What If Anything Can We Do About Disinformation, by Bill Wanlund


Maybe I need to review my browsing habits, but it seems to me that there’s been a spate so far in this young year of articles about disinformation – either sounding the alarm or offering recipes to prevent it.

Perhaps it’s because 2024 promises to be the Mother of all Election Years: At least 64 countries, representing nearly half the world’s population, have scheduled national elections this year. Another contributor to the recent interest in disinformation is the increasingly noisy discussion of Artificial Intelligence, and the cocktail of good and evil AI offers society.

Russia is a concern of much of the recent writing on disinformation, much of which bears directly on Public Diplomacy and its practitioners. Blogging on the American Security Project website on December 14, Dylan Gooding lays it all out there, under the headline, “To Counter Russian Disinformation, Innovate American Public Diplomacy.”

Gooding recounts how Russia uses “an assortment of updated Cold War narratives” such as “portraying itself as a victim of American aggression.” Rummaging deeper into Russia’s bag of dirty tricks, Gooding finds “bots and trolls” that “work alongside Russian-owned media companies such as RT and Sputnik,” to advance the anti-American agenda, particularly in Africa and Latin America.

To help regain the ideological ground the U.S. is losing, Gooding suggests the U.S. Agency for Global Media consider “forming a ‘Radio Free Africa’ and morphing the Office of Cuban Broadcasting into a broader Latin American news outlet” to increase “reliable and trustworthy reporting.” He also urges expansion of cultural exchange programs like Youth Ambassadors to Africa and the Middle East.

But most of all, Gooding says, the U.S. needs to walk the policy talk – “act on the ideals it claims to hold” – to increase its credibility. “If the U.S. wants its public diplomacy operations to work, it must act on its domestic and foreign front to eliminate inconsistencies between its ideals and actions, thereby increasing the credibility of its messaging.” 

“Public diplomacy is an underappreciated method in the American toolkit,” Gooding writes, “which, combined with appropriate policy, can reemerge as a truly effective tool of American national power.”
Dylan Gooding’s essay is here.
 
The Wilson Center’s Torianna Eckles, blogging on that institution’s website on Jan. 22, gets down to specifics with a case study, “The Consequences of Russian Disinformation:  Examples in Burkina Faso.” History is at play in Francophone West Africa, Eckles points out, where failing democracies have resulted in six military coups since 2020, often warmly welcomed by the populations. “While citizens may prefer democracy, they also desire governments that address legitimate frustrations,” she says, citing a 2019-21 Afrobarometer study of 36 African countries [including Burkina Faso, hereafter BF] suggesting that two-thirds of those polled prefer democracy over any other system of government  – but only 38% of respondents were satisfied with how democracy works in their country.

But why does support for the juntas continue, Eckles wonders, “even as security and economic conditions worsen under [their] leadership”?

BF’s experience provides one answer. In 2014, after 27 years of authoritarian government, the country enjoyed a spell of democracy, complete with “political reforms and democratic gains.” However, a deteriorating security situation “proved too difficult for Burkina Faso’s democratic institutions to handle,” Eckles writes, and led to two coups d’état in 2022. The country’s current leader, army captain Ibrahim Traoré, suspended BF’s constitution in favor of a “transitional charter,” any revisions to which require his approval.

BF was fertile ground for Russian disinformation, building off “the legitimate fears and frustrations of the Burkinabè population, Eckles says. “Russian operatives employ inauthentic social media accounts [blaming] France’s military failures and the West more broadly. They glorify Vladimir Putin, overstate the successes of the [private Russian military] Wagner Group, and advocate for closer relationships between Burkina Faso and Russia.…Russia has recruited local African political players and influencers to form and legitimize messaging, making campaigns more credible and resonant with local populations…[and] developed fake news sources to spread disinformation or impersonate or buy legitimate accounts to ensure a spread of information favorable to Russia.” The Russian Embassy in Ouagadougou reopened in December after being shuttered for 31 years. [I’m including Eckles’s reference links for readers who want more detail.]

So, what can the U.S. do? Eckles has some ideas that apply to PD: Torianna Eckles’s study is here.
 
A final note: As mentioned earlier, many wise words are being written about countering Russian disinformation with PD. I chose to highlight the contributions of Dylan Gooding and Torianna Eckles because of what they wrote, of course, and also who they are: Young, engaged, professionals-in-the-making. Gooding has a 2023 bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College with a double major in Economics and Government & Law and is now at Georgetown; Eckles, a former communications intern at State, is a senior at GWU, double-majoring in Peace and Conflict Resolution and Political Science, and a former Wilson Center Africa Program intern. May they thrive and their tribe increase.
 
Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears in the PDCA Weekly Update and the PDCA Blog; it seeks to address topics of interest to PDCA members.