the slums of Düsseldorf to the mosques of Mali. She foresaw a crisis of identity that would soon sweep the Middle East, culminating in the rise of ISIS. But she also saw something else. “Only peer-to-peer relations can change minds,” she concluded. The only way to prevent radicalization was to assemble a crowd of authentic voices to fight back.
Pandith determined that social media would be the key battleground in this fight. She became one of the first high-level U.S. officials to use Facebook in her work. She learned that it was not just a megaphone but also a means to keep her connected to the youth she met around the world, and, even more important, to connect them with each other. “Because I was fully focusing on millennials, I needed to be able to show them in real time what I was hearing from others,” she explained. “I wanted to connect the kid I met in Germany with a kid in Australia. The conversation I was having in Mauritania with the cool thing in the Pamir mountains [of Tajikistan] that they were doing.” Each could become an ally to the other—and part of a broad collective to push back against the specter of extremism.
Frustrated by a bureaucracy that couldn’t get out of its own way and realizing that a teenager’s heart and mind are places where “no government is credible,” Pandith has since left government. But she hasn’t quit the fight. Instead, she has worked to assemble groups around the world into a CVE version of what she has dubbed a “Dumbledore’s Army.”
The name is taken from the Harry Potter series, in which a group of teens mobilize to fight evil. In recent years, a number of these sorts of CVE organizations have arisen. There’s the Online Civil Courage Initiative, which links more than a hundred anti-hate organizations across Europe, and Gen Next, which seeks to “deprogram” former jihadists. There’s even Creative Minds for Social Good, which has enlisted Middle East YouTube and Instagram stars to visit mosques and churches, sharing interfaith exchanges with their millions of followers.
As Pandith explained, the community is seeking to empower those who know best how to speak to youth: their peers. They can “swarm the content of the extremists online with credible voices that will diminish their standing and showcase a whole host of alternative narratives.” For instance, if a 16-year-old girl “is getting more and more interested in what’s happening with the ‘superhero’ guy who’s fighting for [ISIS], in real time she’ll see her peers push back, ‘That’s dumb. That’s stupid. That doesn’t make sense.’”
This community-building has hardly erased the specter of terrorism. But it represents a far more personal and effective approach than staid government broadcasts and press releases. It is also just one example of a new kind of conflict fought largely with bite-sized social media broadcasts, what communications scholar Haroon Ullah has described as “digital world war.”
Whether it is politicians or pop stars, hate groups or those that tell haters to “shake it off,” the new winners are those who have mastered the power of narrative and primed their audiences with emotion, who have fostered a sense of authenticity and engaged in the community-building that goes with it. But they have another trick up their sleeve. Not only do they do it all on a massive scale—they do it again and again and again at the most personal level.
It was the biggest surprise in internet history. One data scientist found that in the twenty-four hours that followed Donald Trump’s election night win of November 8, 2016, the word “fuck” appeared nearly 8 million times on Twitter.
Trump’s victory was just as much of a shock to the political system. As the writer Jason Pargin observed, “Trump ran against the most well-funded, well-organized political machine in the history of national politics . . . All of the systems that are supposed to make sure one side wins failed. He smashed a billion-dollar political machine to pieces.”
And yet in retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t have been all that surprising, for it was evident at the time that Trump had put to better use the new machine that had already smashed communications and the economy. Indeed, by almost any social media measure, Trump didn’t just have more online power than both his Republican and Democratic opponents; he was a literal superpower. He had by far the most social media followers, effectively as many as all his Republican rivals for the GOP nomination combined. He deployed this network to scale, pushing out the most messages, on the most platforms, to the most people. Importantly, Trump’s larger follower pool was made up of not just real-world voters, but—as we’ve discussed previously—a cavalcade of bots and sockpuppet accounts from around the world that amplified his every message and consequently expanded his base of support.
With his Twitter loudspeaker, Trump could drive the national conversation at a pace and volume that left both journalists and his opponents scrambling to keep up. It allowed him not just to dominate the web-borne portion of the 2016 election, but to dominate all other forms of media through it, thus capturing $5 billion worth of “free” media coverage (nearly twice that of Clinton). As Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden explained, “Trump understands one important dynamic: In a world where there is a wealth of information, there is always a poverty of attention, and he has this ability to generate four or five story lines a day . . . He is always in control.”
In an interview shortly after the election, Trump reflected on how he had won. “I think that social media has more power than the money they spent, and I think . . . I proved that.”
But Trump’s power lay not just in @realDonaldTrump but in the wider online army mobilized behind it. In his quest for the White House, Trump attracted the regular coalition of evangelical conservatives and traditional Republican partisans. But his crucial, deciding force was a new group: a cohort of mostly tech-savvy angry, young, white men who inhabited the deepest bowels of internet culture.
While many had gotten their start on 4chan, a notorious image board where anonymous users fight an endless battle of profane one-upmanship, the group is better understood through what is known as “Poe’s Law.” This is an internet adage that emerged from troll-infested arguments on the website Christian Forums. The law states, “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a [fundamentalist] in such a way that someone won’t mistake it for the genuine article.” In other words, there is a point at which the most sincere profession of faith becomes indistinguishable from a parody; where a simple, stupid statement might actually be considered an act of profound meta-irony. Taken to its logical conclusion, Poe’s Law could lead to a place of profound nihilism, where nothing matters and everything is a joke. And this was exactly where many of these internet denizens took it.
From the beginning, many of these lifelong trolls found something to admire in Trump. Part of the reason was cultural; they felt marginalized by national conversations about race and gender (“identity politics”) and saw Trump as the cure. Part of it was economic; although hardly coal miners, they bought into Trump’s economic populism and his vow to “Make America Great Again.” But most of all, they liked Trump because, in the fast-talking, foulmouthed, combative billionaire, they saw someone just like them—a troll.
Trump’s digital force organized in many dark corners of the internet, but their main roost was Reddit. The discussion board /r/The_Donald was launched a week after Trump’s June 2015 presidential campaign announcement. What had started with a few dozen tongue-in-cheek supporters grew to 100,000 by the time he clinched the nomination in April 2016 and then to 270,000 by November 2016. (After the election, its size would double again as it became a willful propaganda arm of the administration.) On /r/The_Donald, supporters obsessed over Trump’s every utterance and launched endless, crowdsourced attacks against his foes. They were soon consumed with the narrative of Trump, standing strong against the forces of “globalism,” aligning with many fervent conspiracy theories. Their meta-irony turned to white-hot anger at what they perceived as increasingly one-sided attacks by the “mainstream media.” And serving in the trenches of a seemingly endless internet war, they also found camaraderie and friendship.
Although they labored tirelessly for Trump, the participants in this online collective were not formal members of his campaign. This provided Trump the best of both worlds. Whenever his online army launched attacks that were clearly profane or bigoted, Trump could deny any association. Yet when the activists struck gold, their work could be incorporated into official campaign messages by the Trump aides who regularly monitored their efforts. Sometimes, the work of these anonymous “shitposters” would even find its way into the Twitter feed of Trump himself—a pattern that continued after he won the presidency. These supporters and aggressive proxies (figures like Jack Posobiec quickly joined the bandwagon) came to echo their “Dear Leader,” eschewing all notions of defense in order to attack, attack, attack. “The pro-Trump media do not appear to ever stop or take days off,” writer Charlie Warzel concluded. “They are endlessly available and are always producing. Always.” In their frantic mania, they set a tempo that no traditionally organized campaign could match.
The collective efforts of Trump’s troll army helped steer the online trends that shaped the election. They dredged up old controversies, spun wild conspiracy theories that Trump’s opponents had to waste valuable political capital fighting off, and ensured that the most impactful attacks continued to fester and never left public attention. Although neither presidential candidate was well liked, an analysis, by the firm Brandwatch, of tens of millions of election-related tweets showed a near-constant decline in the number of messages that spoke positively about Clinton. For Trump, the trend was the reverse. Essentially, the longer the campaign went on, the louder Trump’s proxies grew. And because they reveled in building botnets or assuming fake identities, they were omnipresent.
There was no doubt that this effort was viewed through the lens of information warfare, showing the blurring of lines that Clausewitz would recognize. As General Michael Flynn himself exulted just after the election to a crowd of young supporters, “We have an army of digital soldiers . . . ’cause this was an insurgency, folks, ’cause it was run like an insurgency. This was irregular warfare at its finest, in politics.”
Trump’s new kind of volunteer online army was so effective, though, because it was backed by another organization never before seen, which followed all the new lessons that had begun to fuse politics, marketing, and war. It was an organization that, reflecting social media itself, combined massive scale with personalized micro-targeting.
The effort was overseen by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the famously private, immaculately coifed real estate baron who (ironically) avoided social media himself. In a rare postelection interview, Kushner explained how early on, the campaign had realized that the very identity of their unconventional candidate meant they would have to eschew the traditional pathways to victory. Television advertising or field offices would not win this fight for Trump. The campaign would instead pump its strategic efforts into social media, utilizing the new techniques that it allowed, like message tailoring, sentiment manipulation, and machine learning.
The strategist behind the operations was Brad Parscale, a scraggly-bearded former web designer from Texas, who had risen to the top of Trump’s online business and then his election campaign. The emphasis was clear from start to finish. Parscale famously blew every cent of his first $2 million on Facebook ads. By Election Day, it was his team—not the Silicon Valley–friendly Democrats—that bought every last bit of advertising space available on YouTube.
The digital effort Parscale oversaw was both fundamental to the Trump campaign and more massive in scale than anything seen before in political history. At the center was Project Alamo, named for its election last-stand location in Texas. A 100-person team, aided by embedded social media company employees, drew upon a database whose size and depth would come to dwarf all other campaign operations that had come before it. Into this database was pumped basic information about all of Trump’s donors (including anyone who purchased the ubiquitous red “Make America Great Again” hat). Then there was the data archive of the Republican National Committee, which claimed to have nearly 8 trillion pieces of information spread across 200 million American voters. And, finally, came the massive data stores of a controversial company called Cambridge Analytica.
A UK-based firm that Breitbart chairman and Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon had helped form in 2013, Cambridge Analytica had previously been active in conducting information warfare–style efforts on behalf of clients ranging from corporations to the “Leave” side of Brexit. It would later be reported to have provided to the Trump campaign some 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans. Controversially, a subset came from data collected via various Facebook apps (ranging from a survey to a “sex compass”), which scraped data on not just 87 million users but also their friends—without their consent or knowledge. Included in the dataset was information gleaned not only from public posts, but also from direct messages that users assumed were private.
This data was a “gold mine,” according to one cybersecurity researcher who was able to review a small portion of it when it leaked online. Through the clever use of this mountain of information, one could infer much more through “psychometrics,” which crosses the insights of psychology with the tools of big data. Teams of psychometric analysts had already shown how patterns of Facebook “likes” could be used to predict characteristics of someone’s life, from their sexual orientation to whether their parents had divorced. The researchers had concluded that it took only ten “likes” to know more about someone than a work colleague knew and just seventy to know more than their real-world friends. As a whistle-blower from the Cambridge Analytica part of the project said in 2018, “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”
By slicing and dicing the data, the Trump team didn’t just gain a unique window into the minds of its supporters; it could also use advertising tools like Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to track down users who shared the same political disposition or psychological profile. This tool literally changed the economics of the battle for votes. Suddenly, isolated patches of rural voters—long neglected because of the cost of television advertising—could be selectively targeted. Thanks to Facebook and big data, Parscale marveled, he could reach “fifteen people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for.”
Importantly, the wealth of data didn’t just allow a new kind of micro-targeting of voters, with exactly the message they cared most about, but it also provided new insights into how to tailor that message to influence them most. As opposed to a TV or print ad that could run in only one form at a time, the campaign would regularly run thousands of variations of an online outreach effort simultaneously. The key was that every single message to win hearts and minds was also an experiment. Messages might differ in the phrasing, the choice of photo, and even tiny changes in color that would influence one person’s particular psychological profile more than another. The reason was that social media had turned the conversation into a mass-scaled but two-way street. The targets’ feedback (who clicked it, who “liked” it, who shared it) went back into the profiles, not just for that one person, but for all the other people in the dataset who shared similar characteristics. This allowed the campaign to find the “perfect” messages for engaging different groups of voters—all dynamically and all at the same time. By the end of the campaign, the Trump team had run almost 6 million different versions of online ads. Once, the number of variations on a single message approached 200,000.
Plugged into the subconscious of millions of likely voters, Trump’s digital team began to guide the candidate’s travel, fundraising, rally locations, and even the topics of his speeches. “[The campaign] put so many different pieces together,” Parscale said. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.”
There was little political precedent for Trump’s strategy. But there was precedent. It could be found at an internet giant famous for journalistic classics like “15 Hedgehogs with Things That Look Like Hedgehogs” and “Which Ousted Arab Spring Ruler Are You?”
In 2006, a young MIT postgraduate named Jonah Peretti cofounded a “viral lab.” Peretti’s intention was to understand what content took off and what didn’t. Within a decade, the spinout company called BuzzFeed would grow to become a billion-dollar network with hundreds of employees and offices scattered around the world.
If BuzzFeed had a secret, it was scale. It wasn’t one person angling for viral hits; it was an army, applying a systematic formula of the same kind of weaponized experimentation, constantly testing to map the depths of the attention economy and then make it their own. BuzzFeed could churn out more than 200 articles, “listicles,” and videos each day. It then monitored the performance of each item in real time, tweaking titles and keywords and shifting marketing focus in an algorithmically driven process that was a precursor of the sort of real-time focus-testing conducted by the Trump team. With every viral success, the writers and marketers got a little more experienced, their dataset got a little bigger, and their machines got a little smarter.
Importantly, BuzzFeed’s model didn’t depend on handcrafting any particular item to go viral; it depended on throwing out dozens of ideas at once and seeing what stuck. For every major viral success, like “12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music,” there were dozens of duds, like “Leonardo DiCaprio Might Be a Human Puppy.” What mattered most was scale and experimentation, inundating an audience with potential choices and seeing what they picked. The lesson for BuzzFeed, and for all aspiring social media warriors, was to make many small bets, knowing that some of them would pay off big.
How BuzzFeed made its money was not all that different from how Brad Parscale helped the Trump campaign to victory. It was also strikingly reminiscent of how Russian propagandists drown their opponents in what RAND researchers describe as a “firehose of falsehood,” weaponizing the very same Facebook micro-targeting tools. And it was also a crucial aspect of ISIS’s online efforts to overwhelm its opponents with messaging that was both scaled and tailored. Recall that ISIS could generate over a thousand official propaganda releases each month. In each case, this continuous cascade allowed these savvy viral marketers to learn what worked for the next round.
This is the last part of the equation explaining how combatants can conquer social media and penetrate the minds of those who use it. To “win” the internet, one must learn how to fuse these elements of narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation. And if you can “win” the internet, you can win silly feuds, elections, and deadly serious battles alike. You can even warp how people see themselves and the world around them.
But the fact that these lessons are now available to anyone means that not all online battles will be one-sided blitzkriegs. As more and more users learn them, the results are vast online struggles that challenge our traditional understanding of war.