Worried About Disinformation? Chill! [thoughtfully] by Bill Wanlund

By Bill Wanlund

Regular readers of my occasional posts may have noticed a preponderance of commentary on disinformation, misinformation, and other forms of cyberwarfare against the United States and its allies by forces in Russia, China, and other countries that don’t wish us well. And why not? It’s the soup du jour on the menu of strategic public diplomacy concerns; it behooves us to be alert to the threat and to recognize its varied guises.

Still, it was refreshing to come across a contribution to the Spring issue of the Texas National Security Review titled, “From Panic to Policy: The Limits of Foreign Propaganda and the Foundations of an Effective Response.” Written by Gavin Wilde, researcher of cyber, propaganda, emerging technology, and Russia issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the article cautions policymakers against overreacting to the intrusions into our media consumption by malign forces.

Wilde acknowledges that we’re not imagining this stuff — that Russia, China, et al. “seek to use technology and propaganda to covertly sway the American public is not in doubt.” But, he implies, maybe it’s time to take a step back: “Contrary to prevailing assumptions, a range of recent empirical studies have failed to validate any uniform, causal relationship between online media and major changes in human attitudes and behaviors.”

In other words, we know what our adversaries are up to, and we know how they’re doing it — but there’s no evidence that it’s working. [Unless, of course, your job description includes preaching to the choir: Citing research by the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton, Wilde writes. “Where false or inflammatory content does seem to resonate, the question arises as to whether people already consciously {intend to} accept it. Most inaccurate or misleading information “reaches people who are already misinformed — or at least very open to being misinformed.”]

Wilde’s research found no correlation between audience exposure to Russian online “subversive content” and subsequent attitudinal changes or voting behavior, and added: “Other studies concluded that content shared via social media had no discernible effect on people’s beliefs or opinions”, suggesting, he says, “that people are far less impressionable than presumed, their views much less moldable with any skill or reasonable expectation of success — by states or any other actors. This would not be the first time, however, that American threat perceptions about propaganda have solidified before any scientific consensus could.”

Wilde traces this firm conviction that our minds are ripe for manipulation back a century or so ago when powerful figures like journalist Walter Lippmann and others “examined public persuasion relying on one key assumption: that media could profoundly guide the thinking of the American public,” whom they considered “volatile, unstable, rootless, alienated, and inherently susceptible to manipulation.” Some, like public relations pioneer [and nephew of Sigmund Freud] Edward L. Bernays, held that government “had a solemn duty to interpret important facts and events [for] an otherwise dim or disinterested public, to lead them to socially constructive goals and values.”

However, these remained only suppositions until the digital age, when it was believed that public opinion on just about anything could be identified — and manipulated, thus opening the gates for propagandists of every stripe. Wilde writes, “Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) …assumed a leading role as intermediaries between users and content… Such power is both extensive in practice and seemingly bottomless in promise: human behavior, reduced and reconstituted into a vast pool of measurable units,” immune from those “confounding, real-world variables.”

Not so fast, says Wilde: “People do not operate according to any fixed trajectories or rules, but are self-contradictory, paradoxical, and unpredictable. Flurries of social media activity are frequently measured against the most direct and worst conceivable outcomes, such as foreign manipulation,” but without factual evidence, often leading to overreaction. “The less clarity about another state’s intent and capacity to do harm, the greater the tendency for anxiety.”

“For instance,” Wilde says, “at the height of the Cold War, the United States knew all too well how destructive nuclear weapons could be. What was less clear were Soviet capabilities and intentions. The perceived threat of online manipulation now inverts this dynamic: Ill intent from adversarial states is evident, and the tradecraft of online propagandists is well documented. What remains unclear is the degree to which “information warfare” is a causal factor to real-world events… To begin from the assumption that online propaganda is necessarily successful, merely understudied, may legitimize foreign adversaries’ attempts — thereby doing a measure of their work for them.”

To wrap it up, Wilde says,

“Americans must ultimately be slower to accept the premise that foreign online manipulation is more prevalent, their neighbors more gullible, and human behavior more dependent on media than is likely the case. [The American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John] Dewey once asserted that, provided the right conditions, American citizens are fully capable of living free from outside coercion. In this regard, shutting off avenues for foreign malign influence also means ensuring decision-makers are not distracted or absolved from servicing the needs of the public. Scholars have debated for the past hundred years about where confidence was better placed: in the power of the citizen and of democratic institutions, or in the ability of concerted propagandists to subvert them. The choice today is no less stark.”


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OK, I’m a sucker for footnotes, and Wilde wields 130 of them in support of his scholarship. There’s much more to his work than I captured above, and you can read it here. I would also like to know readers’ reactions to this piece [and others]; if you have any thoughts to share, please let me know here.

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Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears occasionally in the PDCA Weekly Update; it seeks to address topics of interest to PDCA members.