disinformation

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

by Thomas Rid

is, and what it is not. First, and most important, active measures are not spontaneous lies by politicians, but the methodical output of large bureaucracies. Disinformation was, and in many ways continues to be, the domain of intelligence agencies—professionally run, continually improved, and usually employed against foreign adversaries. Second,

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all active measures contain an element of disinformation: content may be forged, sourcing doctored, the method of acquisition covert; influence agents and cutouts may pretend to be something they are not, and

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foreign intelligence.19 On January 11, 1923, a remarkable institutional innovation saw the light of day:20 Artuzov created an office for dezinformatsiya, or disinformation.21 The sheer volume of deceptive material that passed through these intelligence channels was large enough to trigger bureaucratic innovation in Russian foreign intelligence. The

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GPU reportedly coordinated with the Revolutionary Military Council, Russia’s highest military authority, to set up a special bureau to “prepare disinformation for Western military intelligence services.”22 The goal, according to a GPU participant, was “to deter military intervention by the Western powers.”23 The GPU

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was shot by the Germans in 1943. The actions of the Trust, more than any other event in the 1920s, would shape the future of disinformation. It was spectacularly successful. Polish intelligence later declared that—“without exaggeration”—Operation Trust had inflicted “incalculable damage” on the Russian émigrés, undercutting their political

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States who were lobbying hard against recognizing the Soviet Union. America’s highly visible, ideologically motivated opposition to Marxism was practically an open invitation for disinformation and forgery. With his statements against Amtorg, Woll was broadcasting the establishment’s readiness to be tricked. Then, on March 4, about six weeks

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the opening of the GDR Party Congress.23 The political warfare planners at Berlin Operations Base were careful to manage expectations at CIA headquarters. The disinformation campaign that Marbach and his team were designing and implementing was counterintuitive, neither wide nor narrow, designed neither for mass influence nor targeting of

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strange, threatening letters. Henriette Trémeaud, wife of the prefect of Strasbourg, circa 1957. She died in a terrorist attack that was designed to be a disinformation operation. (Photograph by Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images) “French Oppressors!” one such leaflet was titled. The pamphlet was addressed to the authorities

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that the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the foreign intelligence branch of the Ministry of State Security—the Stasi—had already conducted active measures before 1957. But disinformation and “psychological warfare,” the defector said, had been officially announced within the HVA as a “major operational responsibility,” just as the cigar box bomb

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weeks into his tenure. Department D pulled together various officers from different parts of the KGB’s vast First Chief Directorate to coordinate and direct disinformation operations. Shelepin’s most brilliant appointment was Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, a highly decorated career intelligence officer from Ganja (Gence) in Azerbaijan. Agayants was tall,

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that sought to promote “division in the West.” Langley analysts pointed out that they observed “rather elaborate progressions in prolonged campaigns.”15 These anti-Western disinformation campaigns were aggressive, fast-paced, and used innovative methods that evolved quickly and in unexpected, frightening ways. One such measure exploited a military exercise known

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for running espionage operations against the Christian Democrats in the Federal Republic. Heim, a Wehrmacht veteran, defected before the Stasi formed a specific unit for disinformation, but in his debriefings with West German security services, he was already able to detail what he called “intelligence work of corrosion,” or Zersetzungsarbeit.

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, researchers, and specialists, usually not revealing their identity and purpose to these useful outsiders, although some were trusted agents. Not all were Russian. The disinformation division would commission these outside consultants, for a fee, to carry out research on issues of political, economic, historical, or cultural interest to the KGB

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a detailed list of individual active measures, complete with specific objectives, targets, and assigned responsibilities, and are therefore an invaluable source for the historian of disinformation. Oral disinformation, as Ivanov outlined in his 1979 lecture, could be highly effective, even deadly, especially in developing countries. On November 20, 1979, a group of

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had a deeper meaning. “After many years of practice and theoretical generalizations, the comrades from Service ‘A’ have brought some clarity to the concept of disinformation,” Ivanov explained, specifically on the “working methods that are widely used are exposing, compromising, and influencing governments, organizations, and individuals.” He cautioned against getting “

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confidential ties, who will keep secret our involvement in these measures.” Ivanov explained that it was very important to understand the specific target of a disinformation operation. Diplomats were softer targets than intelligence officers, he said. “An intelligence officer will by default report data to the relevant agency, where serious

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assessment. Service A had its own cipher clerks and two cipher machines to handle secure, encrypted communications, both outgoing and incoming, on disinformation in the making. The disinformation planners were supported by the KGB’s encryption service, which handed key material directly to Ivanov’s personal staff. Technology didn’t just

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. New technologies created new forensic problems. Technology also created new targets. Not long after Ivanov’s presentation, his unit reportedly engaged in the first disinformation hack of a telecommunication system. In October 1981, a large Soviet nuclear-armed submarine ran aground near Sweden’s Karlskrona Naval Base, violating Swedish territorial

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that AIDS conspiracy theories continued to fester at the far-left fringes of American civil rights activism, still, so far, without meaningful input from Soviet disinformation operators.18 American intelligence analysts, meanwhile, were investigating the reverse question: whether AIDS was a Soviet biological weapon. The CIA was aware that the

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read and wrote, shared images and documents, socialized, consumed news, and spread rumors. The sprawling network, as became progressively clear, was practically optimized for disinformation, at least until the mid-2010s. Active measures operators two decades after Wagenbreth would frame his question differently: What would active measures be without the

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culture of leaking when Schneier wrote these lines. The two-year period after the Snowden disclosures, in fact, was a short, modern golden age of disinformation. That period was characterized by the confluence of several developments that were, ultimately, all temporary afterglow effects of 1990s internet utopianism: the prevailing view,

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agencies—both as a potential threat and as a potential cover for operations. CyberGuerrilla was a genuine Anonymous forum and preferred leak platform of Russian disinformation operators. (Internet Archive) “Anons,” as the activists called one another, ran social media accounts and blogs to foment unrest and advance the fight against

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military personnel. Screenshots of the newly published cyb3rc site also appeared on Newsweek’s social media feed. CyberCaliphate bore all the hallmarks of a coordinated disinformation campaign: these actions were launched simultaneously, with consistent branding and language, and across various fronts and hacked social media sites, both publicly and as

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forms of truth, of course, are exaggerations, ideals, clichés. This distinction is somewhat coarse and simplistic—nevertheless, it helps explain the logic of disinformation. The goal of disinformation is to engineer division by putting emotion over analysis, division over unity, conflict over consensus, the particular over the universal. For, after all,

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—balloons launched, protesters counted, forgeries printed, packages mailed, letters received, press stories clipped, or downloads and shares and likes and page views logged. Some disinformers of old had long understood this problem: “I don’t think it’s possible to measure exactly, realistically, the impact of an active measure,” Bittman

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in short, created a powerful illusion, an appealing mirage—the metrics created an opportunity for more, and more convincing, disinformation about disinformation. For willfully exaggerating the effects of disinformation means exaggerating the impact of disinformation. All this is bad news for future historians. Seminars, in-person discussions, and correspondence were always fleeting and rarely

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transitioned into the SVR. The sweeping official history of Russian foreign intelligence acknowledges that over the past century the designations of the same operational activity—disinformation—came and went, from “operational games” to “active measures” to the blander, more recent “support measures.”13 Then came the rise of the internet,

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leaked, compromising material of questionable provenance, and as publishers recycled unoriginal, repetitive content. The end effect was that a significant and large portion of the disinformation value-creation chain was outsourced to the victim society itself, to journalists, to activists, to freelance conspiracy theorists, and, to a lesser degree, to

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by an unprecedented confluence of incentives that lead many victims—politicians, journalists, technologists, intelligence analysts, adversary operators, and most researchers—to highlight the potentials of disinformation over its limitations. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this trend is the fantastic story of the Shadow Brokers—the devastating NSA leak with its

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pp. 283–84. The other book was a Stasi memoir available only in German, Auftrag Irreführung, more on which below.   2.  Lawrence (Ladislav) Bittman, former disinformation officer, state security, Prague, interview with Thomas Rid, March 25, 2017, Rockport, MA; audio at https://archive.org/details/bittman-ridt. See Richard Sandomir, “

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33, 2014.   6.  Less aggressive because the CIA mainly supported existing organizations and publications through covert funding, not by designing and delivering divisive and deceptive disinformation; see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); see also Michael Warner’s review in

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, 1930, p. 4. 28.  Spivak, A Man in His Time, p. 164. 29.  “Three Offer Proof Whalen Red Papers Were Forged Here.” 4. American Disinformation   1.  George Kennan, “The Inauguration of Political Warfare,” Draft, April, 30, 1948, NARA release, https://web.archive.org/web/20150123010608/http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document

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Максимович Примаков, Очерки истории российской внешней разведки, Том 5, 1945–1965 годы (Москва: Международные отношения, 1997), p. 13.   2.  Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1985), p. 39.   3.  CIA, “The Soviet and Communist Bloc Defamation Campaign,” CIA-RDP67B00446R000500070009-1,

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Times, June 28, 1978, p. BR4.   2.  The sourcing on the Tupamaros’ motivation is not satisfactory, hence “reportedly.” See Fletcher Schoen and Christopher Lamb, “Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference,” Strategic Perspectives 11 (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2012), p. 33.   3.  Anna Mudry

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Its Secrets,” Associated Press, August 23, 2016. 48.  WikiSaudiLeaks, July 20, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150810005744/http://www.wikisaleaks.com/. 49.  Thomas Rid, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns,” Testimony, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC, March 30, 2017. 50.  The leak

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the reference by an obscure account, @LexingtonAl, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20190923140434/https:/twitter.com/Mao_Ware/status/1097891011202875392. A Century of Disinformation   1.  The full name is Bundesbehörde für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.   2.  Jens Gieseke, Die Stasi (Munich: Pantheon, 2011),

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; recognizing; Service A and; skill set for; Soviet budget for; Stasi’s history with; as support measures; the Trust’s success inspiring; see also disinformation Active Measures of Eastern Intelligence Services report activism; see also Anonymous; peacewar Adenauer, Konrad “Adventures of Mr. Hudson in Russia” Adzhubei, Alexei AEDEPOT Afghanistan AFL

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and; Schneier on; of Shadow Brokers; Snowden and; Ukraine and Russian-orchestrated; WikiLeaks and; see also Anonymous; hacking operations Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) disinformation: accurate information in; Artuzov and; Bittman on; Black Lives Matter movement and; data and; East and West divide on; election interference of 2016 and; emotion

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Mark Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA); Active Measures of Eastern Intelligence Services report and; Arbeitskreis and; archival records of; DENVER operation and; Devil and His Dart and; disinformation focus of; effectiveness of; Fleissmann and; Generals for Peace and; Headquarters Germany and; Helms’s accusations against; Kampfverband für Unabhängiges Deutschland and; Die Neue Nachhut

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All-German Affairs) Kalugin, Oleg Kämpfer, Der Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU); administrative harassment and; balloon distribution of; brochures of; CIA and; closure of; courage of; disinformation and; election interference of; Ford Foundation funding; forgery of; founding of; goals of; graffiti campaign of; hardware sabotage operations of; Hildebrandt’s removal from; operating

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Agency nuclear disarmament nuclear war threats; see also neutron bomb Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign nuclear winter: Alexandrov and; CIA on; KGB and; scenarios of; self-disinformation and; TTAPS project and Nuland, Victoria O Obama, Barack Office of Strategic Services OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) Olympic Games Operation GRAVEYARD Operations Plan (OPLAN

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to; Johnson, R. L., leaking; nuclear war and; publication of; STORM operation and; target list of; Wendland’s suicide and Opperput, Edward #OpSaudi oral disinformation Organization Gehlen Orme, Stan Orwell, George Osborn, K. Barton O’Shaughnessy, Elim Ovchinnikov, Leonid P Paese Sera Pahl-Rugenstein Pakistan Panama Papers Pan-Pacific Worker

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford  · 25 Sep 2023  · 898pp  · 236,779 words

, it has also been a channel for exposing vast segments of society to different forms of harmful content. Internet sites often serve as platforms for disinformation, bullying, hatred, and repulsive content, undermining the safety and dignity of individuals while dividing societies and destabilizing democracies. Algorithms designed to tailor online content

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other critics of the market-driven regulatory model can also point out how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms have repeatedly failed to remove dangerous disinformation on topics ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to democratic elections. And they can replay the images of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at

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the US Capitol, which originated in a rampant social media–fueled disinformation campaign about a stolen election.31 Consequently, when looking strictly at innovation and economic growth, the American market-driven model can be praised for its

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companies are navigating the Russian invasion of Ukraine, facing conflicting demands from Ukraine, Russia, the EU, and the US on how to handle the disinformation and propaganda on their platforms that are shaping the narrative about the war.63 US tech companies operating in China face a particularly difficult balancing

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incident where Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, leaked documents to Congress that raised questions about the company’s handling of hate speech and disinformation.137 These tech companies have advanced in their defense various narratives when lobbying Congress. For example, in 2022, they argued that more robust antitrust

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of an unregulated marketplace. It is also increasingly doubtful whether the market-driven model is delivering on its promise to enhance democracy as hatred and disinformation are often replacing the civic debates that were supposed to thrive online. Instead of nurturing inclusive democracy, online engagement has often increased societal polarization.

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engagement means more advertising revenue, giving the platforms the incentive to amplify it. The digital public space is also increasingly compromised by rampant disinformation, in particular as disinformation gets disseminated more than truth online. A 2018 study examining news stories that were shared in Twitter from 2006 to 2017 reveals how

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electoral process. There is no more vivid illustration of this than the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol following a rampant social media–fueled disinformation campaign about a stolen election. The unregulated digital economy is also rife with privacy scandals. This is exactly what happened in the infamous Cambridge

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cyber operations. For example, the US government does not control social media and news outlets, making it easier for adversaries to infiltrate those outlets with disinformation operations. Such operations can be deployed to manipulate elections or otherwise undermine democratic institutions—as happened, for example, in 2016 when Russian hackers stole emails

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of the European regulatory model. The EU has also developed regulatory instruments to preserve and strengthen democracy in the digital age, including by curtailing online disinformation and promoting a free and pluralistic media. The EU has further woven a commitment to fairness and redistribution into its regulatory model, as exemplified

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freedom of expression is under threat when the platforms are permitted to moderate content. Yet the absence of such moderation practices would allow hate speech, disinformation, terrorist propaganda, and other harmful content to run rampant online. The line-drawing between permissible and impermissible speech is therefore complicated, and the key

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a myriad of ways for technology to undermine democracy. Online communication channels have not only cultivated civic engagement; they have also facilitated the spread of disinformation, undermining public debate and the legitimacy of democratic elections.76 Apart from producing freedom and enhancing democracy, online platforms have also sowed discord and deepened

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its belief in the role of regulation to preserve democratic processes, the EU has adopted a number of regulatory instruments, including measures aimed at countering disinformation and strengthening free and pluralistic media, both of which the EU sees as crucial for sustaining democratic discourse. Through these efforts, the EU is

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elevating the preservation and strengthening of democracy as a central tenet of its rights-driven regulatory model. Fighting Disinformation and Other Harmful Content Online The European rights-driven regulatory agenda is anchored in the conviction that protecting citizens’ ability to express themselves freely online

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is steadfast in its commitment to limit the dissemination of such information online. However, crafting a rights-preserving regulatory approach toward the removal of disinformation is complicated given the EU’s equally steadfast commitment to the freedom of expression online. The EU recognizes that freedom of expression is a fundamental

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information sources and educating them to more critically evaluate the information they encounter online. As part of its regulatory efforts, the Commission developed a nonbinding Disinformation Code, which, in its updated 2022 version, has been signed by leading platforms including Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and Twitter.83 These companies voluntarily

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decisions.”98 The plan also holds that “by providing the public with reliable information, independent media play an important role in the fight against disinformation and the manipulation of democratic debate.”99 This view provides a policy rationale for the EU to leverage regulation with the goal of enhancing the

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EU has been too lenient in tolerating harmful content online. While such regulation has led tech companies to take down considerable amounts of hate speech, disinformation, and terrorist content in the name of dignity, safety, and democracy, this kind of speech remains rampant online. Major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube,

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with content that is harmful, dangerous, and often illegal. Few can dispute that these platforms have become go-to destinations for the spread of disinformation and the manipulation of public opinion on critical issues ranging from global pandemics to vaccines, and from migration to democratic elections. The role of social

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content moderation. Europeans remain concerned about the ways US tech companies are shaping the European public discourse, often for worse, by allowing hate speech and disinformation to run rampant on their platforms. As a result, the EU has adopted regulations aimed at restricting illegal and harmful content online. In response,

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social media.126 Instead of censoring conservative views, the right-wing media in the US often features conservative propaganda, cultivates conspiracy theories, and disseminates disinformation in the news media.127 This suggests that US news outlets have engaged in the kind of propaganda that the US government’s internet freedom

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agenda for years sought to tackle abroad. The online disinformation surrounding the stolen 2020 presidential election—propagated most prominently by President Trump himself—provides perhaps the starkest evidence of how the US government has leveraged

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his 2021 remarks, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stressed how the US was working to ensure that “the technology works for democracy, fighting back against disinformation, standing up for internet freedom, reducing the misuse of surveillance technology.”129 In April 2022, President Biden announced the establishment of the Bureau of

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the Tanzanian human rights organization Fichua Tanzania and its founder.160 However, these deactivations catch only a fraction of the accounts that are deployed for disinformation or government propaganda. For example, Twitter reportedly deactivated only 11 percent of over 3,500 total accounts spreading pro-government propaganda worldwide.161 US platforms

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cultural power, sparking significant concern among political leaders as these platforms continued to abuse their market power, infringe on user privacy, and circulate hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful content. In response, a countermovement to rein in these companies emerged, and foreign governments began to engage in efforts to repeal the

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not simply produce freedom as the early American techno-optimist view had predicted—they also cultivated an online public square littered with hatred, violence, and disinformation. Societal harms associated with free speech online, as illustrated by many of the examples cited earlier in this chapter, cast doubt on the idea

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has been, or is becoming, pertinent. The discussion reveals how the EU’s antitrust rules and content regulations, including norms covering online hate speech and disinformation, can similarly be externalized through the Brussels Effect, and how artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to be the next frontier of the EU’s

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-driven model for inspiration in regulating their digital economies. Content Moderation The EU’s regulation of online content through its codes on hate speech and disinformation, discussed earlier in Chapter 3, is shaping the global policies of tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. When it comes to hate

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where online content poses an “imminent and serious threat” to democratic, political, and policymaking processes, or public goods,117 whereas the EU Code bans disinformation, which “may cause public harm.”118 In explaining the departure from the EU standard, the ACCC noted that a lower threshold might be appropriate in

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the EU, “in which multiple countries have already experienced harms including social media interference, and campaigns of disinformation and malinformation from external countries seeking to affect domestic political processes.”119 The Australian Communication and Media Authority will oversee the implementation of the Code

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is also rethinking the US model’s traditionally inviolable commitment to free speech. Internet users are growing more concerned about harmful content online, including rife disinformation, terrorist propaganda, and foreign interference with elections. In recent years, the public has also become vehemently opposed to the misogyny and racism running rampant

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the European model are increasingly seen as necessary building blocks of a more equitable and human-centric digital economy. Each additional privacy scandal and online disinformation campaign further vindicates the European model while revealing the limits of the American model. Even the US itself is now growing aware of the

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the country’s own democratic institutions and wreaking havoc around the world. Many of the deeply disturbing examples described in this book—be it the disinformation-fueled US Capitol insurrection, the encouragement of illegal sex trafficking in the infamous Backpage case, or the hate speech–fueled genocide in Myanmar—have

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in internet platforms as the guardians and amplifiers of democracy. Now this illusion has been shattered. The digital public space is frequently compromised by rampant disinformation, which interferes with elections and destabilizes democracies. America had a rude awakening on January 6, 2021, when President Trump’s loyalists stormed the US

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handful of tech giants is hardly a reflection of economic freedom as conceived by early techno-libertarians. Similarly, recent scandals, including those revealing how online disinformation campaigns can undermine democratic elections, have shown that strong democracy does not necessarily flow from an unregulated digital marketplace. Consequently, a more regulated digital economy

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Behind China’s Twitter Campaign, a Murky Supporting Chorus, N.Y. Times (June 8, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/technology/china-twitter-disinformation.html. 74.Zhao Lijian (@zlj517), Twitter (Mar. 12, 2020), https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1238111898828066823%7Ctwgr%5E

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Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives (2021), https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/bias-report-release-page. 127.Yochai Benkler, Robert Fairs, & Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics 354 (2018). 128.Freedom House, Freedom on the Net (2021), https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-net/2021. 129

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/eu-referendum-analysis-2016/section-7-social-media/impact-of-social-media-on-the-outcome-of-the-eu-referendum/. 138.Digital, Culture, Media & Sport Committee, Disinformation and “Fake News”: Final Report, 2017–2019, HC 1791, § 6 (UK), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf. 139.Aurelien

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Plan, 350–51 AI Ethics Framework, 350–51 anti-censorship principles, 267–68 antitrust regulation, 343–44, 345 Clean Network, 321 Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, 341–42 content moderation, 341–42 digital trade agreements, 322 news industry regulation, 351–52, 383 nonregulation principle, 266–68 Privacy Act,

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299–300 Europe. see also specific countries by name 5G networks, 301 Apple’s revenue, 261 Chinese influence in, 301 digital single market, 129–30 disinformation campaigns, 280–81 internet freedom initiatives, 272–73 national tax regimes, 142–43 search engine market, 260–61 smart cities, 296–97 European Battery Alliance

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Haley, Nikki, 213–14 Halifax International Security Forum, 388–89 hard tech, 96–97 hardware companies, 73. see also specific companies by name harmful activity disinformation campaigns, 277–78, 280–81 fake news, 281–82 online content, 119–21, 141 protections against, 113–15 sanctions against, 134, 197–99 terrorist

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compliance with EU laws and regulations, 163, 324–25 content moderation, 341 data centers, 154 data privacy policy, 324, 330 data transfer battles, 222–23 Disinformation Code, 120 European headquarters, 142–43 global influence, 133–34, 259–60, 261–62 global revenue, 154, 261–62 government battles, 13–14, 222

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303 content controls, 180–81 cyberattacks, 134 data localization requirements, 330–31 demands on Meta, 338 digital authoritarianism, 135, 308–13 Digital Divide projects, 268 disinformation campaigns, 120–21 Federal Security Service, 312–13 hate speech law, 140–41 and international code of conduct for information security, 303 internet sovereignty, 309

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of the European Union, 110, 118 Trip Advisor, 358 Truex, Rody, 197 Trump, Donald America First policy, 213 complaints against EU antitrust policy, 245 disinformation propagation, 277–78 efforts to ban Chinese tech companies, 102–3, 166–68 efforts to discipline social media companies, 49–50 efforts to restrict entry

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

own advantage. It has granted them not just new ways to control their own populations, but also a new global reach through the power of disinformation. From there, we sketch the terrain of this new battlefield. Social networks reward not veracity but virality. Online battles and their real-world results

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harder than ever to separate the truth from lies. In the right hands, those lies can become powerful weapons. 4 The Empires Strike Back Censorship, Disinformation, and the Burial of Truth “Truth” is a lost cause and . . . reality is essentially malleable. —PETER POMERANTSEV AND MICHAEL WEISS, “The Menace of Unreality”

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blog posts and comments each day, assuming fake identities, hijacking conversations, and spreading lies. He joined a war of global censorship by means of disinformation. It is not surprising that Russia would pioneer this strategy. From its birth, the Soviet Union relied on the clever manipulation and weaponization of falsehood

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, produce and distribute information by any legal way,” the document declared. In reality, the Cold War’s end didn’t mean the end of disinformation. With new means of dissemination via social media, the prospect of spreading lies became all the more attractive, especially after the ascension of Vladimir Putin

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make their life gratingly tenuous (such as by raising their taxes or instructing their landlord to suddenly break their lease). Or it might be through disinformation efforts to undermine their reputation. A favorite tactic is the state-linked media accusing them of being terrorists or arranging “scandals” using kompromat, a

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of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These well-funded Russian propaganda outlets can often outgun and overwhelm their local media competitors. This modern network of disinformation can quickly rocket a falsehood around the world. In 2017, for instance, the U.S. Army announced that it would be conducting a training exercise

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shared an astounding 103.8 million times before the company shut the account down after the election. By cleverly leveraging readers’ trust, these engineers of disinformation induced thousands—sometimes millions—of people each day to take their messages seriously and spread them across their own networks via “shares” and retweets.

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(larger than Twitter and Snapchat combined) and more popular among youth than its Facebook corporate parent. Here, the pictorial nature of Instagram made the disinformation even more readily shareable and reproducible. In 2017, data scientist Jonathan Albright conducted a study of just twenty-eight accounts identified as having been operated

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. Much like the harassment campaigns inside Russia, sockpuppets also targeted Putin critics abroad. The most extreme efforts were reserved for those who investigated the disinformation campaigns themselves. After journalist Jessikka Aro published an exposé of the fake accounts, sockpuppets attacked her with everything from posts claiming she was a Nazi

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to be from her father, who had died twenty years earlier. When another group of Western foreign affairs specialists began to research the mechanics of disinformation campaigns, they found themselves quickly savaged on the professional networking site LinkedIn. One was labeled a “pornographer,” and another was accused of harassment. Such

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anger and division within Russia’s foes. Indeed, a full three years after the flight MH17 tragedy, we tested the strength of the Russian disinformation machine for ourselves by setting what’s known as a “honeypot.” The term traditionally referred to a lure—in fiction, usually a sexy female

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is true and nothing is true.” Even in the absence of digitally empowered censorship, the free world had still fallen victim to the forces of disinformation and unreality. When the social media revolution began in earnest, Silicon Valley evangelists enthused about the possibilities that would result from giving everyone “access

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doubling “share” rates among Trump supporters. In this new media universe, not just money, journalism, and political activism mixed, but also truth and hateful disinformation. News reports of actual events were presented alongside false ones, making it hard for readers to differentiate between them. A series of articles on illegal

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to albums, they’re most common in the political arena. For authoritarian regimes around the world, botnets are powerful tools in their censorship and disinformation strategies. When Syria began to disintegrate into civil war in 2011, the Assad regime used Twitter bots to flood its opponents’ hashtags with random

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campaign that had unfolded on their platforms during the 2016 election. The numbers, once begrudgingly disclosed, were astounding. The bot accounts were putting the disinformation campaign on steroids, allowing it to reach a scale impossible with just humans at work. Twitter’s analysis found that bots under the control of

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would also ripple out onto other sites, like Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram. Overall, Facebook’s internal analysis estimated that 126 million users saw Russian disinformation on its platform during the 2016 campaign. The automated messaging was overwhelmingly pro-Trump. For example, known Russian bots directly retweeted @realDonaldTrump 469,537 times

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Western information offensive. For many in American politics and Silicon Valley, it came when that same Russian effort poisoned their networks with a flood of disinformation, bots, and hate. Today, online battles are no longer just the stuff of science fiction or wonky think tank reports, but an integral part

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“tomorrow we may be fighting with weapons.” Farther afield, the purpose of these Russian information offensives was to add a fifth “D” to the classic disinformation goals we explored in chapter 4. In addition to dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay, these messages were intended to divide. An obvious wedge was

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clever groups and governments can twist this phenomenon to their own ends, using virality and perception to drag their goals closer within reach. Call it disinformation or simple psychological manipulation. The result is the same, summarized best by the tagline of the notorious conspiracy website Infowars: “There’s a war

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Ukraine announced the creation of a volunteer “Internet army,” Russian propagandists turned it into a joke. When Germany launched the Center of Defense Against Disinformation to combat fake rumors and teach citizens to be critical of Russian sources, an RT broadcaster observed (not incorrectly) that it carried echoes of a

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beginning that Facebook had been saturated not just with profit-motivated misinformation and “fake news” spun by Macedonian teenagers, but also with a pro-Trump disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Russian government. As stupefied liberals searched for someone or something to blame, Mark Zuckerberg could see the tidal wave coming.

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home, U.S. legislators launched the first major effort to regulate online political advertisements, especially the “dark ads” used by Russian propagandists to spread disinformation and by the Trump campaign to suppress minority voter turnout. It moved to subject them to the same Federal Election Commission disclosure rules that applied

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Twitter, and every other internet company of scale will use neural networks to police their platforms. Dirty pictures, state-sponsored botnets, terrorist propaganda, and sophisticated disinformation campaigns will be hunted by machine intelligences that dwarf any now in existence. But they will be battled by other machine intelligences that seek to

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that make us such dynamic, social creatures—our curiosity, affinity for others, and desire to belong—also render us susceptible to dangerous currents of disinformation. It doesn’t even help to be born into the world of the internet, as is the case for millennials and Generation Z. Study

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information attacks, backed by the close proximity of Russian soldiers and tanks. Their inoculation efforts include citizen education programs, public tracking and notices of foreign disinformation campaigns, election protections and forced transparency of political campaign activities, and legal action to limit the effect of poisonous super-spreaders. In many ways,

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on how to address the challenges outlined in this book, while its State Department refused to increase efforts to counter online terrorist propaganda and Russian disinformation, even as Congress allocated nearly $80 million for the purpose. Similarly, the American election system remains remarkably vulnerable, not merely to hacking of the

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Just as in the case of viral outbreaks of disease, there is a need for everything from public awareness campaigns to explain the risks of disinformation efforts to mass media notifications that announce their detected onset. Given the dangers, anger, and lies that pervade social media, there’s a temptation

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of people’s lives are at stake. Those who deliberately facilitate enemy efforts, whether it be providing a megaphone for terrorist groups or consciously spreading disinformation, especially that from foreign government offensives, have to be seen for what they are. They are no longer just fighting for their personal brand

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s unacceptable that social media firms took nearly a year after the 2016 U.S. election to release data showing definitive proof of a Russian disinformation campaign—and even then, only after repeated demands by Congress. It is perhaps especially troubling that, despite all the political and public pressure, most

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ranging from hate groups to harassment, they were consistently ignored. Similarly, when outside researchers raised concerns about emerging problems like neo-Nazi trolling and Russian disinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. election, the firms essentially dismissed them. Changing to a proactive strategy will require the firms to alter their

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-confessions-of-a-kremlin-troll-57754. 103 more than 200 blog posts: Ibid. 103 One story (possibly apocryphal): Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak, Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism (WND Books, 2013), loc. 284, Kindle. 103 more than 10

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,000: Thomas Rid, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns,” testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence, March 30, 2017, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites

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/default/files/documents/os-trid-033017.pdf. 104 Operation INFEKTION: Thomas Boghardt, “Operation INFEKTION: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign,” Studies in Intelligence 53, no. 4 (2009). 104 Indian newspaper Patriot: Ibid. 104 “well-known American scientist”: David Robert Grimes, “Russian Fake News

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tpartynews-twitter-russia-link/index.html. 112 seemingly trustworthy individuals: John D. Gallacher et al., “Junk News on Military Affairs and National Security: Social Media Disinformation Campaigns Against US Military Personnel and Veterans” (data memo 2017.9, Computational Propaganda Project, University of Oxford, October 9, 2017), http://comprop.oii.ox.

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see the Twitter account Logic Reason (@gsobjc), https://twitter.com/gsobjc?lang=en. 145 In Venezuela: Peter Pomerantsev, introduction to The New Authoritarians: Ruling Through Disinformation, Beyond Propaganda (Transitions Forum, Legatum Institute, June 2015), 6, https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/publications/the-new-authoritarians—ruling-through

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“Ukrainian Internet Army Report Card: ‘A’ for Effort ‘F’ for Achievement,” Sputnik, June 3, 2015, https://sputniknews.com/science/201503061019154259/. 211 Center of Defense Against Disinformation: Rachel Stern, “Germany’s Plan to Fight Fake News,” Christian Science Monitor, January 9, 2017, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2017/0109/Germany-s

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, 236, 242 Active Measures Working Group, 263 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 26–27 Advocates for Peace and Urban Unity, 14 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 60 AIDS disinformation campaign, 104, 208 Airbnb, 239 Al Qaeda, 54, 65, 79–80, 149, 234 Alabed, Bana, 214–16 al-Assad, Bashar, 9, 72, 88,

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, 233 of Nipplegate, 218–19 regulation, 228–29 in Russia, 103–17 Silicon Valley view of, 83 in Turkey, 91–93 Center of Defense Against Disinformation, 211 Centre for Research on Globalization, 108 Cerf, Vint, 35–36, 37, 38 Charlottesville, VA, 115, 138, 189, 232, 239 chatbots, 140, 251 Chen

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15, 202 discrediting anti-vaxxers, 124–25 campaigners, 116 of information, 123 journalists and activists, 15, 114 of truth, 140 See also trolls and trolling disinformation, 103–14, 137 botnets, 141–47 cybersecurity, 241 dangers of, 261 Russian botnets, 144–45 See also fake news; propaganda disintermediation, 54–55 diversity,

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139–40, 142 fake news, 131, 132, 240 government surveillance on, 94 homophily, 123–25 Instagram and, 49 intelligence gathering, 177 Lookalike Audiences, 177 Macedonian disinformation, 118–21 Mexican cartels, 69–70 Myanmar genocide, 136 News Feed, 46 origin of, 42–47, 219, 265 Palestinians, 197 regulation, 228, 230–31,

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generative adversarial networks, 256–57 generative networks, 254–55 geographical data, 58–59 Gerasimov, Valery, 106 Gerasimov Doctrine, 106–7 Germany Center of Defense Against Disinformation, 211 communication in World War I, 181 cybersecurity, 241 propaganda in World War II, 7–8 refugees and, 206–7 Ghonim, Wael, 85 Giesea,

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military military memes, 191 Milley, Mark, 58–59 Milner, Ryan, 191 MILNET, 38 Milošević, Slobodan, 83–84 Milov, Vladimir, 105 mining information, 79 misinformation. See disinformation; fake news mobile phones, 47 Modi, Narendra, 116 Moneyball (Lewis), 77 monopolies, 49–50 Montag, Heidi, 155–57, 158, 159 Monteiro, Mike, 219–20 Moore

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Allan, 110 Poe’s Law, 174 polarization, 126, 132–33, 160, 202 politics authenticity, 168 botnets, 138–39, 141–47 China internet, 95–103 disinformation, 115–16 dislike for, 222 EZLN revolution, 40–41 fake news, 130–31 “Macaca” moment, 55–57 radio use in, 32–33 Trump and, 3

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, digital, 244–48 Sesame Credit, 100–101, 102 “SF-lovers” email, 36 Shane, Janelle, 248 Shannon, Claude, 26 shareholders, 221 shares alt-right, 134 disinformation, 113, 118 links in, 134 as reflection of self, 273 thoughtfulness of, 123–24 virality, 129–30 Shinn, James, 77 Shirky, Clay, 86 shitposters, 175

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social media accounts, 15 Ullah, Haroon, 172 U.S. Air Force, 52 U.S. internet user, 118 U.S. military ARPANET, 27, 36–38 disinformation, Russian, 108–9 intelligence gathering, 79–82 ISIS and, 10–11 narrative, 160–61 Operation Neptune Spear, 53–55 Rolling Thunder campaign, 18 social media

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie  · 8 Oct 2019

of documents I provided to law enforcement revealed that the Vote Leave campaign had used secret Cambridge Analytica subsidiaries to spend dark money to propagate disinformation on Facebook and Google ad networks. This was determined to be illegal by the U.K.’s Electoral Commission, with the scheme ending up as

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all wanted to talk to me. Within weeks, the European Union and more than twenty countries had opened up inquiries into Facebook, social media, and disinformation. I told my story to the world, and now every screen was a mirror reflecting it back at me. For two weeks straight, my life

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narratives and virtual realities. Cambridge Analytica first piloted this new warfare in Africa and tropical islands around the world. The firm experimented with scaled online disinformation, fake news, and mass profiling. It worked with Russian agents and employed hackers to break into opposition candidates’ email accounts. Soon enough, having perfected its

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-harvesting operation. This material demonstrated that the company had recruited hackers, hired personnel with known links to Russian intelligence, and engaged in bribery, extortion, and disinformation campaigns in elections around the world. There were confidential legal memos from lawyers warning Steve Bannon about Cambridge Analytica’s violations of the Foreign Agents

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planting fake battle plans on a corpse dressed as a dead soldier in the fantastically named Operation Mincemeat. The well-designed use of information—and disinformation—is one of the most effective ways of gaining tactical advantage on the battlefield. In devising an informational weapon, it’s helpful to think of

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Europe for NATO on counter–Russian propaganda initiatives. One was for a counter-narcotics program in a Latin American country, where a military client spread disinformation to turn local coca farmers against drug lords. Others detailed PSYOPS programs in Mexico and Kenya. As Nix had said before, these were projects that

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that it would turn into something valuable. What few people know, however, is the story of who became Cambridge Analytica’s very first target of disinformation. Back when Bannon and I first met, he had rejected going to a private club on Pall Mall, preferring to meet in Cambridge. Nix clocked

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its counterinsurgency operations in other parts of the world. It is unclear who inside the firm actually gave the final order to set up these disinformation operations, but for many of the old guard who had spent years working on projects around the world, none of this seemed unusual. They were

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if I asked too many questions that he didn’t care for. But at the time, in spring 2014, just two years before any Russian disinformation efforts hit the U.S. presidential election, there wasn’t anything innately suspicious about these Russians beyond the typical bread-and-butter shadiness that the

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what the firm, at least in theory, was capable of setting up were there to be a project that needed special intelligence services or scaled disinformation operations on social media. (As the memo was internal, it referenced SCL; Cambridge Analytica was merely a front-facing brand for American clients that was

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build credibility and cultivate followers.” For many of SCL’s clients, this was a standard offer—private espionage, stings, bribes, extortion, infiltrations, honey traps, and disinformation spread through fake accounts on social media. For the right price, SCL was willing to do whatever it took to win an election. And now

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outlined an SCL project in Nigeria aimed at undermining voters’ confidence in civic institutions. Labeled “Election: Inoculation,” the material described how to spread rumors and disinformation to sway election results. Nix played videos of emotional voters convinced that the upcoming Nigerian election would be rigged. “We made them think that,” he

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the United States want access to our U.S. data assets? And if this was a commercial project, why was Alexander showing them slides about disinformation in Africa? But it wasn’t simply the internal data assets that were shown to the firm’s clients. The firm was eager to show

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their opponent, including a concerted effort to leak rumors about the opposing candidate’s health. And this stolen kompromat was then combined with widespread online disinformation targeting social media networks. The overlap in events could be entirely coincidental, but many of the personnel who worked on Nigeria also worked on CA

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system of constitutionally protected free speech, and the U.S. government did nothing to stop them. Neither did Facebook. Was Cambridge Analytica involved in Russian disinformation efforts in the United States? No one can say for sure, and there’s no single “smoking gun” proving that Cambridge Analytica was the culprit

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other CIS countries; memos referenced ex–Russian security services; and we have Alexander Nix telling Lukoil about Cambridge Analytica’s U.S. data sets and disinformation capacity. When I had lunch with Nix to tell him I was quitting, he was clear about how he thought things would play out. “The

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, more than a year after it first identified the issue, and seven months after beginning to investigate what was called a “five-alarm fire” of disinformation spreading on its site.) Ultimately, between the Democrats’ indifference to the threat and Silicon Valley’s inability to understand how to solve a problem without

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(DCMS), at his office in Portcullis House, a modern glass building on the Parliamentary Estate. Collins had opened up an official inquiry into social media disinformation, and several MPs and committee chairs I’d talked with had recommended that I meet with him. Collins was extremely polite and posh and spoke

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regulatory investigation.” The reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was instant and explosive. I was called before the parliamentary inquiry into “fake news and disinformation.” It would be the first of many public and secret hearings, covering everything from Cambridge Analytica’s use of hackers and bribes to Facebook’s

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addicted to rage only because there was nothing to prevent it from doing so—and so, unimpeded, the company drowned them in a maelstrom of disinformation, with predictably disastrous results. But simply stopping CA is not enough. America’s newfound crisis of perception will only continue to worsen until we address

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commit acts of hatred and, in some cases, acts of extreme violence. There is no such thing as “just online” anymore, and online information—or disinformation—that engages its targets can lead to horrific tragedies. In response, Facebook, like the NRA, evades its moral responsibility by invoking the same kind of

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, liking, and sharing. Americans on Facebook did the Russians’ work for them, laundering their propaganda through the First Amendment. But this new era of scaled disinformation is not confined to the realm of politics. Companies like Starbucks, Nike, and other fashion brands have found themselves targets of Russian-sponsored

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disinformation operations. When brands make statements that wade into existing social or racial tensions, there have been several identified instances in which Russian-sponsored fake news

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could in turn create “real” footage showcasing a racist trope of an “angry black man” demanding free stuff in a store. So why would these disinformation operations target a fashion company and attempt to weaponize its brand? Because the objective of this hostile propaganda is not simply to interfere with our

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the British Parliament, thank you for being some of the loudest voices for holding Silicon Valley to account. Your nonpartisan collaboration on the inquiry into disinformation and “fake news” put the public interest first, and you all set a shining example of how politics should be done. By working together, your

Four Battlegrounds

by Paul Scharre  · 18 Jan 2023

, “keeping pilots safer and more effective as they orchestrate large numbers of unmanned systems.” AI is changing war, and it is also changing surveillance, disinformation, and other aspects of global peace and security. Nations around the globe are racing to capitalize on AI technology to gain an advantage over others

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electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize.” AI has applications in cybersecurity, surveillance, defense, border security, disinformation, and economic warfare, yielding major geopolitical advantages to whoever best harnesses these tools. The first and second industrial revolutions brought about a societal process of

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by requests that receiving governments praise China. Chinese officials convinced European Union lawmakers to tone down a report whose early drafts criticized China’s “global disinformation campaign.” When Australia called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the virus, China responded by restricting imports of Australian products into China. When

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tools that can influence and distort the information ecosystem, undermining truth. AI-generated text, audio, and video can be used to create fake news for disinformation and propaganda. They can even be used to convincingly impersonate political leaders. Bots can flood social media with manufactured narratives, allowing authoritarian regimes to suppress

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were thinking about a strategy for responsible release. Humans didn’t need machines to generate fake news, of course. The internet was already rife with disinformation, but tools like GPT-2 could make it easier for trolls, propagandists, and malicious actors to generate fake articles faster and in larger numbers.

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S. presidential election, Russia used fake online personas, surreptitious ad purchases, digital forgeries, social media bots, and online troll farms to create, spread, and amplify disinformation. These efforts were aimed at not only influencing the election, but more broadly sowing division among Americans and undermining faith in democracy. Nor was Russia

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against the 2016 British Brexit referendum and the 2017 French presidential election. In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, concerns about Russian disinformation reached a fever pitch in Washington. U.S. senators warned that Russia’s “information warfare campaign” was designed to “sow fear, discord, and paralysis

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around America’s military and directly attack the nervous system of American democracy, the free and open exchange of ideas. In practice, the effects of disinformation campaigns were hard to measure and hotly debated, but even the perception of foreign influence in an election could—and did—polarize, divide, and

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topic. Furthermore, they found that readers were as willing to share GPT-2 generated articles as a real New York Times article. “Large-scale synthesized disinformation is now possible,” the researchers concluded. “When such content floods the Internet, people may come to discount everything they read.” When we spoke over

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model. Limiting the accessibility of potentially harmful AI tools is only the first step in protecting the information ecosystem against increasingly sophisticated AI tools for disinformation, propaganda, and information warfare. The information environment is swiftly evolving, driven by the emergence of new channels of communication, such as social media, and

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AI-generated content. The information environment has always been a geopolitical battleground among nations, and it is one increasingly fought using AI. Authoritarian states peddle disinformation and propaganda to hide the truth and promote false narratives. AI is giving malicious actors new opportunities to spread lies and suppress the truth. The

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The perpetrators were never caught. Even more worrying than criminal use is the possibility of using synthetic media for information warfare. Nations have long used disinformation to sow discord and uncertainty among rivals. Instead of cybercriminals faking a CEO’s voice to defraud a company, a malicious actor could release a

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’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spawned a flood of war propaganda on all sides of the conflict. The Kremlin peddled a steady stream of disinformation, domestically and internationally, which was often echoed by the Chinese government. Russian falsehoods included claims that the United States had bioweapons labs in Ukraine

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sounds; the quick response from Zelensky, social media companies, and news outlets; and the fact that the Ukrainian government had been warning about deepfake disinformation for weeks. The Zelensky video was an early sign, however, of the ways in which actors will try to use deepfakes to manipulate geopolitical events

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failed and multiple deepfake experts have said the video is likely real. But questions about the video’s authenticity may have contributed to rumors and disinformation about whether the president was still in control or even still alive. (He has since appeared in public, visibly weakened from the stroke.) Knowledge

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can be verified as trustworthy. Tech companies and media organizations whose business model depends on veracity are banding together to develop solutions to weed out disinformation and verify authentic media. Project Origin is a partnership among Microsoft, the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, and the New York Times to use digital

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watermarking to authenticate media and ensure it has not been manipulated. The Trusted News Initiative, a global consortium of news organizations designed to combat election disinformation, has agreed to engage with Project Origin’s digital watermarking technology. Media and tech partners of the Trusted News Initiative include Agence France - Presse,

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one of the core pillars of free societies: the truth. Tech companies, media institutions, and nonprofits are leaning into the problem of synthetic media and disinformation, and the problem may be manageable through a combination of technical, societal, and regulatory approaches. Harmful content will continue to lurk in the dark

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of simple scripts and don’t rely on large data or machine learning. Bots are usually used in conjunction with human-operated accounts to spread disinformation, with bots amplifying messaging. Nevertheless, they are valuable tools for actors looking to manipulate political views online. Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard of the

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University in Doha, Qatar, suggested in 2017 that half of Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia could be bots. Bots have also been used in foreign disinformation campaigns to disrupt democracies. China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have all conducted influence operations targeted at other nations, in which

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of bots include tweeting alerts about natural disasters or links to free books on Amazon.) Bots are in many ways a small part of online disinformation, and bot network takedowns are just one part of social media companies’ broader efforts to counter manipulative information campaigns. Twitter and Facebook have removed

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simply responding to user engagement. Humans are attracted to novelty and are more impacted by negative information than positive information. Our brains are hardwired for disinformation. A 2018 MIT study found that fake news traveled six times faster on Twitter and reached more people. Political content was especially viral. Just

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without uniform rules, other less scrupulous companies will crop up in their place. As Twitter and Facebook increased their content moderation to crack down on disinformation, far-right users flocked to alternatives like Parler and Gab. Fragmenting the social media ecosystem so that users fall into even more extreme bubbles is

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without evidence—that U.S. tech firms have an anti-conservative bias. These unfounded allegations may have caused some companies to soft-pedal right-wing disinformation out of fear of incurring Republicans’ wrath. During the 2020 presidential election, Facebook altered its algorithm to boost the rankings of authoritative news sources over

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S. elected leaders, not unaccountable tech company executives. Yet American political leaders have, time and again, demonstrated not only an unwillingness to confront dangerous political disinformation—many have actively promoted it. Even after a violent mob staged an insurrection to overturn the presidential election, 147 Republican members of Congress objected to

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the scarce resources of data, talent, and compute and have effective institutions to funnel them toward innovative AI applications. Authoritarian uses of AI for surveillance, disinformation, and repression pose a profound challenge to freedom around the globe. Democracies have tremendous advantages in this competition, but they must find ways to harness

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Isn’t Working,” Business Insider, April 18, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-china-coronavirus-political-points-mostly-not-working-2020-4. 75China’s “global disinformation campaign”: Michael Peel and Tom Mitchell, “China Warned EU 3 Times over Virus Propaganda Report,” Financial Times, April 26, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content

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-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/communication-artificial-intelligence-europe. Thanks to CNAS research assistant Katie Galgano for background research on European AI regulations. 15. DISINFORMATION 1178 million web pages totaling 40 gigabytes: “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” openai.com, n.d., https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/

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com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/. 119fake news at industrial scales: Ben Buchanan et al., Truth, Lies, and Automation: How Language Models Could Change Disinformation (Center for Security and Emerging Technology, May 2021), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/truth-lies-and-automation/. 120malicious AI applications: Miles Brundage et al., The

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A. Fox fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute), https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/10-31-17%20Watts%20Testimony.pdf; Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions: Hearing of the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 115th Cong (2017) (replies

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116-XX (2019), https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf. 122slew of influence operations across Europe to undermine democratic processes: Disinformation and ‘Fake News’: Final Report (8th report of Session 2017–19, UK House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, February 18, 2019),

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, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/08/white-house-shares-doctored-video-support-punishment-journalist-jim-acosta/. 129Kremlin peddled a steady stream of disinformation: Stuart A. Thompson, “4 Falsehoods Russians Are Told About the War,” New York Times, March 10, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10

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that we will be checking”: Giorgio Patrini, interview by the author, July 17, 2019. 132working to combat deepfakes: Burt and Horvitz, “New Steps to Combat Disinformation.” 132Facebook partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and the Partnership on AI: “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” Kaggle.com, 2020, https://www.kaggle.com/c/deepfake-detection-challenge/. 132Facebook

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Serelay (website), 2021, https://www.serelay.com/. 138Truepic: Truepic (website), 2021, https://truepic.com/. 138Project Origin: “Trusted News Initiative (TNI) Steps Up Global Fight Against Disinformation with New Focus on US Presidential Election,” BBC Media Centre, July 13, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2020/trusted-news-initiative; Burt

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University, July 22, 2020), https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165. 139“AI-generated content will continue to become more sophisticated”: Renée DiResta, “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” The Atlantic, September 20, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/future-propaganda-will-be-computer-generated/616400/. 140Facebook

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, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/jamal-khashoggi-saudi-arabia-cyberwar-trolls-bee-army-missing-journalist-turkey-us-a8591051.html. 141broader disinformation effort by Saudi Arabia: Jack Stubbs, Katie Paul, and Tuqa Khalid, “Fake News Network vs. Bots: The Online War Around Khashoggi Killing,” Reuters, November

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1, 2018, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-saudi-khashoggi-disinformation-idUKKCN1N63R0. 141common tool by political actors: Marc Jones and Alexei Abrahams, “A Plague of Twitter Bots Is Roiling the Middle East,” Washington Post, June 5

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/06/05/fighting-the-weaponization-of-social-media-in-the-middle-east/. 141fifty countries around the world: Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation” (working paper, Project on Computational Propaganda, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2019), 1, 11–12,

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https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/09/CyberTroop-Report19.pdf. 141in the United States: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” 10–12; Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123–126. 142“the adoption of techniques to influence political opinion online”: Case Studies—Collated—NOV

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docx, 123. 142astroturfing, a manipulative social media practice: Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123–126. 142twenty-six authoritarian regimes: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” i, 2, 5. 142half of Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia: Marc Owen Jones, “Automated Sectarianism and Pro-Saudi Propaganda on Twitter,” Exposing the Invisible

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, January 18, 2017, https://exposingtheinvisible.org/en/articles/automated-sectarianism/. 142China, India, Iran: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” 2, 5. 142Twitter removed a pro-government bot network: Ben Collins and Shoshana Wodinsky, “Twitter Pulls Down Bot Network That Pushed Pro-Saudi Talking

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Street Journal, May 23, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-considers-forming-panel-to-review-complaints-of-online-bias-11590238800. 150soft-pedal right-wing disinformation: Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020, https://www

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Philip K., 81 dictator’s dilemma, 69 Didi, 92 digital devices, 18 DigitalGlobe, 204 Digital Silk Road, 110 DiResta, Renée, 139 disaster relief, 201, 204 disinformation, 117–26 AI text generation, 117–21 deepfake videos, 121 GPT-2 release, 123–24 Russian, 122 voice bots, 121–22 distributional shift, 233, 426

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257 Rubik’s cube, 26 rule-based AI systems, 230, 236 Rumsfeld, Donald, 61 Russia, 12, 40, 52, 108, 110 bots, 142 cyberattacks of, 246 disinformation, 122 invasion of Ukraine, 129, 196, 219, 288 nuclear capabilities, 50 submarines, 255 Rutgers University Big Data Laboratory, 156 RYaN (computer program), 287, 445; See

The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew  · 2 Aug 2010  · 1,744pp  · 458,385 words

on his experience of supplying bogus information to Duff during the Schultz case, Kell supplied more elaborate disinformation to Salter which Grosse passed on to Berlin. Grosse’s case officer was sufficiently pleased with the disinformation to forward a more detailed list of inquiries on wireless telegraphy, range-finding, naval guns and

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. During the Schultz and Grosse cases he had, in effect, briefly used Duff and Salter as double agents by successfully channelling through them information and disinformation to German intelligence. Graves offered Kell a remarkable, but risky, opportunity to recruit him as a full-time double agent. On the day after his

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happen in the Second World War, the first wartime espionage case might thus have led to the development of a ‘Double-Cross System’ to feed disinformation to the enemy.50 The government’s insistence, against MO5(g)’s wishes, on public trials and courts-martial for captured spies, however, made a

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have been limited. Unlike the turned German agents of the Second World War, Müller was executed and therefore unable to add personal credibility to the disinformation sent to German intelligence in his name. The Double-Cross System also depended not on one individual but on a series of turned German agents

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as well as on the co-operation of the whole intelligence community to provide a mixture of information and disinformation capable of both impressing and deceiving the enemy for the remainder of the war. Unlike MI5 in the Second World War, MO5(g) lacked the

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Political situation, most convincingly written. Also sent information regarding the effects of the Zeppelin raids on London. In September, on MI5 instructions, COMO sent further disinformation on the military situation in England and likely movements on the Western Front. He told the Germans that the British were planning an attack on

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15th. COMO continued to pass on at irregular intervals details of the intelligence missions entrusted to him by the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle, and MI5 continued to channel disinformation through him. According to a post-war summary, COMO ‘was always quite honest and trustworthy and did some v[ery] valuable work for us, at

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intelligence agency had the capacity to produce a forgery on the scale and of the complexity that would have been required. Even the KGB, whose disinformation department, Service A, made far more use of forgery than any Western intelligence agency, never fabricated a handwritten document of comparable length.28 The relatively

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War. In June 1933, with MI5’s approval, he travelled to Hamburg to meet his Abwehr case officer. For the next three years he sent disinformation prepared by MI5, disguised (as instructed by the Abwehr) as correspondence on stamp-collecting, to a cover address (Box 629) in Hamburg. Lacking the interdepartmental

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system for assembling disinformation developed for the Double-Cross System in the Second World War, however, MI5 began to run out of plausible falsehoods of interest to the Germans

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capture of five of the twenty-three German agents despatched to the UK during 1941, identified two more and provided valuable guidance in devising the disinformation with which the double agents deceived the Abwehr.71 In December 1941 the veteran codebreaker ‘Dilly’ Knox, though terminally ill with cancer, succeeded in breaking

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the Security Service controlled all German agents operating in Britain.72 ULTRA provided crucial evidence that the Germans were successfully deceived by much of the disinformation fed to them by their turned agents. The Double-Cross System also involved SIS, which both recruited and assisted double agents in neutral capitals. Its

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eventually taken on as Agent ARABEL. Pujol got no further than Lisbon, from where, claiming to be in England, he despatched to the Abwehr plentiful disinformation on non-existent British troop and naval movements, spiced with details of ‘drunken orgies and slack morals at amusement centres’ in Liverpool and the surprising

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henceforth be passed to the Twenty Committee.79 In order to run double agents successfully, B1a needed to have available a mixture of information and disinformation with which they could both impress and deceive German case officers. In January 1941 the Wireless Board (also known as the W Board) was set

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the Double-Cross System in the autumn and winter of 1940.80 The Wireless Board therefore quickly delegated day-to-day selection of information and disinformation to the Twenty Committee, so called because the roman numeral for twenty (XX) is a double cross. The Committee, which had representatives from the Security

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London. Had the embassy become a successful base for German espionage, the intelligence collected would at some point have contradicted, and therefore risked compromising, the disinformation supplied by the double agents. The fact that Spanish espionage in the German interest achieved little of significance was due in large part to the

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Service, he received no guidance from the NKVD. Because of a recurrence in the Centre of paranoid suspicions that the London residency was being fed ‘disinformation’ by its agents, it was closed in February 1940 and the resident, Anatoli Gorsky, recalled to Moscow. In December 1940 the residency reopened, and Gorsky

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that Blunt (like others of the Five) must be deceiving them. ‘Our task’, the Centre instructed its London resident, Anatoli Gorsky, ‘is to understand what disinformation our rivals are planting on us.’ Modrzhinskaya concluded in October 1943 that ‘all the data’ indicated the Cambridge Five were part of an organized deception

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.9 Throughout the deceptions, the LCS maintained close contact with the Twenty Committee and B1a. Eight double agents were used to pass disinformation to the enemy.10 The most inventive disinformation came from the Spanish double agent GARBO and his full-time case officer, Tomás ‘Tommy’ Harris,11 the bilingual son of

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France. Many elements went into the deception plans: among them bogus radio messages from non-existent army units which the Germans were intended to intercept, disinformation abroad spread by British diplomats and agents, and dummy military installations. Shepperton Studios built a huge fake oil-storage complex near Dover, designed by Basil

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her Abwehr case officer falsely reporting her arrival in Bristol in November 1943. Churchill was also given evidence of how much German intelligence valued the disinformation sent them by TRICYCLE and TATE. Pride of place in the double-agents section of MI5’s April monthly report to the Prime Minister went

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1944 report informed Churchill that a German map (above), captured in Italy, showing the location of Allied forces in the UK, accorded ‘precisely’ with the disinformation fed to the enemy by the double agents and wireless deception pointing to an attack in the Calais region. The map opposite shows the real

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August report informed Churchill that a German map, captured in Italy, showing the location of British ground forces in the UK, accorded ‘precisely’ with the disinformation fed to the enemy by the double agents and wireless deception.111 It added, with an understandable air of triumph: ‘Conversations between Hitler and his

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were falling mainly in an arc to the north and west of London.116 It was decided, however, that continuing to use GARBO to send disinformation on the flying bombs carried too great a potential risk to the credibility of B1a’s star double agent. A pretext had therefore to be

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a series of years the pretence of a bitter quarrel between them to deceive the West is proof that his obsession with Soviet penetration and disinformation had led him to lose all sense of proportion. Golitsyn, however, dismissed all agents, defectors and other Soviet sources who disputed his deception theories as

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senior officers, and said that he brought with him a: brief from [the DCI Richard] Helms to discuss with certain Liaison Services the problems of disinformation and penetration and to explore whether arrangements could be made both to step up investigations in the countries which they were visiting and to make

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Anatoly are quite extraordinary chaps.’ MacDonald noted afterwards: The D.G. and ‘C’ indicated very tactfully that while they accepted the facts of penetration and disinformation, they did not consider that it was therefore necessary to subscribe to the Sino-Soviet deception theory. I said that even if we agreed to

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, talks in Washington between representatives of MI5, SIS, CIA and FBI, some attended by FJ, agreed on British–American collaboration in an investigation of Soviet disinformation and penetration by a small group of intelligence officers who exchanged highly classified information. Though J. Edgar Hoover rejected formal FBI membership of the group

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group (in association with the FBI) to seek to identify high-level Soviet penetration in the West, especially of intelligence agencies, and to uncover Soviet disinformation campaigns.69 Angleton brought Golitsyn with him to Melbourne, where, according to Peter Wright, Golitsyn ‘laid special emphasis on Britain, and the many penetrations which

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VENONA exchanges . . . are probably unique in conception, at least in peacetime. There is acceptance by the participating organisations of the threat from penetration and from disinformation and the professions of complete frankness appear to be reflected in the actual exchanges of intelligence. . . . The frank discussions on the threat, the exchanges of

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has been useful to include Australia, Canada and New Zealand in this intimate circle. It has resulted in them devoting more resources to work on disinformation and penetration.77 In May 1970 FJ agreed to invite Golitsyn to Britain and give him access to material from Security Service files in order

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Golitsyn who realised in 1963 that he had told all he knew and set about developing his theory of massive and co-ordinated Soviet deception (‘disinformation’) supported by high-level penetration of all western intelligence and security services98 Among the instances of Wright’s dishonesty in fabricating or distorting evidence to

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arrests of Islamist militants in Albania, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauretania and Tajikistan. The Security Service also believed that some attack warnings might have derived from deliberate disinformation by UBL. A senior member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad was reported to have said that there had never been any intention to attack the US

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of plausibility (albeit inadequate) to his argument that ‘in 1963, there was no doubt that the Soviets had the necessary conditions to begin a major disinformation exercise.’21 In reality, the ‘necessary conditions’ did not exist. The lack of a long-term perspective on the relationship between intelligence and policy in

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be ‘questioned closely by the British about German policy’. With the personal approval of Canaris, he was supplied with a plausible mixture of information and disinformation likely to deceive the British. ‘Preliminary note on the use by German Intelligence of Deception as an aid to military operations’, Security Service Archives. No

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Sherer (B1A), ‘Nathalie Sergueiew’, 4 July 1944, TNA KV 2/466, s. 377a. 89 Henceforth, however, Robertson considered it ‘out of the question’ to include disinformation in TREASURE’s radio messages to Lisbon which thus made no further contribution to FORTITUDE deceptions. Ibid. 90 ‘Report on the Activities of the Security

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Service Archives. 38 There is no credible evidence to support claims that the intelligence generated by Operation GOLD was muddied by significant amounts of KGB disinformation. The best accounts of the Berlin tunnel operation, based both on material made available by the SVR and on declassified CIA files, is Murphy, Kondrashev

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–7; Abwehr agents converted to double agents 248–55, 259; GC&CS’s decrypts of ciphers 248, 249–50, 253, 254–5, 262, 278, 281; disinformation supplied to 285, 287, 288, 292, 294, 297, 299, 300–301, 304, 305, 308, 311, 314–16 Aden 473–7, 605, 801; DSOs/SLOs 138

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, 472–3, 474, 475, 803, 808, 809, 856 Kenyatta, Jomo 176, 454–7, 466, 467–8 Kerrigan, Peter 386, 410, 853 KGB (Soviet intelligence agency): disinformation department 90; use of forgery 90; Second World War codenames 349; and American Communist Party 366; Wilson and 417, 418–19; mishandling of Cambridge Five

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arms 798 Pujol Garcia, Juan (double agent GARBO): background and character 253–4, 256; recruited by SIS 254; transferred to MI5 254; inventive supplier of disinformation 284–5, 294, 855; partnership with Harris 284; German payments to 292; deception of his wife 294–6; and D-Day landings deceptions 297–8

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

by Maria Ressa  · 19 Oct 2022

platforms, the world’s new information gatekeepers, those activities created more engagement and brought in more money. The goals of the gatekeepers and the disinformation operatives aligned. That was the first time we became aware of information warfare tactics that would soon be deployed around the world, from Duterte to

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February 24, 2022, using the same techniques and the same metanarratives he had seeded to annex Crimea, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine itself. This is how disinformation, bottom up and top down, can manufacture a whole new reality. Less than three months later, the Philippines fell into the abyss. May 9,

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as toxins, bacteria, and viruses to use as weapons of mass destruction. White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater began calling Peter “a conduit for Iraqi disinformation.” Those in power have always attempted to control the narrative, especially during wartime. That was true even before social media. Peter would make mistakes later

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was seeing in Indonesia was something I had seen in the Philippines and someday would see in countries around the world as the power of disinformation began to devastate the minds, and transform the behavior, of often less educated people or those less familiar with the internet. Education determines the

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Monterey, California.21 In tracking terrorists, we saw that al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Southeast Asia and Australia operated the same way as disinformation networks someday would: they hijacked disparate groups, trained and funded them, and infected them with the jihadi ideology that targeted both the “near enemy,”

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later: Facebook’s cybersecurity and intelligence experts, including former employees of the US National Security Council, would come to the same conclusion about how online disinformation networks that spread through Facebook regenerated after years of takedowns: “The threat became more dispersed and harder to track down.”23 By 2003, I had

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before the great propaganda wars began in 2016, “happy” was overwhelmingly the most prevalent emotion in five years among our users.18 Over time, disinformation networks would exploit the greed of Facebook and YouTube and we would see in real time how behavior changed, with information operations artificially inflating the

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took off, some shady companies that sold Twitter likes and followers had offices in the Philippines.18 Political marketing by now had evolved into “networked disinformation.” When Filipino politicians began to experiment with social media, many outsourced their operations to advertising and PR strategists who pulled together a spectrum of content

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gave shape to the disparate elements already in the Philippines that operated in a gray area of law and ethics.19 Supply met demand, and disinformation became big business. The Philippines was also a fraud hub. By 2019, it was the global leader of online attacks,20 both automated and

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services to political candidates and corporations. In 2016, Rappler began tracking people who shifted the discourse as Sam did and all of the networks of disinformation. Our research arm wanted to understand the phenomenon. We were one of the few media organizations doing so in the world, which was another

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States in the 1990s—mostly by computer companies like IBM and Microsoft targeting their competitors—known as “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or FUD. The disinformation campaign spread negative information and lies to fuel fear. The conversation we mapped online reminded us of the Communist strategy “Surround the city from the

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and larger powers using the surreptitious tactics of a rebel group. Anyone who stood up to the lies spreading over pro-Duterte and pro-Marcos disinformation networks was gaslit, or told they were crazy. What the bad guys were doing, they ascribed to the good guys. The same process was

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they behaved. We at Rappler began to think about how we could create a database to monitor our information ecosystem—a kind of Interpol for disinformation networks. We needed to build technology to understand the technology. We started automating data collection to see what kinds of content were spreading and

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reach. We became better at this in the coming years, deciding that radical transparency, including publishing full geeky maps of the accounts taking part in disinformation networks, was the way to go: give as much information as the most detail-oriented reader might want. We continued our investigation of the

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network was connected to the core manpower of the Duterte campaign. In August 2021, I discovered that the URL of one of the three key disinformation websites, newstrendph.com, had disappeared. In its place was a Chinese online betting site, linked to a controversial Duterte initiative, the Philippine Offshore Gaming

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.46 This is partly why the company has consistently allowed politicians to lie, why it hid the truth, then blunted its announcement, about Russian disinformation and information operations, and why it allowed extremist groups to grow and seed metanarratives that led to its wake-up call: the violence on Capitol

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Facebook says and does: first, that more information is better; second, that faster information is better; third, that the bad—lies, hate speech, conspiracy theories, disinformation, targeted attacks, information operations—should be tolerated in service of Facebook’s larger goals. All three ideas are great for Facebook because they mean that

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only if there is something of a level playing field, not what Facebook algorithms created. The company’s choices gave a bullhorn to hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories—emotive content that keeps you on site and scrolling, bringing in more revenues for the platform. If Facebook had taken its

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in the comments where we saw a lot of astroturfing happen. Typically, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t take the comments into account when he claimed that disinformation composed only 1 percent of the site. The attacks on my own Facebook page also increased. I tried to respond, but my feed was

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to embrace my fear and change what I could. We gathered data, monitoring the evolution of tactics as well as the growth and messaging of disinformation networks. Then we published stories that forecasted what might happen in other democratic countries.33 We knew we were wading into dangerous waters. By

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and overwhelm a truth teller and change the public narrative. More than anything else at that time, the report captured the scope of the global disinformation crisis. It was to be released in August 2017, but it kept getting delayed. In October, Camille and I had lunch at Chelsea Market

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Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be overhauling its news feed.14 The changes would be a puny response to the growing public outcry over the disinformation it had allowed to run rampant. It would now be prioritizing what friends and family shared15 over content from publishers and brands (even the

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facts reached fewer people. And if there are no facts to counter the lies that make their way to family and friends from information operations, disinformation spreads further exponentially. Facebook’s decision to deprioritize news18 was an absurd way to address issues of “fake news.” It claimed that it wanted

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somewhat, maintained order and stability around the world. That hit me in June, when the Atlantic Council gathered fifteen of us in Berlin to study disinformation and its impact on power. Among the other participants were Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state; Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden;

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268 people arrested. Those protests were different because the people behind them were decentralized: organized on social media—largely Facebook, according to my interviews—where disinformation was misleading and fueling past grievances, many of which might have been legitimate but now had been amplified to the point of encouraging violence. When

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Mark Zuckerberg, was their youth. But I had learned to trust their supervisor, who was a former FBI investigator. Gemma Mendoza, who heads our disinformation research, was joining me to take the Facebook team through the tactics and methodology of the attack networks we had discovered. It was my second

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point, Beth suddenly entered the room. Somewhat surprised, I stopped and introduced her to the Facebook team. “Hey, Beth, meet the new team working on disinformation networks at Facebook,” I said. “Guys, this is one of the founders of Rappler, Beth Frondoso.” “Maria, don’t turn around,” Beth said tersely.

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to enforce its own policies and remove posts inciting violence; to ban ads that seek to delegitimize election results; and to take measures to prevent disinformation and misinformation about the election results. It was a sign of the times that within twenty-four hours, Facebook acted on all of them. It

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with Facebook, hoping against hope that it would act. In the instances when Facebook did act, it often made the problem and the spread of disinformation worse. One example was shutting down the API, the application programming interface, that enabled third parties to gather data. The move was intended to

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Step two was to use natural language processing, using computers to process large amounts of text to pull out the consistent messages of networks of disinformation. Doing that led us to step three, which was identifying the websites and other digital assets associated with those networks, including those profiting off

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and fuel information operations. These government propaganda efforts are often aided and abetted by foreign actors. In December 2018, Rappler Research found links to Russian disinformation networks23 from the Facebook page of the Daily Sentry in the Philippines, which had quickly become the most powerful account attacking Rappler. Facebook would take

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digital funnel to public hubs. NTF-ELCAC, on the other hand, uses a red-tagging network built on state accounts as well as its disinformation network. The end result was that the stories about the activists targeted and killed tended to stay within the bubble of progressive groups and the

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government agencies—using tried and tested methods in the drug war and evolving after three Facebook takedowns in 2018 and 2019—can be at amplifying disinformation and abuse. This was the second wave of the Duterte administration’s use of violence and fear, the creation of an enabling environment for

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team, working with our core managers, found the solution in our investigative journalism: the very same processes we had developed to track networks of disinformation online became the foundation of a data- and tech-based business model that grew by 12,000 percent from 2018 to 2019, helping power our

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down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long

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views, matching social media’s impact on behavior in other parts of the world.26 The Marcos networks worked hand in hand with the Duterte disinformation and propaganda networks, using common themes to achieve their common goals. By 2018, the center of the Philippines’ Facebook information ecosystem was dominated by

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down by Facebook for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”27 One of the fastest-growing sites on Facebook that year was Daily Sentry; its links to Russian disinformation were exposed by Rappler28 (it was, not coincidentally, Rappler’s top attacker) before it was taken down. In 2020, Facebook would also take down

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a common defense of facts. Competition stopped that in the Philippines, to our collective detriment, allowing news organizations to be sidelined by the Duterte-Marcos disinformation networks that had turned information operations into information warfare. The goal is to try to pull our collective digital footprints together. This idea started with

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amplification, which would help all of us rise together, ensuring greater distribution of the fact-checks. Layer three is composed of at least seven disinformation research groups that take the data, make sense of it, and release a weekly report that tells us how the public sphere is being manipulated

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facts. More than 140 groups from media, civil society, the Church, academe, business, and lawyers banded together—a whole-of-society approach to fighting disinformation and ensuring the integrity of our elections. Even though it took nearly three months to organize, it was exciting because we were no longer just

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the ousting of the Marcos dictatorship, Leni Robredo’s campaign rallies began to draw massive crowds. Both Ukraine and Robredo had long been targets of disinformation, but in the following weeks, collective action by real people began to turn the tide, creating cracks of hope and light. Vladimir Putin had

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to hundreds of thousands of people in city after city, igniting a spirit of volunteerism that our country had never seen before.40 To fight disinformation, they began to go door to door. Those developments made March a month of action. Our #FactsFirstPH pyramid grew in parallel with Robredo’s

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for the companies and instead force them to make changes to their business model, such as ending algorithmic amplification that threatens fundamental rights and spreads disinformation and hate, including in cases where the risks originate outside EU borders. 5.Urgently propose legislation to ban surveillance advertising, recognizing this practice is fundamentally

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journalists’ safety, media sustainability and democratic guarantees in the digital space in the forthcoming European Media Freedom Act. 8.Protect media freedom by cutting off disinformation upstream. This means there should be no special exemptions or carve-outs for any organization or individual in any new technology or media legislation. With

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globalized information flows, this would give a blank check to those governments and non-state actors who produce industrial scale disinformation to harm democracies and polarize societies everywhere. 9.Challenge the extraordinary lobbying machinery, the astroturfing campaigns and recruitment revolving door between big tech companies and

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html. 19.Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes, “Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines,” Newton Tech4Dev Network, February 5, 2018, http://newtontechfordev.com/wp-content/uploads

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/2018/02/ARCHITECTS-OF-NETWORKED-DISINFORMATION-FULL-REPORT.pdf. 20.Glen Arrowsmith, “Arkose Labs Presents the Q3 Fraud and Abuse Report,” Arkose Labs, September 18, 2019, https://www.arkoselabs.com/

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball  · 19 Jul 2023  · 317pp  · 87,048 words

and emerge should be an easier task – and an urgent one. Most efforts to tackle online conspiracies do so through the lens of misinformation or disinformation, imagining that fact-checks, better moderation or better-managed social networks could go a long way towards fixing our issues. But thinking of QAnon and

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alarm that the lab has leaked. PART ONE Emergence 1 Ask the Q From the way 4chan is talked about in the media and by disinformation researchers, you’d be forgiven for imagining at some Matrix-movie-esque den of iniquity, the heart of darkness, a tool of the notorious dark

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damages of almost $50 million in a July 2022 ruling.19 Later rulings brought the total payout due from Jones to the victims of his disinformation to $1.4 billion. Lest anyone think that Jones is some small-time operator, financial documents released as part of that case and reported by

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: ‘Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.’ By January 2021, a conspiracy theory born in 2017 and allowed to grow through the neglect of social media giants and the inattention of the

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initialism of QAnon’s ‘Where We Go One, We Go All’ mantra. Research by the Media Manipulation Casebook, a team within Harvard researching misinformation and disinformation,17 found tweets relating to the protest and hashtag were retweeted 66,000 times in the week following the march. Rojas then announced plans to

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at the time, it said: Polaris and many other organizations that work to protect children and families are deeply concerned that the spread of intentional disinformation about how child sex trafficking happens in most situations is detracting from the very real, very important work of helping families to protect children and

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dissipated in the heavy rain. But Protzman succeeded in persuading another crowd of hundreds back to Dallas two weeks later,13 prompting BBC Monitoring’s disinformation journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh to publicly express concern that Protzman’s ‘QAnon offshoot is rapidly turning into a full-on cult and this should be a

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of time reporting on those who have gone down that route is Marianna Spring, the BBC’s specialist correspondent covering disinformation and social media – in practice, essentially a QAnon/antivaxx/climate change disinformation beat. A key principle for her, she says, is to remember why conspiracy theories latch on to people. If

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this – I think that that makes for more impactful investigative reporting alongside the fact-checking.’ Spring repeatedly praises her colleagues who work fact-checking online disinformation, but says her role is a very different one. Instead of trying to get into the truth or otherwise of each specific conspiratorial claim, her

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worlds, and the effects they have on the people close to them. It’s very much about … almost weaponising the very techniques that allow online disinformation to go so viral, and using them in a way of covering the topic that means that it has impact and is able to reach

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kinds of different audiences. Because what often strikes me when I’m interviewing, particularly experts on the topic of anti-vaxxers, for example, or Covid disinformation, is that they will be very measured, very reasonable – and good scientists and good doctors have to be like that. And that’s a brilliant

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thing. But unfortunately, it means that the online disinformation space is dominated by people who talk in absolutes, and who make this kind of information very appealing, and very emotive and very frightening, very

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kind of abstract internet thing that they can’t relate to their own lives. And as a consequence, it doesn’t succeed in countering the disinformation. This logic doesn’t say that experts should start telling stories that aren’t true, but instead that they should tell true stories in a

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could be pulled back. Spring – who receives considerable online abuse and threats herself – believes doing this to be essential. ‘My job isn’t to combat disinformation, but rather to reveal the harm that it’s causing in the real world and for people to understand the violence and the harm to

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. ‘Picture a young man in front of a computer, in his parents’ basement,’ says Rashad Ali,18 a senior fellow at the anti-extremism and disinformation think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Ali – once a senior figure in the extremist-leaning Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, who now researches counter

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are somehow even worse at it online, despite networking being the very core of the internet. Short of endless solemn pronouncements that online ‘misinformation and disinformation’ are a threat to democracy, those coordinating a response seem content to stay well in their comfort zone,8 imagining that a fact-check here

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interviewed and cited in this book, many of whom helped far beyond their quoted contributions. I’d also like to salute anyone working on the disinformation beat and trying to sound the alarm on what’s happening – good work and Godspeed. I’d also like to apologise to the numerous people

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, ‘Virality Project (US): Marketing meets Misinformation’, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu, 26 May 2020. 46. Samantha Walther and Andrew McCoy, ‘US Extremism on Telegram: Fueling Disinformation, Conspiracy Theories, and Accelerationism’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 15/2 (2021), at www.jstor.org. 47. Louise Hall, ‘ “Forcing boys to wear masks is emasculating”: GOP

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, 15 March 2022. 54. At https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1503437677445537793?s=21. 55. US Department of State, ‘GEC Special Report: Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem’, www.state.gov, 4 August 2020. 56. Liam O’Dell, ‘QAnon think Trump backs Ukraine-Russia conflict to destroy “secret labs” run

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-ness. 6. Yes, I know they’re not actually nuns. 7. If it starts facing upwards. 8. ‘Barack Obama Takes on a New Role: Fighting Disinformation’, www.nytimes.com, 20 April 2022. Bibliography and Further Reading This is a selection of titles referenced through this book, and also some related to

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

to push the boundaries as far as they will go, and beyond. Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016 after a campaign marred by disinformation and electoral interference. Far from being an aberration, dirty politics is the new normal. What’s so bad about political campaigns not declaring the source

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, and accentuates the risk of the public sphere being captured by vested interests. Dark money has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of digital disinformation. It is a truism that politics has been transformed in recent years. But it is not just the outcomes, the election of disruptive authoritarian populists

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Britain. Once again, we will find laws that are hopelessly out of date in the digital age. We will delve into the world of online disinformation, meeting some of the people behind the online news sites that push populist messages across the Internet. We will chart the rise of Europe’s

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-funded pro-Johnson ads flooded social media. Conservative Party sources routinely lied to journalists. Many saw the spirit of Dominic Cummings behind the onslaught of disinformation. Having vowed to “deliver Brexit” in government, Cummings was credited with instigating Boris Johnson’s controversial decision to suspend Parliament in August 2019 in an

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playing on their fears around migrants coming to Britain. “Fear is such a powerful driving emotion, especially online,” says Claire Wardle, an expert in digital disinformation. Unlike in traditional campaigns, Vote Leave’s emotive images were not seen on posters or buses. They appeared privately, on people’s social media feeds

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staff at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had been brought before Collins’s committee. The inquiry initially began as a bipartisan examination of the spread of disinformation, inspired by the efforts in Washington of Democratic senator Mark Warner and his Republican counterpart Richard Burr to understand the role of Russia in the

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.” In December 2019, Boris Johnson won a general election landslide. The campaign was a ramped-up reprise of Vote Leave. There were dubious claims and disinformation, anonymous adverts on social media and incessant lying. Journalists who asked awkward questions were sidelined. On the morning after the vote, Dominic Cummings stood smiling

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team of journalists focused on social media. Endless fact-checks corrected the record. But they were a finger in the dyke against a flood of disinformation. Conspiracy theories swirled, in some cases actively encouraged by political parties. In Britain, as in many other countries, digital politics has become a chaotic void

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the digital age,” he said. But even if the way politicians spend money online was circumscribed, would it stem the rising tide of lies and disinformation? Voters themselves are already conduits for mistruths and falsehoods. Tighter constraints on parties would also do little to stop another growing source of online interference

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I asked why, almost all listed the same concern: “Emails.” Few offered more detail than that. The 2016 US presidential election also showed how online disinformation can be used not just to support a particular candidate, but also to sow discord and chaos. While the Kremlin weighed in on Trump’s

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, often creates a false equivalence between facts and lies is as much a boon for populists and political snake oil sellers as dark money and disinformation. The shift to high-octane, 24/7 reporting has made it easier for those in power to manipulate journalistic conventions. Almost as soon as Boris

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than a melee of Labour protesters, there were only half a dozen people and no punches had been thrown. The journalists who had amplified this disinformation apologised for their mistake, but it was too late. The dead cat had become the story. Journalists have struggled to react to this rising tide

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advance, however, is also undergirded by networks of dark money and hidden influence, much as we have seen in Britain. Armies of digital supporters spread disinformation across the borderless Internet. Electoral rules, where they exist, are there to be broken. Europe’s populists often share similar campaigning styles and talking points

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support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, is closely aligned with Vladimir Putin. The billionaire businessman’s television station spreads a conservative message laced with disinformation. Frequent guests on his programmes include influential Putin acolyte Aleksandr Dugin, a neo-fascist thinker and proponent of ‘Eurasianism’ – a dream of a revived Russian

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half million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic tweets.63 They often published identical posts that were designed to look spontaneous but were in fact coordinated disinformation. In one instance, a raft of pro-Vox accounts tweeted images of a riot said to be happening in a Muslim district in France. The

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news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.”64 Many of Vox’s digital echo chambers pushed religiously tinged disinformation. Muslims wanted to take Spain back to the time of the Moors. Leftists were encouraging children to have abortions. Highly emotive messages about moral issues

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– especially those that spark feelings of fear – are a particularly effective way to spread disinformation. Similar tactics were used during the 2016 presidential election, when pro-Kremlin accounts appealed directly to Christian fundamentalists by sharing images that showed Hillary Clinton

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horns protruding, arm-wrestling with Jesus.65 Religion, as digital expert Claire Wardle explained to me, “is one of the best ways to spread disinformation online.” * Digital disinformation and wealthy foreign donors are not the only sources of electoral interference. States often meddle in each other’s politics. Between 1946 and 1989

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competing with other parties for control of Italy’s democratic institutions. We don’t have to look far, however, to find a European state where disinformation and targeted influence campaigns have already created a much more solidly grounded ‘illiberal democracy’. * In late 2017, I arrived in an icy Budapest to give

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a much wider political project, to support authoritarian societies led by ‘strongmen’.” * As this book has looked primarily at the effect of dark money and disinformation on Britain, this chapter has focused on examples of the nativist surge in some of the UK’s European neighbours: Italy, Spain and Hungary. In

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all three, nationalist appeals to religion and identity have been underpinned by international networks of political influence and digital disinformation. The effects of this can be seen most dramatically in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has shown how quickly supposedly liberal democratic norms and conventions can

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transparent, and accountable to citizens. What, if anything, can be done to reverse the crisis in democracy? Can we halt the seemingly unstoppable rise of disinformation and dirty politics? Or has democracy already gone dark? * The princess is also close to Hillary Clinton and was one of about a dozen women

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from academics and policy wonks to the chair of the Electoral Commission, warned that the country’s democratic process was failing. The biggest source of disinformation “is the governing party, and they are the ones charged with changing the law”, said Will Moy, chief executive of Full Fact, an independent fact

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being bought have been rendered obsolete when huge sums can be spent outside regulated periods, or by super Pac-style campaign surrogates. Politicians wilfully spread disinformation. We are being targeted online in ways that we cannot fully understand, partly because campaigns and tech platforms have to disclose so little about how

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as the cost of doing business. * British politics, of course, is not alone in becoming increasingly Americanised. The global nexus of dark money and political disinformation that we have seen is part of an escalating war against the basic tenets of democracy. Nationalists and xenophobes from Italy to Hungary have tapped

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, including the UK. Electoral interference is likely to get worse, not better. So how will we respond to the growing crisis of dark money and disinformation? Will we all sit back and mutely watch it unfold, complaining bitterly on social media but struggling, atomised, to find avenues to channel our anger

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closed, another quickly opens up. The third, and biggest, obstacle to meaningful democratic reform is the political class itself. As long as politicians think that disinformation wins elections, dirty habits are unlikely to change. Not only are the fines for breaking the rules of our democracy meagre; funding politics through anonymous

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donations and spreading disinformation seems to come at little political or reputational cost. In 2019, the Conservatives faced no electoral comeback for ‘shit-posting’ on social media, lying with

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’t. Occasional protests outside the headquarters of tech giants hint at growing frustrations, but where are the mass movements needed to push dark money and disinformation from a niche concern to the top of the political agenda? If proven law-breaking – as in the Brexit referendum – and obvious electoral manipulation is

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insisted that concerns about the effect of tech monopolies on democracy are overstated. Zuckerberg’s platform has introduced changes aimed at limiting the spread of disinformation. Doubtless Facebook will launch more initiatives. But promises have been made before and have failed to deliver. Meanwhile, digital influence campaigns are already migrating to

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while dismantling the modern-day equivalent of the railroad monopolies might help, it’s not clear how such a move would stem the flow of disinformation, especially on the closed groups and anonymous forums from which armies of online trolls are feeding a populist surge across the world. There have been

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of personal data with companies across the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, has warned of a “digital dystopia” if disinformation and invasion of privacy are not stopped. In 2019, dozens of tech companies including Facebook and Google signed Berners-Lee’s ‘Contract for the Web

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. Like the climate, democracy is fast reaching a tipping point. If the opportunity for change is not seized, the worst aspects of the present malaise – disinformation, dark money and spiralling polarisation – could well push us beyond a point of no return. It is not too late. I am still an optimist

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never have been possible without the tireless team at openDemocracy and, in particular, Mary Fitzgerald, who realised early on the importance of dark money and disinformation in British politics and has been prepared to fight tooth-and-nail to tell many of the stories in this book. She has been my

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Sport Committee, ‘Fake News’, House of Commons, June 2018. See also http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/85344.html; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 3 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New

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Sport Committee, ‘Fake News’, House of Commons, June 2018. See also http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/85344.html; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 94 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Arron Banks lied to Parliament about his Brexit campaign

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Sport Committee, ‘Fake News’, House of Commons, May 2018. See also http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/82471.html; accessed 20 Jan. 2020. 24 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘How the Electoral Commission turned blind eye to DUP

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/culture-media-and-sport/181126-Correspondence-between-Richard-Cook-CRC-and-the-Chair.pdf; accessed 20 Jan. 2020. 43 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Disinformation and “fake news”: Final Report’, House of Commons, February 2019. See also https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/179112.htm; accessed 20

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Leave staffer is running Facebook ads pushing the Greens’, Wired, November 2019. 56 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Revealed: Former Vote Leave data chief accused of pro-Tory “disinformation”’, openDemocracy, November 2019. 57 Jemima Kelly, Cynthia O’Murchu and David Blood, ‘Voters left in the dark over money behind online election ads’, Financial Times

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2019. See also https://about.fb.com/news/2019/09/elections-and-political-speech/; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 70 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Disinformation and “fake news”: Final Report published’, House of Commons, February 2019. See also www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture

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”: Explosive new tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression, manipulation and bribery’, openDemocracy, January 2019. 73 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Disinformation and “fake news”: Final Report published’, House of Commons, February 2019. See also https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/179107.htm; accessed

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-behind-macedonias-fake-news-sites; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 51 Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler, ‘Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, August 2017. See also https://cyber.harvard.edu

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

the Internet has become a fetid swamp, overgrown with manipulative scams, malevolent propaganda, and parasitic bots. Misinformation, a term for unintentional falsehoods as distinguished from disinformation’s deliberate lies, is overflowing online, along with every other kind of information. Online echo chambers not only contribute to political polarization, they produce a

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the press and sculpting of public opinion, and the recruitment of intellectuals, academics, and journalists to a totalizing crusade. * * * What lies beneath the specter of disinformation is the struggle for control. “It has become increasingly clear that information is one element, and perhaps the most important, of state power,” wrote the

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the experience as rather more electrical than ethical. —Joan Didion, The White Album The concept of hybrid warfare, which foreshadowed the elite crusade against disinformation, was popularized in response to three events that took place over the course of 2014: the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, which the United States backed

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to counter misinformation or deception campaigns with truthful information.” The project’s description specified that part of the funding would go to automating its counter-disinformation and propaganda work—tasks that would get dramatically easier as artificial intelligence advanced over the next decade. Leaving aside the political and legal questions raised

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processes.” The European Union, in partnership with NATO, opened its own “Centres of Excellence” for countering hybrid threats. The emergence of a continent-spanning counter-disinformation complex served multiple purposes, some clearly legitimate. Russian propaganda was neither benign nor a figment of the Western imagination. It is not an exaggeration to

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measure, the EU conflated populist movements like Brexit, supported by a majority in England including most English socialist parties, with the “extreme right” and Russian disinformation. The claim went beyond a political judgment to make Europeans who advocated for national independence potential targets for NATO intelligence operations. In the United States

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created an official government office for coordinating the resistance to Trump who, after all, stood accused of being the primary beneficiary and spreader of disinformation. Thus countering disinformation, while nominally concerned with foreign threats, marshalled the federal bureaucracies against the incoming administration. The government was not only divided but at war with

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the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications that had been headed by Richard Stengel. Highlighting the continuities connecting counterterrorism, countering violent extremism, and the ascendant counter-disinformation establishment, the person picked to head the GEC was a former Navy SEAL with a counterterrorism background named Michael Lumpkin. Years later, in a State

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everything but presented with new urgency. Instead of searching for terrorist needles hiding in haystacks of data, national security officials now confronted continuous waves of disinformation hordes streaming through America’s screens and colonizing the minds of its citizens on social media. Old-fashioned concepts of privacy and congressional oversight impeded

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to flag or take down. Censorship became a routine and informal agreement between the various parties who had been brought together in the fight against disinformation. Fact-checkers, content moderators, nonprofit anti–hate speech representatives from groups like the Anti-Defamation League, counterterrorism veterans, trust and safety officials, countering violent

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extremism experts, social scientists, political operatives, FBI agents, millennial journalists, and CIA officers all rubbed shoulders on the counter-disinformation party bus housed inside the social media companies. This information war was more than just a policy mandate; it was a sociological phenomenon with its

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is precisely the gunshots and violence that distinguish wars from political debates and other contentious activities such as drinking and backgammon. But the war on disinformation, which became a war on incorrect ideas the moment its focus turned from foreign military operations to Americans’ political speech, eroded those essential distinctions.

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that set the stage for the next four years and transformed the American political system. First, it launched the Global Engagement Center’s war against disinformation, which absorbed the apparatus of the war on terror. Next, it released the deceptive and politically motivated intelligence community assessment that popularized the claim that

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. The claim that Russia hacked the 2016 vote allowed federal agencies to justify the new public-private censorship machinery as a necessary measure to fight disinformation and protect “election integrity.” People who expressed true and constitutionally protected opinions about the election (and later about issues ranging from the origins of

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COVID-19 to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan) would be labeled conspiracists, spreaders of deadly disinformation, and stooges of Vladimir Putin, and they would be systematically removed from the public square. By an extremely conservative estimate based on public reporting, tens

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mobilization used to fight past wars by “leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.” As it evolved, the definition of disinformation rapidly expanded. “Real, total war has become information war,” Marshall McLuhan observed in 1967. “It is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold

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academics affiliated with Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy published an influential report titled “Information Disorder.” Conceptually, the paper showed the disinformation field evolving from its military and intelligence origins into a generalized theory of society. The very term disorder, with its medical and therapeutic connotations, suggested

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Twitter executive named Emily Horne. Twitter had a smoking gun showing that Hamilton 68 was guilty of exactly the charge it made against others: peddling disinformation that inflamed domestic political divisions and undermined democratic institutions. But that had to be weighed against other factors, Horne suggested, such as the need

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late-night talk show hosts, racial equity consultants, and private equity consultants. Never-Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.” Inevitably, the field attracted opportunists and people looking to capitalize on the cause

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(England’s Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, would eventually join the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder). Yet most anti-disinformation crusaders were not cynical opportunists or power-mad schemers. Following the social and career incentives of the knowledge class, they became earnest believers in their

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the Internet and worked to achieve nothing less than the eradication of harm and human error. * * * CISA’s mandate soon expanded from guarding against foreign disinformation to surveilling Americans’ speech for mis- and malinformation. The porousness of the labels and the inherently political nature of the field made its transition from

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of it. At a structural level, this was a crucial capacity-building stage for the nascent information state. The fact-checking, election-integrity, and counter-disinformation fields—all straddling the public-private divide—formed the new infrastructure of governance. * * * On the eve of the 2020 presidential race, The New York

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writer. That made her an ideally credentialed person to evangelize for the intelligentsia’s new article of faith, which held that civilization was imperiled by disinformation. The essay approvingly quoted a Yale philosophy professor: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.” Only enlightened censorship

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national security official named Andrew Grotto published a paper with Stanford University’s Information Warfare Working Group titled “How to Report Responsibly on Hacks and Disinformation.” Buried in its bland policy prescriptions, the authors advocated a radical change to the ethos of journalism. The report called on journalists to “break

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under Biden. And the second was the decision to use the tools of counterinsurgency against American citizens. The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from Russiagate

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privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email. Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom

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“extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the conspirators, Ball noted that they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation.” The outcome of the election proved something beyond the obvious point that many Americans were sick of the endless Trump drama. Biden’s victory demonstrated

…

citizens accused of extremism. Beyond merely defeating specific groups committed to violence, the government’s terrorism strategy aimed to “counter the polarization often fueled by disinformation, misinformation, and dangerous conspiracy theories online.” Yet the national strategy defined terrorism and extremism so broadly that they encompassed everything from neo-Nazi groups to

…

era ideological techniques. One called “attitudinal inoculation” proposed to build “psychological antibodies” in people deemed vulnerable to wrongthink in order to strengthen their defenses against disinformation. Even the Post Office got in on the action through a program called iCOP (the Internet Covert Operations Program) that collected Americans’ social media posts

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argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.” * * * At the same time as Biden was accusing social media companies of killing people with their supposedly lax misinformation

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appeared to redouble their doubts. The same was true for efforts at deradicalizing Trump supporters. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that the crusaders against disinformation tended to come from fields like counterterrorism, journalism, academia, and epidemiology that shared records of failure in recent years. If information control failed to

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October 10, 2022, https://cimsec.org/navy-information-warfares-road-to-serfdom. “information intended for foreign,” Information Operations Roadmap, 26. “an official program that uses disinformation” Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena,” New York Times, December 13, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004

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; and the allegation by a roster of former senior US intelligence officials that reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptops was likely tied to a Russian disinformation campaign. These claims were debunked in subsequent court proceedings (Cambridge Analytica), in reporting (trolls farms and the Steele dossier), by the release of internal

…

-industrial. “one man,” Hayden wrote Hayden, Assault on Intelligence, 111. “What makes this information war” Jankowicz, How to Lose the Information War, 3. 12: DISINFORMATION DISORDER tens of millions of public posts In just one month, April 2020, Facebook alone reported placing warning labels on 50 million posts. While the

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along with co-chair Katie Couric and commissioners including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. “notifying social media platforms” “DHS Needs a Unified Strategy to Counter Disinformation Campaigns,” Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security, August 10, 2022, https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2022-08/OIG-

…

22-58-Aug22.pdf. “metastasized into the nerve center” The Weaponization of CISA: How a “Cybersecurity” Agency Colluded with Big Tech and “Disinformation” Partners to Censor Americans, Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, US House of Representatives, 118th Congress

…

https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-online-misinformation-epidemic-with-renee-diresta/. video that was discovered Mike Benz, “Renée DiResta ‘Worked for the CIA’ Before Stanford Disinformation Role, According to Video Remarks from Her Supervisor Alex Stamos,” Foundation for Freedom Online, March 9, 2023, https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/renee-diresta-worked-for-the

…

-cia-before-stanford-disinformation-role-according-to-video-remarks-from-her-supervisor-alex-stamos/. “made unsubstantiated claims” The Censorship Industrial Complex: U.S. Government Support for Domestic Censorship and

…

White House, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-freedom-of-speech-and-ending-federal-censorship/. dismantled the enormous counter-disinformation machine Marco Rubio, “Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department,” US Department of State press release, April 16, 2025, https://www.state.gov

…

Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone) Didion, Joan digital counterinsurgency digital diplomacy digital journalism digital swarms digital technology, history of DiResta, Renée disinformation, use of the term. See also counter-disinformation industry Disinformation Governance Board DNA Doctorow, Cory Dorgan, Byron Dorsey, Jack Doughty, Terry Dowd, Maureen drone warfare dual use Du Bois, W. E

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nihilism 1984 (Orwell) Nixon, Richard nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) Northrup Grumman Ntrepid nuclear arms race nuclear rationality Nunes, Devin Obama, Barack Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act “Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy” Google and immigration policy open government initiative propaganda and Russiagate and Wilson administration compared with Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Office

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Warfare 7: Total Information Awareness 8: The Silicon President 9: Whole of Society 10: Hybrid War, Hybrid Power PART III: REVOLT 11: Hacking Democracy 12: Disinformation Disorder 13: The Naked Emperor 14: Limits of Control NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT THE INFORMATION STATE: POLITICS IN THE AGE OF TOTAL

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