Information Warfare

Monday, September 9, 2024

Information Warfare

The Justice Department's announcement last week that it has chosen to pursue malevolent Russian actors for disrupting our politics was welcome news. Fairness requires mentioning that it was also politically risky for the Biden administration. While foreign election meddlers should be charged for criminal acts, pursuing them risks looking like a domestic partisan political stunt all on its own. Absent the hostile foreign activity, it would look a lot like one party were charging its rival’s supporters with criminal behavior as a ploy for electoral advantage.

When one party claims its opponents are competing by breaking the law, it appears willing to undermine democracy and rule of law all at once. When one party does it and wins, the other party will think crimes are worth copying—for electoral gain or just retribution. That leads to an inevitable crisis of legitimacy for the whole political system.

The sad fact, at the same time, is that this all came about from a long-term lack of vigilance against hostile foreign governments getting directly involved in our politics. The foreign influence operations are like a cancer in the body politic: untreated, they spread everywhere, corrupting and poisoning the whole system.

The political hazards of pursuing criminal indictments are discernible at the individual level, too. As citizens in our republic, we can become passionate about our political beliefs. Psychological research has found that once people decide in favor of specific products—including a political parties or candidates—we tend to commit to them emotionally. As a result, we tend to believe good news about them and dismiss the bad news. The bad news we take as a sign that its source is untrustworthy due to hopeless bias. This blog is no less prone to such thinking and tries to remain mindful of the tendency.

Hostile influence operations make use of this by embedding themselves into an existing political structures and daring the other party to name them. Proclaiming the other side to be subverted by hostile outside actors itself becomes a fraught act—one that cuts both ways. In fact, malevolent outside actors embed themselves in both sides in order to increase vitriol and decrease political trust. America’s enemies prefer Americans to fight among themselves.

An excerpt of Anne Applebaum’s recent book Autocracy, Inc. published in the Atlantic discussed the subversive participation of Russian agents in American politics, where they raise questions based on falsehoods in order to confuse political debates. The examples Applebaum uses emphasize how the MAGA movement has been a target, but any opposition party could find itself similarly misused.

Allying with the opposition party works to launder misinformation by having it come from the campaign criticizing the administration in office. The misinformation becomes an accusation that the administration has to address publicly. It makes the misinformation appear to be factual—serious enough to require public refutation. And since no one can provide evidence that something didn’t happen—you can’t prove a negative—outlandish claims become a topic of informed debate.

In one particular case, Russian propagandists started spreading the idea that Ukraine hosted secret American biological weapons labs. This was picked up by Kremlin-allied media and Chinese media, who promoted it all over social media via bot accounts. The effort eventually spread the false claims worldwide wherever Russian, Chinese, and Iranian “news” outlets provide free content. Meanwhile, in the United States, it had the intended effects of undermining trust in pro-Ukrainian administration policy while eroding trust in American news and government institutions. As Applebaum describes it, the long-term goal of the autocracies is to keep citizens too bewildered by conflicting and irreconcilable reports of events until frustration and resignation overcome anyone not energized by the partisan battles.

Indictments from the U.S. Department of Justice are a step in the right direction, but it will take a greater effort to make Americans aware of such activities. The judicial system grinds slowly on a good day, requiring lots of careful actions to prove the existence of crimes and criminals to present to a court. Everyone knows the chances of catching the actual perpetrators who live beyond U.S. jurisdiction are scant. Creating bogus online content and fake news is cheap, quick, and easy by comparison. The authoritarian powers seek actively to undermine and defeat the rule of law, after all. So why would they comply as long as they feel they have nothing to fear, nothing to lose? Our political leaders should be taking these threats more seriously, and warning the public of the stakes.