But it doesn’t end there. In the same way that cage-fighting bears sells on reality TV, such conflict also sells on Facebook’s News Feed, which rewards posts that get a lot of engagement, as well as on Twitter and the larger ecosystem of amped-up cable news that feeds off viral content.

The Russian trolls clearly understood this. They based their campaigns on well-known divisions — racial, political, religious — and the conflicts they generated spread far across social media, and were then widely covered by the news media.

“If Simon Cowell once tapped into a main artery of negativity in American life, Facebook and Twitter and 24-hour news really picked that up,” said Mike Duffy, a co-founder of Ugly Brother Studios, which produces many unscripted shows, referring to the acerbic judge of “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent.” “They’re pushing the same types of bombastic characters, and they’re seeing a ratings increase.”

We’ll never know what’s really real.

There’s a surprising amount of disagreement among experts about how real reality TV is. One camp suggests it’s not real at all. Jennifer L. Pozner, a media critic and author of “Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV,” said that reality producers go to fantastic lengths to manipulate contestants, denying them food and communication, plying them with alcohol and ultimately chopping up footage to make it look as if they have said and done things that they haven’t.

“The contestants have zero ability to contribute narratives about themselves,” she said.

There’s another camp that suggests that while the circumstances on most shows are contrived, the contestants’ emotional responses are deeply real.

“The way we generate drama on reality TV is to put someone in the most extreme environment possible and then watch for their genuine reaction,” said Troy DeVolld, a longtime producer and the author of “Reality TV: An Insider’s Guide to TV’s Hottest Market.” In fact, he said, reality TV would be boring if that weren’t the case — the whole reason we watch is “we can tell how seriously everyone is taking what’s going on, even in the most absurd of circumstances.”

I’m not here to adjudicate this debate. But I will point out that it matches the question at the heart of the Russian-influence saga: Did Russia’s trolls persuade Americans to act in ways that they wouldn’t have otherwise — or were they merely providing us a framework for expressing our deeply held political and social ideas?