disinformation campaign Concepts

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

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

, the panic over Russian disinformation was born out of America’s homegrown traditions of progressive technocracy. Almost every tactic and slogan of the modern anti-disinformation campaign reprised patterns established a century earlier during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson’s policies in the First World War that inaugurated the

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previously worked on Hamilton 68. With the Senate report still making headlines, The New York Times published a bombshell: New Knowledge had run its own disinformation campaign using the same tactics it had attributed to Russian trolls. The experts testifying about foreign interference on Capitol Hill had, it turned out, recently run

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coverage provided a script that the media would follow months later when it covered—or, rather, covered up—the Hunter Biden laptop stories. “Make the disinformation campaign as much a part of the story as the email or hacked information dump. Change the sense of newsworthiness to accord with the current threat

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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 documents (Hamilton

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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

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-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 Disinformation Campaigns, 2016–2022, Before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, 118th Congress (March 9, 2023) (testimony by Michael Shellenburger), https://judiciary

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. “One could argue we’re in the business” D. Howard Kass, “CISA Plans More Forceful Response to Disinformation Campaigns,” MSSP Alert, November 19, 2021, https://www.msspalert.com/news/cisa-plans-more-forceful-response-to-disinformation-campaigns. once-in-a-century windfall Daisuke Wakabayashi, Karen Weise, Jack Nicas, and Mike Isaac, “Big Tech Continues

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

by Thomas Rid

leaving behind. In early July, I decided to write up a first draft of this remarkable story. I published two investigative pieces on the ongoing disinformation campaign, the first in late July 2016, on the day of the Democratic Convention, and the second three weeks before the general election. But I noticed

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successful. Twenty-first-century liberal democracies can no longer afford to neglect this past. Ignoring the rich and disturbing lessons of industrial-scale Cold War disinformation campaigns risks repeating mid-century errors that are already weakening liberal democracy in the digital age. Recognizing an active measure can be difficult. Disinformation, when done

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accident that disinformation played out in shifting shadows, not in pitch-black darkness. Often, at least since the 1950s, the covert aspect of a given disinformation campaign was only a veneer, imperfect and temporary by design. Also, disinformation is not simply fake information—at least, not necessarily. Some of the most vicious

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and criticism. This book will extract three main arguments from the history of disinformation over the past century. The first argument is conceptual. At-scale disinformation campaigns are attacks against a liberal epistemic order, or a political system that places its trust in essential custodians of factual authority. These institutions—law enforcement

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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 individuals. Instead

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graffiti daubed in red and black paint on the walls of the newly reopened synagogue in Cologne. The incident opened an extensive, global anti-Semitic disinformation campaign designed to harm West Germany. (Hansherbert Wirtz, Kölnische Rundschau) But the swift arrest of the two initial perpetrators did not stop the anti-Semitic incidents

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from Russian into German in order to mail them to Jewish families in West Germany.41 One of the most noteworthy aspects of this spectacular disinformation campaign is the absence of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm, the HVA. The HVA was then headed by Markus Wolf, who had a Jewish father

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,” one 1960s Cold War defector wrote, reasoning that blacks in the United States would rather turn to Africa than to the USSR.8 Accordingly, Russian disinformation campaigns would exploit America’s race problem by pulling in Africa, as they had with the UN forgery. The KGB’s Department D and its subsidiaries

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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 as

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did not have press freedom, we would have to invent it for them.”57 That same year, the KGB initiated and approved direct cooperation on disinformation campaigns between the humongous East German Stasi and the leaner but more agile StB. General Markus Wolf of the Stasi’s HVA and Colonel Josef Houska

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. versus Soviet disinformation operations. Russia directly accused the CIA of running a disinformation operation against Moscow—or was the KGB by now engaged in a disinformation campaign of its own? It was impossible to judge. The Post understood this dilemma, and did something unexpected: it ran two remarkable articles in the following

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minutes from meetings of minor West German peace groups. The early campaigns against budding peace activism foreshadowed by far the largest, longest, and most expensive disinformation campaign in intelligence history: the subversion of the peace movement in the West. Throughout the 1960s, annual Easter marches became a focal point of the West

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so he thought. Brandt survived the vote, and Ostpolitik was saved. Two years after the HVA’s remarkable election interference, the X launched another timeless disinformation campaign: it manufactured far-right, neo-Fascist sentiments in West Germany in response to the government’s guest worker program of the 1970s. The operation, known

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of an open society, sir,” responded McMahon. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations had understood perhaps one of the most insidious threats posed by successful disinformation campaigns: overreacting to active measures risked turning an open society into a more closed one. The more difficult question was how to draw the line between

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.5 It was against this background of military escalation in Afghanistan and weapons of mass destruction in South Asia that one of the most infamous disinformation campaigns of the entire Cold War emerged: the story that AIDS was an American biological weapon developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41

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origin; the engineered virus had spread from there first to Haiti, he conjectured, and then to the United States. The moment was ideal for a disinformation campaign, as the marchers’ signs in New York made clear: there was yet little research into AIDS, and an abundance of hysteria. The CDC now counted

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the potential of the escalating AIDS crisis in the United States and Europe itself. The AIDS article in Patriot was a continuation of the bioweapon disinformation campaign of the previous year, designed to distract from U.S. revelations on Soviet chemical warfare in Southeast Asia. Patriot noted that the United States was

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as September 1989, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Department X argued in an internal meeting that the peak of the AIDS disinformation campaign had not yet been achieved.46 The X was right. Jakob Segal continued to spread the AIDS-was-made-in-the-USA theory until his

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the AIDS campaign as a major success. In 1992, the head of Russian foreign intelligence, Yevgeny Primakov, confirmed the KGB’s role in the AIDS disinformation campaign during a talk at MGIMO, an academic institute affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. Primakov revealed that the AIDS story was “created

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the site could be used to spread disinformation,” Young recounted in 2004. “I can’t rule out that we are being subjected to a sophisticated disinformation campaign by government agencies.”4 He applied the same sunlight-is-the-best-disinfectant logic to potential abuses: “If it smells, then someone will point it

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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 silent measures

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, one of the best reporters at the technology-focused website Motherboard, was the first journalist to publish an investigative story calling the DNC hack “a disinformation campaign by Russian spies.”11 The same day, June 16, a private intelligence firm named Secureworks published a stunning finding. The firm had discovered what would

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Jon Merritt tweeted.”17 The story in the Times harked back, without intending to do so, to the Times coverage of that big first American disinformation campaign from April 1930, the Grover Whalen forgeries. Then as now, press coverage of the fakes—and the subsequent congressional investigations—received far more public attention

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. “Measuring the actual impact of trolling and online influence campaigns is probably impossible,” said Kate Starbird, one of the world’s leading researchers of online disinformation campaigns, who examined the influence of digital disinformation on the Black Lives Matter movement. “But the difficulty of measuring impact doesn’t mean that there isn

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facts; it requires a judgment call, which in practice means a political decision, often a collective decision. Therefore, if a targeted community believes that a disinformation campaign was a major success, then it has made it a major success. Disinformation, finally, is itself disintegrating. Bureaucratically, this degeneration proceeded with the breakup of

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challenges. For the offender, campaigns have become harder to control, harder to contain, harder to steer, harder to manage, and harder to assess. For victims, disinformation campaigns have also become more difficult to manage, more difficult to assess in impact, and more difficult to counter. At the beginning of the third decade

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identity crises by the rise of the internet and its side effects, are both overstating and, more rarely, understating the threat and the potential of disinformation campaigns—and thus helping expand and escalate that very threat and its potential. This constructivist vortex is propelled by an unprecedented confluence of incentives that lead

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

by Eliot Higgins · 2 Mar 2021 · 277pp · 70,506 words

organs. Accusations against the Syria Civil Defence, better known as the White Helmets, sounded absurd. But scrutiny showed that something sinister was afoot: a leaderless disinformation campaign, with claims leaping from conspiracy theorists to state propagandists to alternative-media outlets and back – an ecosystem I call the Counterfactual Community. The White Helmets

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Gong imprisoned in China? Is France illegally supplying arms used in Saudi airstrikes in Yemen? What a moderator must evaluate could be part of a disinformation campaign or part of a genuine public debate. It could be a genuine debate based on disinformation. The depth of this problem feeds into internet miserabilism

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discredit a conclusive open-source investigation than to claim that nothing is to be believed? I am certain this tactic will soon become routine in disinformation campaigns. I already see tweets dismissing videos from Syria, saying, But how do you know this isn’t a deepfake? The uninformed give this technology powers

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/372812134230806528 21 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/04/13/doumafakenews/ 22 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/12/18/chemical-weapons-and-absurdity-the-disinformation-campaign-against-the-white-helmets/ 23 faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Alt_Narratives_ICWSM17-CameraReady.pdf 24 www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/10/16/why-assad-and

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert · 14 Aug 2020

the virus is actually a U.S.-made bioweapon deliberately designed to target China.84 The latter had echoes of a much earlier, KGB-sourced disinformation campaign from the pre–social media age, codenamed Operation Denver, which propagated the false theory that AIDS was the product of a U.S. bioweapons experiment

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were executed as part of clandestine regime change and other military and intelligence programs throughout the Third World. As happens today, commercial and nation-state disinformation campaigns periodically overlapped. In the 1940s, the United Fruit Company hired Edward Bernays, who later used his public relations expertise to help foment a coup in

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Guatemala after the election of a president who was unfavourable to the company. Bernays helped mount a multi-pronged disinformation campaign designed to discredit the democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, as a communist puppet and to motivate U.S. lawmakers and thought leaders to support an

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of a few whistleblowers. But countless other companies like it roll on, following variations on the same successful model. BuzzFeed News, which has studied online disinformation campaigns extensively, discovered that “since 2011, at least 27 online information operations have been partially or wholly attributed to PR or marketing firms.169 Of those

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North Africa — the same dynamics are playing themselves out, with a spice of local flavour and entrepreneurial variation. In Indonesia, low-level military personnel coordinate disinformation campaigns that include dozens of websites and social media accounts whose operators are paid a fee by the military, and whose posts routinely heap praise on

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-ops. It should come as no surprise that big corporations are getting into the game too. Perhaps the most alarming are the well-funded corporate disinformation campaigns around climate change, which have roots going back decades but are now multiplying in the chaos of the communications ecosystem. Big oil, chemical, and other

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payrolls.182 They have built entire organizations, think tanks, and other front organizations to generate scientific-looking but implausible reports, which are then seeded into disinformation campaigns and targeted advertisements meant to disorient and distract audiences from the real science of climate change.183 The consequences for global public safety are disturbing

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-may-be-coming-to-a-website-near-you/2019/07/25/c5d42ee2-5c53-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html In Indonesia, low-level military personnel coordinate disinformation campaigns: Allard, T., & Stubbs, J. (2020, January 7). Indonesian army wields internet ‘news’ as a weapon in Papua. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

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

elections. And they can replay the images of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at 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 ability

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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 Analytica scandal

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EU’s efforts to fight online disinformation through digital regulation are particularly relevant in its quest to protect the integrity of political elections. Politically motivated disinformation campaigns, including interference by foreign governments, present a serious threat to democracy.93 One particularly disturbing example of such election meddling is Russia’s

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disinformation campaign orchestrated to influence the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum,94 which further contributed to the EU’s resolve to address the problem with more

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Roma groups in the suburbs of Paris.140 The European Parliament’s Special Committee found that the Roma people have been a target of multiple disinformation campaigns in Europe, and that online platforms led to the escalation of rumors and to the 2019 mob attack.141 Another prominent fake news story was

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or disinformation presents a thorny challenge for the US platforms. According to research by the Oxford Internet Institute, governments in over 80 countries are pursuing disinformation campaigns.158 In 2021, Meta deactivated more than 20 Facebook accounts linked to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s ruling National Resistance Movement party. The Ugandan president

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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 limits of

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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 in

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-fake-news. 141.Judit Szakács & Éva Bognár, European Parliament Special Committee on Foreign Interference in All Democratic Processes in the European Union, the Impact of Disinformation Campaigns About Migrants and Minority Groups in the EU 14 (2021). 142.Jakub Janda & Ilyas Sharibzhanov, Six Outrageous Lies Russian Disinformation Peddled about Europe in 2016

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and COVID-19 (2022), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/FP_20220525_china_seo_v2.pdf. 157.Id. 158.Nina Otte-Witte, Disinformation Campaigns: “Lies Can Turn Deadly or Threaten the Stability of Societies,” Akademie (Sep. 24, 2021), https://www.dw.com/en/disinformation-campaignslies-can-turn-deadly-or

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–302 digital protectionism, 72–77, 214 Digital Silk Road (DSR) initiative, 18, 20, 27–28, 294–97, 314, 316–17, 391–92 digital sovereignty, 215 disinformation campaigns, 282–83 dual circulation strategy, 206 e-commerce, 94–95, 155 Export Control Law (ECL), 200–3 exports, 290–323 Five-Year Plan (14th), 206

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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, 134

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–40, 377–78, 384–85 criticism of, 283–84, 384 criticism of China’s internet policies, 100 data privacy, 382 data transfer battles, 231–32 disinformation campaigns, 280–81 efforts to address societal harms they cause, 283–84 EU services, 19 fake accounts, 282–83 founding, 137–38 FTC fines, 139 global

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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 attacks, 281

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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, 309–10

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–9, 87–88 social fairness, 124 social media, 41, 64–65, 215–16 Chinese platforms, 80, 82–83, 154–55, 166–67, 293, 312–13 disinformation campaigns, 280–81 role in Brexit, 280 role in January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, 141 role in terrorist attacks, 281–82 US platforms

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–79, 80 compliance with EU laws and regulations, 116–17, 163 content moderation, 3, 7–8, 65–66, 337–38, 341, 377–78, 384–85 disinformation campaigns, 280–81 Disinformation Code, 120 employee walkout, 384–85 European headquarters, 142–43 fact checks, 49–50, 82–83, 277 global influence, 133–34, 257

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again

by Richard Horton · 31 May 2020 · 106pp · 33,210 words

disinformation – the infodemic – that emerged during the crisis of COVID-19. What was even more surprising and unexpected was that governments themselves resorted to political disinformation campaigns in order to defend their own roles in managing the outbreak. These efforts to rewrite the narrative of COVID-19 are important to document. Just

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

by Amy B. Zegart · 6 Nov 2021

not alone anymore. China’s operations grew more sophisticated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in Wuhan in late 2019. Within months, China’s disinformation campaigns to shift blame for the virus had grown so widespread, the European Union called it an “infodemic.”115 At the same time, the U.S

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’s Underground Great Wall.” 84. Sandalow, “Remote Sensing and Foreign Policy.” 85. Zegart and Morell, “Spies, lies, and algorithms.” 86. Mike Isaac, “Facebook Finds New Disinformation Campaigns and Braces for 2020 Torrent,” New York Times, October 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/technology/facebook-disinformation-russia-iran.html. 87

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by CIA; drone strikes by CIA Chambliss, Saxby, 195, 220 Child, Julia, 62 China: and AI, 2, 141; censorship in, 85, 275–76; COVID-19 disinformation campaign, 243, 266; cyberattacks, 4, 261–62; destruction of U.S. spy network in, 166–68; domestic spying by, 83; establishment of Communist government in, 112

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; and great power competition, 75, 177; intelligence cooperation with Russia, 166; Internet disinformation campaigns, 243; Internet influence campaigns, 266–67; Julia Child in, 62, 62f; monitoring of, 79, 80, 112; Nixon and, 157; and nuclear weapons, 227, 228, 230

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, 163, 189, 190, 202 Cold War: CIA covert action during, 174, 176, 180, 186; end of, and IC’s failure to adapt, 205–6; Soviet disinformation campaigns in, 266; and U.S. intelligence, 48 computer modeling, uses of, 236 computer systems, cyberattacks’ damage to trust in, 269–70 confirmation bias, 103–4

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–3; usefulness of, 179–81; in Vietnam, 63; in Yemen, 31, 169–71, 175, 176–77. See also drone strikes by CIA COVID-19: Chinese disinformation campaign on, 243, 266; and Chinese espionage, 147; and increased use of technology, 3 crowdsourcing, uses of, 236 Cuba: covert action by CIA in, 63, 64

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of central intelligence, 65 Director of National Intelligence (DNI): creation of, 70–71; functions of, 72–73; Office of, 47, 49; weakness of, 71–72 disinformation campaigns online, 8, 265–69, 365n10, 373n113. See also deepfake audio and video; Russian interference in 2016 election DNI. See Director of National Intelligence domestic spying

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1948, 111 election of 2016, 111. See also Russian interference in 2016 election election of 2020: disputed results of, 39; interference in, 11–12; online disinformation campaigns in, 266–67 employees of IC: on best and worst moments, 97–98; bond among, 156–60, 317n86; daily life of, 93–95; ethical dilemmas

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. policy, 75; quantum computing research, 223; and vulnerabilities, 8, 271, 272 Military Intelligence Division (MID; G2), creation of, 57 mirror imaging, 124–26 misinformation. See disinformation campaigns online Mohammad, Khalid Sheikh, 100–101 Morell, Michael, 27, 67, 91, 93, 94, 105, 194, 199 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 29–30, 67 Mueller, Robert, 260

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, 120, 130 Silicon Valley–Washington divide, 9–10, 11, 221–23, 275–76 Snowden, Edward, 9, 20–21, 165, 211, 222 social media: foreign government disinformation campaigns on, 243; information warfare on, 4, 8; manipulation of information by, 3, 10; refusal to cooperate with government security efforts, 275; and Russian interference in

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words

$4 billion a year on active measures around the globe,61 culminating in an estimated 10,000 disinformation operations throughout the Cold War.62 Soviet disinformation campaigns were often effective, but there were limits. The former FBI agent and national security analyst Clint Watts notes, “Soviet propaganda outlets took many years or

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bring lunch from home; it turns out that Putin’s chef doesn’t provide his employees a cafeteria.29 The philosophy behind Russia’s aggressive disinformation campaign is embodied in an unlikely source. In an interview with the New York Times, Dmitry Peskov, one of Putin’s closest advisors, singled out “this

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$200.”55 The IRA likewise solicited Americans for a range of tasks—such as protesters or web designers—in effect recruiting unwitting assets into their disinformation campaign.56 It’s difficult to know how many of these efforts paid off, but some did. At a West Palm Beach Trump rally in August

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committee chair may not understand every aspect of some newfangled technology, but those same chairs may be acutely conscious of the history behind Moscow’s disinformation campaigns or the risks of allowing concentrated economic power to grow unchecked. Age aside, few lawmakers are well equipped to understand the ins and outs of

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is organic, authentic, and safe. Even as platforms have made some encouraging strides since 2016, much more must be done to limit the spread of disinformation campaigns by foreign actors. While social media platforms can’t stop people from believing disinformation, they can offer as much truthful context as possible. That means

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Alleged Chinese Trolls,” BuzzFeed News, March 14, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/reddit-coordinated-chinese-propaganda-trolls. 153 Kate Conger, “Twitter Removes Chinese Disinformation Campaign,” New York Times, June 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/twitter-chinese-misinformation.html?action=click&module=Alert&pgtype=Homepage. 154

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Conger, “Twitter Removes Chinese Disinformation Campaign.” 155 Jeff Horwitz, “ ‘Live’ Facebook Protest Videos Drew Millions of Views, but Some Footage Was Years Old,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2020, https://www

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

by Azeem Azhar · 6 Sep 2021 · 447pp · 111,991 words

of misinformation.37 When used by states in this manner, misinformation becomes disinformation – that is, information that is actively malicious rather than merely inaccurate. These disinformation campaigns can have a troubling real-world impact. In 2016, Russian internet trolls were able to organise a protest and counter-protest in Houston, Texas. More

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an opponent’s citizens puts no soldiers at risk. And the results can be varied, and disorientating: ranging from nuisance-level misinformation to meticulously planned disinformation campaigns; from cyberattacks against power and water infrastructures to drone-borne explosive attacks. Perhaps all foreshadowing a full-blown war. At the same time, our political

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conflict – where any low-level scuffle could escalate into something more disastrous. The mischievous needling of small-scale cyberattacks, the disruptive potential of long-term disinformation campaigns, and savage, coordinated cyber warfare are all part of the same ecosystem. And citizens and businesses, as much as politicians and armies, will be on

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) <https://esoc.princeton.edu/publications/trends-online-influence-efforts> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 36 Gregory Winger, ‘China’s Disinformation Campaign in the Philippines’, The Diplomat, 6 October 2020 <https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/chinas-disinformation-campaign-in-the-philippines/> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 37 Jack Stubbs and Christopher Bing, ‘Facebook, Twitter Dismantle Global Array

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April 2020 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-52395771> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 41 Wesley R. Moy and Kacper Gradon, ‘COVID-19 Effects and Russian Disinformation Campaigns’, Homeland Security Affairs, December 2020 <https://www.hsaj.org/articles/16533> [accessed 23 April 2021]. 42 Simon Lewis, ‘U.S. Says Russian-Backed Outlets Spread

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., Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) Moy, Wesley, and Kacper Gradon, ‘COVID-19 Effects and Russian Disinformation Campaigns’, Homeland Security Affairs, 16, article 8, December 2020 <https://www.hsaj.org/articles/16533> [accessed 23 April 2021] Mueller, Milton, Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty

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Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

by Jonathan Rauch · 21 Jun 2021 · 446pp · 109,157 words

for truth, as when Trump claimed rain had not fallen on his inauguration. They lied in grandiose and fantastic ways, as in their months-long disinformation campaign claiming to have won an election which Trump had demonstrably lost (a campaign which ended only when he was impeached for inciting a violent insurrection

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troll farm in St. Petersburg, whose humans and bots and algorithms worked around the clock to design and refine viral fakery. In 2015 an online disinformation campaign convinced millions of people—including the governor of Texas—that a routine federal military exercise might be an Obama administration plan to round up political

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dissidents. That, too, turned out to be a Russian dry run for the much larger disinformation campaign of 2016.14 Soon it became evident that countries around the world—big ones like Russia and Iran, small ones like Azerbaijan and Ecuador—were

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lulz. What trolls, unaffiliated and state-sponsored alike, had discovered was that because the internet was optimized for advertising, it was also ideally suited to disinformation campaigns on a previously impossible scale. “The entire toolbox of advertising technologies can be packaged together into coordinated campaigns that utilize both human and machine intelligence

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of what troll epistemology was really all about. In Active Measures, his history of disinformation wars, the historian Thomas Rid summed it up: At-scale disinformation campaigns are attacks against a liberal epistemic order, or a political system that places its trust in essential custodians of factual authority. These institutions—law enforcement

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was used. The claims’ “contradictory character is not a flaw of the Kremlin’s propaganda, but a feature,” reported The Economist. “The purpose of the disinformation campaign is to drown Western intelligence in a cacophony of wild claims, rather than offer a coherent counter-narrative.”26 The Washington Post, publishing a flow

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falsehoods, concocted theories, and red herrings, intended not so much to persuade people as to bewilder them.”27 A key to the success of any disinformation campaign is to trigger repetition and amplification in the target society’s own media and political ecosystems. “A … large portion of the disinformation value-creation chain

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been seen in American civic life before. The point, by now, must be obvious: Trump and his enablers and allies were engaged in a classic disinformation campaign, the sort of campaign which Yuri Bezmenov would have recognized immediately. Instead of using a traditional government propaganda agency, they coordinated their campaign on Twitter

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in that respect political; but his larger and more important purpose was to signal to his supporters in politics and conservative media that a major disinformation campaign was coming, and to organize and mobilize them to follow his lead. No one was surprised when, after the election, his now fully assembled propaganda

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but not least, from an information-warfare point of view—further divide already polarized Americans. As Thomas Rid writes in his history of information warfare, disinformation campaigns have taken many forms, but “the goals were the same: to exacerbate existing tensions and contradictions within the adversary’s body politic, by leveraging facts

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to sort it out.’ ”67 She felt she could trust nothing but believe anything: students of information warfare will recognize this as the state which disinformation campaigns seek to induce. By heightening political polarization, attacking established institutions, and fueling social mistrust, propagandists can make a portion of the public not only receptive

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they will be the last to be fooled. Conspiracy theories like the ones about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic “are profoundly participatory disinformation campaigns,” as the University of Washington’s Kate Starbird told a Lawfare interviewer. “It is both top-down and bottom-up. At times elites and political

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The argument of this chapter is that disinformation is an old and well-known form of information warfare. Where strategic fundamentals are concerned, the modern disinformation campaigns waged by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or their allies and surrogates would seem familiar to propaganda operatives in the era of Lenin or Goebbels

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and bots to help Facebook and Twitter shut them down.”75 Journalists moved rapidly up the learning curve. They developed beats to cover, and uncover, disinformation campaigns. They became more sophisticated about adverting to conspiracy theories without always repeating them. They got smarter about inauthentic posts and deep fakes and algorithmic manipulation

…

be mobilized globally to reach anyone anywhere, literally overnight. A generation later, digital technology would make thought vigilantism even easier and faster. Like trolls and disinformation campaigners, cancelers, as they came to be called, discovered in social media an ideal technology for their purposes; but where trolls sought to confuse and disrupt

…

attacks, 127, 134, 212, 219 Administrative Procedure Act (1946), 102 AdSense, 146 advertisers and advertising: bias exploited in, 28; digital shift of, 137–38, 149; disinformation campaigns and, 161–62; internet and, 125; Twitter and, 149; Wikipedia and, 139 algorithmic media filters, 124–26, 132–33, 145, 148, 152–53, 263 Alien

…

and, 198; student demographics and, 228; trolling and, 160 conspiracy theories: audience complicity in, 183–84; conservative media and, 177–79; digital media and, 135; disinformation campaigns and, 165, 166, 184; fallibilism and, 167; journalism and, 4; printing press and, 120; profitability of, 160; reality-based communities vs., 87; social belonging and

…

digital media: cancel culture and, 210; content moderating efforts of, 143–47; designing for truth in, 17–18, 139, 146–49; “disinfonomics” of, 135–38; disinformation campaigns and, 17, 161–66, 168, 184; institutionalization of, 18, 119, 143, 149–54, 239–40; misinformation through, 124–26, 133–35; outrage addiction and, 126

…

Facebook: advertising shift to, 137; conspiracy theories and, 135; content regulation and, 144–47, 150–51, 240; disinformation campaigns and, 168; institutionalization of, 150–52 FactCheck.org, 152 facts and factuality: conservative media and, 176; disinformation campaigns and, 165–66, 169; fact-checking, 152–53, 169–70; law and, 102; methodology for establishing, 116

…

Driftwood (online LGBT story archive), 256 inaccuracy in cancel culture, 220 Inbar, Yoel, 225 inflation, 118–19 information technology: checks and valences of, 120–24; disinformation campaigns and, 163; knowledge technology compared to, 125. See also digital media information warfare, 18, 163, 169, 173, 183–85, 218–20, 247, 258 Ins, Markus

…

, 110 Johns Hopkins University, 68, 69 Jones, Alex, 160 journalism: business models for, 135–38; cancel culture and, 211, 240; conservative media on, 175–76; disinformation campaigns and, 186–87; liberal order and, 4, 100–102, 162; reality-based communities and, 100–102; standards development in, 121–24, 126, 134, 150–52

…

, 105; checking errors and, 97; conformity bias and, 196–97; Constitution of Knowledge requiring, 92–94, 98, 99, 109, 111, 131; critical, 93–94, 113; disinformation campaigns vs., 165; marketplace of, 92–94, 109–13; outrage vs., 135; reason and, 22–24; in social networks, 65, 92; Wikipedia and, 143 Persuasion.community

…

Republic of Science,” 71, 77 polarization: compromise and, 84; conservative media and, 176, 181; creed war and, 38, 40–41; digital media and, 132–34; disinformation campaigns and, 163, 184; identity and, 33; Trump and, 173 political correctness, 14, 231. See also canceling and cancel culture political parties, 81 PolitiFact, 152 Pomerantsev

…

Society, 66–68, 151 Rudolph, Frederick, 69 rule by consent, 50–51 Rushdie, Salman: The Satanic Verses, 189, 209, 213–17 Rushkoff, Douglas, 150 Russian disinformation campaigns, 161, 163–66, 168, 181, 182, 241 same-sex marriage, 30, 91, 256–58 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 211 Sanger, Larry, 138–39

…

–29, 259–60; persuasion in, 22–24; representative democracy and, 81–82 trolls and trolling: cancel culture and, 14; conservative media and, 160, 174–80; disinformation campaigns of, 157, 161–68, 185–88; epistemic crisis and, 8–10, 15–16, 18, 156–57, 184–88; as information warfare, 18, 163, 169, 173

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