Second Step: Divide Them

You do not have to create a real conflict

This matters. Effective division does not require inventing hatred from nothing. Societies have real cracks. People have real interests, historical grievances, ideological differences, different values and real experiences of injustice. That is precisely why division is so effective. You do not need to create the crack. It is enough to find it, widen it and tell each camp that the other is the reason for its suffering. This process is not hypothetical. It is documented.

A U.S. Senate investigation into Russia's Internet Research Agency found that influence operators deliberately used sensitive American issues — race, immigration, gun rights, LGBT issues, police violence, religion and regional identity — in order to turn Americans against one another and against their own government.[1] The operation did not create only one propaganda page. It created different identities for different camps. One page played to conservative patriotism.

Another to racial injustice. One to gun rights. Another to police violence. One to Christian identity. Another to LGBT identity. The Senate documented pages such as Being Patriotic, Blacktivist, Heart of Texas, United Muslims of America, LGBT United and Army of Jesus.[1] This is almost a perfect textbook for the second step. You do not need one ideology. You need two. Preferably ten. And you tell each something different.

The best propaganda often does not lie about everything

If you want to divide people, you do not need to feed them a completely fabricated story. Quite the opposite. The strongest propaganda takes something real. A real injustice. A real crime. A real inequality. A real political mistake. A real fear. Then it builds from it an identity whose basic rule becomes: they are the reason this is happening to you. Once the opponent has been sufficiently dehumanised, there is no longer any need to answer them. No need to listen. No need to check their claim.

No need to understand why they think differently. Because they are no longer a person with a different view. They have become a category. Fascist. Communist. Racist. Traitor. Globalist. Conspiracy theorist. Extremist. Ignoramus. Privileged. Parasite. Enemy. Once a person has been turned into a label, the work is almost done.

Proof of how effective anger is

Modern technology has turned an old political principle into something far more powerful. In the past, a propagandist first had to find an audience. Today, the algorithm finds the audience. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analysed more than 2.7 million political posts on Facebook and Twitter. It found that posts talking about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each additional word referring to the political out-group was associated with a 67 percent increase in the likelihood that a post would be shared.[2]

Think about what that means. Hatred is not only politically useful. It can be economically rewarded. A platform does not have to believe in the left or the right. It does not have to want racial conflict. It does not have to plan civil war. It is enough for its business system to reward content that produces more clicks, comments, shares and screen time. If anger is more contagious than calm, anger gets the advantage. If hatred of the other camp produces more engagement than a reasonable conversation, the system develops a natural tendency toward conflict. This is even more dangerous than classical propaganda. Division no longer needs a single propaganda minister. It can become a by-product of the attention economy.

An algorithm does not need an ideology

Facebook itself acknowledges that it uses thousands of signals to rank content and predicts what a user is most likely to engage with.[3] The company later began reducing the weight of comments and shares for political content and publicly said that users were seeing too much political material and that some engagement signals did not necessarily equal what people actually wanted to see.[4] Under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission has demanded explanations from large platforms about their recommender systems precisely because of risks that explicitly include impacts on electoral processes, public discourse, harmful content spirals and so-called rabbit holes.[5]

It is important not to draw too simple a conclusion. Research does not show that the algorithm is the only cause of political polarisation. Large Facebook experiments found that reducing content from politically like-minded sources over a short period did not automatically reduce political polarisation.[6] But that does not change the central point. The system knows very well that conflict creates attention. And an economy that sells attention will always be tempted to keep it. Even if the price is social peace.

First they teach you who you are. Then whom you must hate

The deepest level of division is not political opinion. It is identity. When a political position becomes part of a person's sense of self, an attack on an idea is no longer an attack on an idea. It becomes an attack on the person. That is why identity questions are so explosive. Race. Sex. Religion. Nationality. Sexual orientation. Political affiliation. Vaccination status. Class. Generation. Once you convince a person that the world must first be viewed through one of these labels, you also give them a map of enemies. Every injustice becomes proof of a broader war. Every incident becomes proof of the nature of the entire opposing camp. Every extremist becomes the representative of millions of people. And every compromise becomes betrayal of one's own group. Then the centre disappears. Only fronts remain.

The most elegant part of the system is that every camp thinks it is fighting the system

This is almost a perfect trap. A person on the left believes they are fighting fascism, capital, racism and patriarchy. A person on the right believes they are fighting communism, globalism, mass migration and cultural decay. Both may be pointing to real problems. Both may be completely right on particular issues. But what happens if both spend most of their energy hating one another? Who is meanwhile shaping financial standards? Who is writing data laws?

Who is building digital infrastructure? Who is buying companies? Who controls distribution platforms? Who is creating new identification systems? Who designs algorithms? Who decides what money will even mean tomorrow? The population can feel as though it lives in a permanent revolution while the structures above it quietly become more entrenched.

When the front enters the home

Political division becomes much more powerful when it no longer remains on television or in elections but enters the family, friendship and everyday relationships. When a family lunch cannot survive one political topic, when a friendship cannot survive one election, and when generations, men and women, or vaccinated and unvaccinated people begin to experience one another primarily as opposing camps, a person starts losing precisely the bonds that could support them outside large institutions. Division then is no longer merely conflict. It becomes preparation for isolation.

What if the culture war is the perfect smoke screen?

What if most of the issues that make us furious at one another every day are not unimportant at all? What if some are extremely important? But what if the way they are served to us is designed to turn a real problem into an endless identity war in which a solution becomes almost impossible? What if the goal is not for one side to win? What if it is enough that neither side ever stops fighting?

The documented example of the Russian IRA is almost uncomfortable in its clarity here. The operators did not bet only on one side of society. They created pages and content for opposing identity groups, presented themselves as authentic Americans and used existing cultural cracks to generate additional anger and division.[1] If such a strategy is good enough for an intelligence influence operation, why would we think no one else understands it? And if content about the opposing camp is demonstrably shared far more often, while platforms rank content partly through engagement signals, why would we even need a central director? Perhaps the system itself produces what it can monetise most effectively. Anger. Fear. Tribal loyalty. An enemy.

When people hate each other, you do not have to force them into silence

They will silence one another themselves. They will demand the banning of the other side. They will demand the removal of speakers. They will demand punishment for the wrong words. They will demand that a company fire someone who said something inappropriate. They will demand that a platform remove a profile. They will demand that the state act against those they consider dangerous. And every side will be convinced that censorship is not censorship if it silences the right enemy. This is the moment when power receives something priceless.

A population that itself demands instruments of control because it believes they will be used against the other camp. But infrastructure built against your enemy today may have a different user tomorrow. And by then it will be too late to rediscover principles.

Do not let them choose your enemy for you

This does not mean evil acts do not exist. It does not mean there is no need to resist crime, corruption, violence, authoritarianism or ideologies that take freedom away from people. It means something more difficult. Hate the act, but do not allow someone to turn millions of people into a single face of the enemy for you. That is where manipulation begins. When you no longer see the individual. When you see only the group. When every person on the other side is already guilty before they speak. Then you are no longer an independent thinker. You have become a soldier in a war whose map you may never have seen.

The second step is complete when you forget that you need other people

A system of total control does not need a person who trusts family, community and neighbours. It needs an isolated individual. Someone who suspects the neighbour. Who hates the political opponent. Who receives identity from a screen. Who receives moral signals from the crowd. Who belongs to a camp, not a community. Because a community can survive without the system. A camp needs a permanent enemy. And when people are divided enough, the next step follows almost by itself.

A divided person can still be strong if they have people they trust and can rely on. Division alone is therefore not enough. The next step is to weaken precisely those bonds — not necessarily by law or prohibition, but through atomisation, distance and the replacement of direct relationships with digital approximations. Once a person is alone, it becomes much easier to determine whom they will trust and on whom they will depend.

Then we are ready for the third step: Isolate Them.