Very famously, the Soviet information.... It wasn't called the GRU at the time, but it had a swastika campaign in the seventies in Europe. It decided it would paint swastikas everywhere. This goes to Ben's point about successful versus unsuccessful disinformation operations and what characterizes signal and what characterizes noise. Oftentimes, what becomes signal is concerned about noise, right? What happened in Europe was that 70 swastikas were put up by GRU members. That's all it took. That's all it took for people to start becoming convinced that everybody else was hateful. Once they were convinced that everybody else was hateful, they started blooming up organically.
So, you have a catalytic process whereby people are oftentimes initially.... You know, what's happened in social media is the growth of what we call false polarization. We're told that the other side has become so radical. Don't believe it. It's not true. Consistently, when we poll people to understand what their positions are, what we learn is that we have far more consensus on virtually any issue than what is depicted on social media, so we're being fed a conflict. In that environment, the suspicion of being undermined by a fifth column or the suspicion of having your control taken out from under you, being sold on that conflict, is where it becomes so important to say, “Hey, guys, this is a small signal. It's not that important.” However, when there's no one trusted to be able to say that, all the suspicions have fuel to become fire very quickly.