It is widely recognized that Russian counterintelligence services intervened fiercely in the 2024 presidential election, as they did in 2016 and 2020, favoring the election of Trump, winning two out of three. But how did they do it?

That is, not technically, wherein they used bots and other disinformation instruments to mainly impact matters by online means, but in terms of the kinds of narratives or messaging that worked for them.

There is a level on which they operate most effectively that is missed completely by most people, including professionals. It goes to acting on the psychological triggers behind the words to elicit a desired emotional response.

It is not the words, the causes or slogans, that the experts in the Kremlin work on to produce their results, but triggers, key emotional touch points that can cause someone to fly into a rage, spiral into self-pity, or otherwise alter their normal mental or moral functioning.

The operational level below even that where psychological manipulation seeks to grab the unsuspecting victim and send them in the direction of desired outcomes delves into deep self-doubt and related core vulnerabilities. Here is where the tearing away at sensitive egos and the building up of alternative identities and world views can happen.

Central to this process of “conditioning” is a constant drumbeat which relays a notion that a person’s life and life itself is meaningless and crappy. It is why so many of the Russian bots that pop up on social media pages are filled with the most vile and disgusting language. It is aimed at inviting the reader to descend to the same level of lurid name-calling and strings of expletives.

But even if the reader doesn’t go there, so to speak, he or she is psychologically assaulted by such angry diatribes as to feel violated or driven to depression or demoralization.

The goal may be to shatter an impressionable mind’s belief that life and people are basically good and worth helping or relating to. No, Mr. Russian bot seeks to convince you, life is crap and so are you. There is a shady way this approach, used all the time in recruitment efforts for trafficking and coersion, can infect the minds of naive or unsure persons and steer their behaviors into predetermined pathways.

If nothing really matters, as this messaging seeks to convince a victim, then why not succumb to that which is the most expedient, or perhaps pleasurable? It is a fast track to a complete loss of control and susceptibility to any number of forms of bondage, through chemical addictions or psychological ones.

The key is the capacity to demoralize, and that notion grabs at the heart of a person’s identity. Demoralization, indeed, is de-moral-ization. A morality, no matter how personal or unique, is at the heart of most people’s sense of self-worth and positive self-identity, and it almost always relates to how a person brings him or herself forward in the world. To be moral means to be true to friends, most basically, to be honest and reciprocal in relationships.

To truly de-moral-ize someone is to remove that core sense of self-worth and replace it with a shell of selfish aggrandizement, and then to offer someone in this condition options of anger and rage as tools for getting even with a new-found sense of being victimized by phantoms of social expectations, or the “deep state.”

Now we have the foul-mouthed bully, self-impressed only by the strings of ugly swear words that can be self-generated and the looks of fear that such strings can induce in others (even if only imagined as reactions from others online).

When the claim is made that online social network sites impact young people by causing them to feel badly toward themselves if they don’t see themselves as attractive enough, for example, this is but the tip of the iceberg. More aggressive Russian online bots play on more than just adolescent self-doubts to fashion the kind of social monsters they are turning our people into.

The solution? When are we, as a society, going to wake up and begin to invest in the virtues of decency and morality over greed and selfishness?