Russian hackers are suspected to have struck to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Credit:New York Times Two things about the state of American, and particularly Republican politics, coming into 2016 have paved the way for Trump's rise: firstly, the media-savvy real estate magnate faced relatively weak candidates in the primaries. And more crucially, the right-wing media had primed Republicans for years to accept information that played fast and loose with facts. But in this climate, the way Trump has been able to convert confusion, gaffes and outrages into a kind a must-see act of political theatre reflects heavily the strategy for the use of information to support him. For a candidate who promised to have Bill Gates "close up" the internet to stop terrorism, the Trump people have proven adept at fusing their short-term political goals with the culture of the internet itself, found in places like Reddit, 4Chan and meme generation sites. It is on the internet where domestic and international politics collide and where anonymity provides an enormous back door into influencing political perceptions within other countries.

Despite boasts to the contrary, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a string of failed business dealings behind him. Credit:AP And it's on the internet that Russia has used its information war capabilities on its neighbours in Eastern Europe and then Europe as a whole. "Russia has taken advantage of technology and available media in ways that would have been inconceivable during the Cold War," write social scientists Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews at the US-based RAND Corporation in a report whose description of Russian propaganda bears uncomfortable parallels with the digital torrent in support of Trump. Paul Manafort has denied any links to Putin. Credit:Bloomberg The report – which does not mention the Trump campaign - describes Russia's online propaganda strategy as the "firehose of falsehoods" approach, with "tools and channels now [including] the internet, social media, and the evolving landscape of professional and amateur journalism and media outlets."

Information is "rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency" or to "objective reality," the report states. A tweet purporting to show 'liberal' violence instead used an easily debunked image of Australian star Samara Weaving from film Ash vs Evil Dead. Crucially, many of the "firehose of falsehoods" methods, they write, "run directly counter to the conventional wisdom on effective influence and communication from government or defense sources, which traditionally emphasise the importance of truth, credibility, and the avoidance of contradiction." In other words, simply adhering to and amplifying the truth – as was the counter-strategy during the Cold War – is no longer enough. A focus on race. Social media topic discussions related to candidates in January - visualised by MIT Media Lab. Credit:MIT Media Lab

This point will be no surprise to people working in online media – where the advent of social media has made it much easier for incorrect reporting to take on a life of its own. One of the reasons is that the volume and pace of information in this propaganda method helps trick the minds of the audience into accepting incorrect facts. An analysis of social media mentions related to candidates in January by the MIT Media Lab. Notice the role of race for Donald Trump. Credit:MIT Media Lab This happens because questionable sources are forgotten even as the information is "remembered as true", the RAND report states. Think of Trump's latest backdown over claiming he had seen a video of the US paying Iran $US400 million – something he proclaimed twice to friendly crowds.

The RAND report concludes that information that was initially assumed valid but later retracted can continue to influence thinking, especially when a strong "confirmation bias" effect - acceptance of news confirming their experience - already exists. Considering that issues of race and class have long coloured right-wing identity politics, "confirmation bias" was already an issue among movement conservatives in the US. This year, however, the Trump campaign has taken playing to racial and class identities to a new level. A visualisation analysis of Tweet data by MIT Media Lab in the US from the beginning of the year showed that "Despite his business background ... Trump is more highly associated with race issues than his rivals." The visualised shape of the tweets related to Trump look strikingly different than the others. Trump infamously retweeted racists' tweets while some of his most die-hard supporters are white supremacists.

"Information that connects with group identities or familiar narratives - or that arouses emotion - can be particularly persuasive," the RAND report states. It's clear that the way information is used by the Trump campaign is not meant to be fact-checked, weighed against earlier statements, or even to create the building blocks of a political policy discussion. Rather, it's designed to go past the public's heads and directly to their hearts. TV-era presidential season reporting typically ended the day with one or two major news stories from the campaign trail. The internet has increased and disrupted the pace, as was seen in 2008 and 2012. The Trump campaign dispenses with the convention of interviews and instead serves up controversy and outrage that change by the hour.

Trump's infamous Twitter account would not be so nearly effective if there weren't legions of fans on forums such as Reddit, 4Chan and white supremacy sites poised to convert Trump's latest utterance into a flurry of memes, tweets, posts and web pages. How co-ordinated this effort around Trump may be is not clear - but that there are online thought-leaders in this venture is. That many of them are anonymous is also clear. And that some are not based in the US is also clear. WikiLeaks, for example, is playing a special role this year in publishing emails hacked by Russia. The goal of the Trump campaign, inasmuch as it's influenced by Russian information war strategy, is not to prove Donald Trump the better candidate, or disprove his critics. The goal is to dominate the information space of the US election with Donald Trump. The social media techniques have been perfected in Russia then used in Eastern Europe. In addition to playing fast and loose with facts, the Trump campaign, like Russian propaganda, manufactures events.

It's unclear how much this reflects his media-hungry, never-wrong personality, and how much is part of a strategy of controversy to keep the wheel of publicity turning. The traditional media in this regard, does not lead nor set the agenda, but gives legitimacy and weight to the Trump campaign - after the campaign has already acted. Some have noticed. Writing in March 2016, the Committee to Protect Journalists' executive director, Joel Simon, observed that unlike Obama's famously social media-savvy campaign of 2008, Trump's strategy was to "shock the media system by being outrageous, offensive, or provocative". "The shock reverberates across the entire media ecosystem, with the traditional media compelled to cover Trump's social media pronouncements, and Trump supporters using social media to amplify and spread anything he does via traditional media," Simon wrote.

It's worth noting that such use of charged, polarising language is also a tactic of Russian propaganda. As Jolanta Darczewska of the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies describes Russian "propaganda", it features the "language of emotions and judgments, and not of facts". In this way, encouraging white supremacists, trolls and racists to denounce and threaten opposition makes sense. The offence gets a response on social media - even if it is rejection. Social media thrives on controversy and the algorithms that rank posts often reward it. "The very factors that make the firehose of falsehood effective also make it quite difficult to counter," write RAND researchers. The benefits derived from "presenting the first version of events (which then must be dislodged by true accounts at much greater effort) could be removed if the true accounts were instead presented first.

"But while credible and professional journalists are still checking their facts, the Russian firehose of falsehood is already flowing: It takes less time to make up facts than it does to verify them." This contributes to the momentum of information (much of it incorrect or invented or wilfully conflating facts) flowing online. Like-minded supporters build community and through them maintain channels to push out the Trump campaign's "firehose of falsehoods". At the same time, fact-checking organisations, which have grown as a popular corrective to the spin of the political world online, struggle to keep up with the onslaught surrounding the Trump campaign. If voters in the US, the public and the mainstream media in Western democracies today find themselves speechless in sizing up Trump's statements and behaviour, there may be a scientific reason why this is so. Loading