A separate poll from May found that about half of working-class Americans agreed with the statement, “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” Those divisions preceded Trump’s election, and they don’t just show Americans disagreeing on policy or politics—they show Americans inhabiting completely different worlds of values and, increasingly, objective facts. Russia wouldn’t have needed hacked data to push those pain points.
What Facebook’s Russia problem really underscores isn’t how powerful Moscow is, but rather how weak and divided America has become. That Russian operatives could so effectively engage Americans with tactics as simple as Facebook ads, fake-news postings, and Twitter trolls, shows how dangerous misinformation is in the social-media age, when propaganda can be so easily amplified. More important, it highlights how primed Americans already were for manipulation.
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