On disinformation: Mirroring the past, but harder to fight
In my first diplomatic posting, one of my first tasks was to pay a call on a Bangladeshi publisher whose newspaper had printed a story that the AIDS virus had been manufactured in a U.S. military lab at Ft. Detrick in Maryland for the purpose of killing people of color.
The publisher feigned embarrassment and promised to run the counter story that we provided, and he made a show of calling his editor and asking where the Ft. Detrick story had come from. “The Soviet Embassy,” he repeated.
Well, duh, tell me something I didn’t already know. Seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
This past week, the Economist reports that a network of Russian-run websites called CopyCop pumped out 19,000 “news” stories in a month in English and French featuring contentious issues such as the war in Gaza.
What makes the stories interesting is that they started with real news stories that had been altered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to emphasize “the perception of Republicans, Trump, DeSantis, Russia, and RFK Jr. as positive figures, while Democrats, Biden, the war in Ukraine, big corporations, and big pharma are portrayed negatively.”
The Economist writer opines (hopefully) that such stories — like the one that reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has used ill-gotten wealth to purchase King Charles’ house at Highgrove — will be dismissed as nonsense by discerning readers.
However, in April NBC News released a national poll that correlated voters’ political preferences with their news consumption habits. Biden led by 49 points among voters who relied on newspapers (that’s you, dear reader). He led by 20 points among voters who relied on national network news. In what NBC called “digital websites,” Biden led by 10 points.
However, among voters who relied on social media, Trump led by four points. Among voters who relied on cable news, Trump led by eight points. Among voters who get their news from YouTube and Google, Trump was up by 16 points and voters who don’t follow political news at all favor Trump by 26 points.
In America, we rely on the private sector — the social media companies themselves — to monitor their platforms and to remove disinformation from malign sources. Some are better than others. Elon Musk has dismantled the unit that was previously policing what is now X.
The brilliant Anne Applebaum has explained how there has been a convergence of propaganda efforts by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to discredit Western constitutional democracy, universal human rights, media independence, judicial independence and civic participation.
Convincing Americans that the country — and the world — is going to hell in a handbasket is a good way to convince voters to chuck out the incumbents. Are we being primed to believe the absolute worst about our country?
It is disturbing that American politicians are echoing some of these memes. Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has called out some of his GOP colleagues who have repeated Russian propaganda. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner has warned that we could well see more foreign interference in the upcoming election than in 2016.
The fight against disinformation can seem hopeless at times. How many people saw that original story from the Soviet Embassy back in 1986? How many saw our counter story?
What makes it all harder is how tribal we have become. A variety of views can barely penetrate our silos. Newspaper editorial pages — including this one — present a variety of viewpoints. Social media sites are more of a free-for-all and some of the “content providers” there, we can be sure, are paid by Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His new book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.