Autocracies Are Winning the Information War
And the American craving for drama is helping them.
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In The Atlantic’s newest cover story, Anne Applebaum details the onslaught of antidemocratic propaganda flooding the United States. If only Americans weren’t so ready to believe so much of it.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Propaganda for American Tastes
Back in 2017, I was asked by the State Department to give a series of lectures on disinformation to audiences in various cities in the Czech Republic. (I wrote about it here.) I was stunned, even then, at how the European information environment was poisoned by a deluge of Russian propaganda—including the obvious cross-pollination between Russians and malevolent actors in the United States. This global problem, Anne Appelebaum writes in our new cover story, has since gotten much worse.
As Anne points out, the Chinese, the Russians, and others are on a propaganda offensive around the world, even in places that most Americans don’t pay much attention to. She described how a European diplomat was “mystified” to find students in Africa parroting Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine. “He grasped for explanations,” she writes: “Maybe the legacy of colonialism explained the spread of these conspiracy theories, or Western neglect of the global South, or the long shadow of the Cold War.”
The simpler but more ominous truth, Anne explains, involved “China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language.”
These efforts differ from Cold War–era propaganda campaigns. In those days, the Soviets and others tried to paint a happy picture of the successes of their autocratic regimes as a way of legitimizing their rule and as a kind of enticement to other nations to join Team Red. Many of these efforts “backfired,” Anne writes, “because people could compare what they saw on posters and in movies with a far more impoverished reality.”
Those were the days. Now, Anne points out, the goal of most autocracies is not to replace truth with regime-friendly lies but to destroy truth itself, and to obliterate the human ability—or desire—to even distinguish between truths and lies. “The new authoritarians,” she writes, “have a different attitude toward reality.”
When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in [Vladimir] Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed … This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know?
The point of such efforts is not really to mobilize support for bad regimes but to numb the brains and neutralize the agency of citizens everywhere. As Anne writes, “If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.”
I recommend that you read Anne’s article in its entirety to see the full spectrum of these autocratic efforts around the world, but I want to focus here on what’s happening in the United States. Americans are being targeted by foreign propagandists who are using the internet and social media to pump their toxic slurry directly into American veins. “A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk,” Anne writes, “but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying.”
As is always the case, this propaganda has found willing customers in a bored and listless society that alleviates its ennui by gorging on entertaining conspiracy theories. Americans don’t have to seek out foreign propaganda when plenty of their fellow citizens are eager to sell them lies that have been altered to suit American tastes. But why does American society have so many takers for such soul-destroying nonsense? Anne points out that after the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March, the former PayPal entrepreneur (and close pal of Elon Musk’s) David Sacks posted on X that “if the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it.” This inane and baseless charge has been viewed 2.5 million times.
More than David Sacks himself, however, the problem is a culture that even thinks to take people such as David Sacks seriously. Democracies have always had conspiracy theorists and other cranks wandering about the public square, sneezing and coughing various forms of weirdness on their fellow citizens. But even in the recent past, most people with a basic level of education and a healthy dollop of common sense had no trouble resisting the contagion of idiocy.
Today, the immune system of once-healthy democratic societies is compromised. Be it the idea that the moon landings were faked or the attacks on the legitimacy of elections, wild theories have become surprisingly easy for Americans to believe, a sign of a national gullibility that makes the United States an obvious target for outlandish propaganda.
Governments alone cannot solve this problem. Individual citizens have to take the initiative—as exhausting as it might be—to confront one another over bad information. They need to ask questions: Where did you hear that? Why do you trust that source? Do you think that I, as a friend or a family member, am lying to you if I tell you it’s not true? People who have already been captured by propaganda will not believe official disclaimers from authoritative sources, and will see such disclaimers only as further proof of the conspiracy. But when conspiracists and deeply misinformed people encounter people close to them, those whom they care about, who gently but firmly refuse to join them in the maze of misinformation, such discussions can sometimes have a positive effect, at least in the short term.
What I am suggesting is not fun, and should be limited to friends and family. (It’s probably not a strategy to pursue at a bar with strangers after a few drinks.) And it may not change very much. But right now, it’s all any of us can do.
Related:
Today’s News
- Hamas laid out a proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza that the group’s political leader said was based on a plan from Egypt and Qatar. Israel’s leadership said that the terms were “far from Israel’s essential demands” but that it would be sending a delegation to Cairo to continue the negotiations.
- The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial ruled that the former president was in contempt of court after he once again broke a gag order preventing him from attacking jurors and others involved in the trial.
- The Israeli cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera yesterday and immediately moved to shut down the news channel’s offices in the country and to seize some of the company’s communication equipment.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: The new question du jour is “What is milk?” Isabel Fattal examines the factors complicating milk’s identity.
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Evening Read
Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?
By Stephanie H. Murray
Say you’re sorry. For generations, parents have leaned on the phrase during sibling tiffs and playground scuffles. But it has lately become controversial, particularly among a certain subset of Millennial parents—those for whom the hallmark of good parenting is the reverence they show for their kids’ feelings. Under this model, gone are the days of scolding a child for melting down, sending them to a time-out, or ignoring them until they settle. (Joining them for “time-ins” to help them process their emotions? That’s okay.) The guiding principle seems to be to take children’s current or future feelings into consideration at every parental decision point—even when they are the ones who have hurt the feelings of someone else.
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Read. “No Subject,” a poem by Andrew Motion:
“Hope exhausted years ago / but I still try.”
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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