your Uncle Milton is still forwarding you a junk news story that undocumented immigrants are secretly running the FBI. We tend to underestimate the supply of domestic disinformation because it has always been part of our information ecosystem. But domestic players greatly outnumber foreign ones.
So, yes, the supply of disinformation is growing, but that’s in part because the demand is also growing. People seek it out. The tendency to see conspiracy theories is in our genes. One reason we seem to have reached a deeply polarized US and THEM culture is that this is how we’ve always seen the world, ever since we lived in small, isolated groups. WE were always worried about THEM, and that helped US survive. Our brains are wired that way. Tribalism is the breeding ground for disinformation, and social media seems to reinforce tribalism. The problem for humanity is that the technology to create and distribute disinformation is evolving a whole lot faster than we are. I don’t have a solution for that.
The ontological problem of disinformation is that it gets in the way of us seeing reality for what it is. Of course, no human being sees reality exactly the way it is—we all have prejudices and biases. But disinformation exaggerates those prejudices and biases and accentuates our divides. The truth is, disinformation doesn’t create divides between people, it widens them. One reason it’s easy to amplify division is that we have so much of it. That’s the ultimate goal of the disinformationists—not so much that we believe them, but that we question those things that are demonstrably true.
Disinformation is in part the cause for what Hannah Arendt once called the curious mixture of “gullibility and cynicism” of voters in modern politics. Disinformation, she suggests, helps create the strange circumstance in which people “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.”
That is the goal—that there’s no empirical reality that we can all agree on. The ultimate danger is not that lies will replace truth, or that disinformation will substitute for factual information, but rather that the distinction between the two will evaporate—that the very idea of trying to discriminate between fact and fiction will no longer be a feature of our mental landscape. Then we would truly be living in a world where everything was possible and nothing was true.
The first thing you notice when you walk into the White House Situation Room is how cramped and stuffy it is. There’s so little space that if people are already sitting at the table, you have to slowly snake your way in between them like you’re taking a seat in the middle of a row in a crowded movie theater. Excuse me … Pardon me … Sorry. And try not to bump the National Security Advisor. For some reason, the air-conditioning doesn’t work all that well, so it can get pretty fragrant. And unless you’re the President of the United States, every guy keeps his suit jacket on and his tie tightened.
It was early in 2014, and it was my first time in the room with President Obama. I was the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. He was in shirtsleeves and came in without greeting anyone—focused, intense, all business. I had known President Obama when I was a journalist and had that chummy, jokey rapport with him that journalists and politicians cultivate. But this was a side of him that I had never seen before.
The meeting was about the role of international broadcasting, which was part of my brief at the State Department. International broadcasting meant the legacy organizations that were better known during the Cold War: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. You may not pay attention to them anymore, but they still have a $750 million budget—a nontrivial number even to the federal government. Ben Rhodes, the President’s deputy national security advisor, sketched out the topic and then called on me. I started to lay out all the traditional stuff that these entities were doing, and I could see the President was impatient. “I caught the pass, Rick,” he said without a smile. Hmm. In a nanosecond, I pulled back to 30,000 feet and said, well, the real problem was that we were in the middle of a global information war that was going on every minute of the day all around the world and we were losing it.
Then, a different response from the head of the table. “Okay,” the President said, “what do we do about it?”
That is the question. There is indeed an information war going on all around the world and it’s taking place at the speed of light. Governments and non-state actors and individuals are creating and spreading narratives that have nothing to do with reality. Those false and misleading narratives undermine democracy and the ability of free people to make intelligent choices. The audience is anyone with access to a computer or a smartphone—about four billion people. The players in this conflict are assisted by the big social media platforms, which benefit just as much from the sharing of content that is false as content that is true. Popularity is the measure they care about, not accuracy or truthfulness. Studies show that a majority of Americans can recall seeing at least one false story leading up to the 2016 election.1 This rise in disinformation—often accompanied in authoritarian states by crackdowns on free speech—is a threat to democracy at home and abroad. More than any other system, democracies depend on the free flow of information and open debate. That’s how we make our choices. As Thomas Jefferson said, information is the foundation of democracy.2 He meant factual information.
Disinformation is as old as humanity. When the serpent told Eve that nothing would happen if she ate the apple, that was disinformation. But today, spreading lies has never been easier. On social media, there are no barriers to entry and there are no gatekeepers. There is no fact-checking, no editors, no publishers; you are your own publisher. Anyone can sign up for Facebook or Twitter and create any number of personas, which is what troll armies do. These trolls use the same behavioral and information tools supplied by Facebook and Google and Twitter to put poison on those platforms and reach a targeted, receptive audience. And it’s just as easy to share something false as something that’s factual.
One reason for the rise in global disinformation is that waging an information war is a lot cheaper than buying tanks and Tridents, and the return on investment is higher. Today, the selfie is mightier than the sword. It is asymmetric warfare requiring only computers and smartphones and an army of trolls and bots. You don’t even have to win; you succeed if you simply muddy the waters. It’s far easier to create confusion than clarity. There is no information dominance in an information war. There is no unipolar information superpower. These days, offensive technologies are cheaper and more effective than defensive ones. Information war works for small powers against large ones, and large powers against small ones; it works for states and for non-state actors—it’s the great leveler. Not everyone can afford an F-35, but anyone can launch a tweet.
Why does disinformation work? Well, disinformation almost always hits its target because the target—you, me, everyone—rises up to meet it. We ask for it. Social scientists call this confirmation bias. We seek out information that confirms our beliefs. Disinformation sticks because it fits into our mental map of how the world works. The internet is the greatest delivery system for confirmation bias in history. The analytical and behavioral tools of the web are built to give us information we agree with. If Google and Facebook see that you like the Golden State Warriors, they will give you more Steph Curry. If you buy an antiwrinkle face cream, they will give you a lot more information about moisturizers. If you like Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson, the algorithm will give you content that reflects your political persuasion. What it won’t do is give you content that questions your beliefs.3
So, what do we do about it?
First, let’s face it, democracies are not very good at combating disinformation. I found this out firsthand at the State Department, where the only public-facing entities in government that countered ISIS messaging and Russian disinformation reported to me. While autocracies demand a single point of view, democracies thrive on the marketplace
