If you watch anything today, let it be this. Ukraine hit Russian data centres and suddenly there was a dramatic drop in the online hate and division being amplified across the West, including in Germany, the UK, the US and France. Russia has spent years using bots and coordinated accounts to spread fear, resentment and hostility. Why? Because they understand propaganda. Social proof + repetition + emotional conditioning = incredibly effective propaganda. Humans use the behaviour of other people as a shortcut for deciding what is normal and sometimes what is true. If you see thousands of apparently independent accounts saying the same thing, your brain starts to perceive that as a consensus. Repeat a claim often enough and you get the illusory truth effect. Constantly feed someone stories about migrant crime, for example, and those stories become disproportionately available in their memory. Your brain then starts to overestimate how common that crime actually is. Add fear and anger and you have an incredibly powerful way of influencing people. And this is why propaganda works. It isn’t necessarily about convincing you of one big lie. It’s about changing what you think is normal, what you think other people believe, and what you are afraid of. The most effective propaganda is the propaganda you don’t recognise as propaganda. So many people reading this will be absolutely certain they aren’t being influenced by Russian propaganda. They’ll believe what they feel is patriotism. That they’re protecting their country, their families, their communities. But ask yourself where those feelings came from. Because if a hostile foreign power can make you more fearful of your neighbours, more hostile towards minorities, less trusting of democracy and more divided from your fellow citizens, it doesn’t need you to support Russia. It just needs you to help weaken your own country.