Information Wars. Richard Stengel
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and ISIS did; how government isn’t much good at responding to a threat like this. In many ways, the fight against ISIS’s messaging looks like a success story. We actually did a fair amount, and ISIS went from seeming omnipresent on social media to being confined to the dark web. But the truth is, I don’t know that what we did made any difference. Crushing ISIS militarily had a heck of a bigger effect than dueling with tweets. As I used to tell my military colleagues, losing a city to ISIS sends a terrible message, but taking a city is the best message of all. Ultimately, it’s not a military fight; it’s a battle of ideas between Islamic extremists and the much larger audience of mainstream Muslims. ISIS was always more of an idea than a state, and that idea is far from dead.
The fight against Russian disinformation was murkier. It was difficult to get started, didn’t gain much traction, and then mostly faded away. Combating Russian disinformation was harder than countering ISIS in part because everyone agreed that ISIS was an irredeemable enemy, while lots of people at State and the White House were ambivalent about hitting back at Russia. Some of that hesitance came from people who didn’t think it was the government’s job to counter any kind of disinformation, which is a fair point. Some of it came from people who thought that countering Russia’s message only made things worse. And some came from people who felt that it was more effective to treat Russia as a fellow superpower (even though it was not) than a fading regional player.
But the scale of Russian disinformation was beyond what we were capable of responding to. The Russians had the big battalions; we had a reluctant, ragtag guerrilla force. They also had the element of surprise. Maybe a few old Cold Warriors might have seen it coming, but mostly we did not. It hadn’t been all that long since the 2012 election when people had mocked Mitt Romney for saying that a revanchist Russia was our number one geopolitical foe. Frankly, it’s not that they were so sophisticated, it’s that we were so credulous. The Global Engagement Center, created during my final year and designed to be a centralized hub for countering all kinds of disinformation, is potentially a powerful weapon in this fight.
Finally, when it came to countering Donald Trump’s disinformation, we were pretty much paralyzed. No one wanted to do that. Let me correct that: plenty of people wanted to do it, but almost no one thought it was practical or right or legal to do so. Moreover, everyone at the White House and at the State Department thought, Well, Hillary is going to win, and the White House really didn’t want it to look like we were putting our finger on the scale. After all, the Russians and Trump were preparing to question the integrity of the election when Trump lost. No one wanted to give them any evidence they could use to say the election was rigged, which is precisely what they would have done.
For the first six weeks after Donald Trump entered the race in June 2015, Russia did almost nothing to support him. The Russians seemed as bewildered as the rest of us at what he was doing. They were always and resolutely anti-Hillary, but it took them a while to become pro-Trump. They were reading the polls too. When they did come around to supporting him, it was pretty clear they didn’t think he would win. What they wanted was a loss close enough that they could question the legitimacy of Mrs. Clinton’s victory. They were as surprised by Trump’s victory as, well, Trump was.
I saw Russian disinformation enter the American presidential campaign and was alarmed by it, but to this day, I’m not sure what impact it had. Russian messaging had a lot of reach but hardly any depth. Sure, Russian ads and stories on Facebook reached 126 million people, but those 126 million people saw exponentially more content than a few Russian ads.10 Moreover, as data today suggests, the ads themselves were not very successful. People didn’t recall them or act on them. What had a more significant effect was the false and deceptive content that the Russians seeded onto all platforms, not just the buying of ads on Facebook. But in the end, disinformation tends to confirm already held beliefs; it’s not really meant to change people’s minds. Disinformation doesn’t create divisions; it amplifies them.
So, did Russian disinformation tip the election to Donald Trump? I don’t know. By televising hundreds of hours of Trump’s campaign speeches, CNN did a whole lot more to elect him than Russia Today did. Televising his rallies sent a message to voters: this is important, pay attention—after all, we are. And millions of voters’ deeply held antipathy to Hillary Clinton did a lot more to defeat her than a few hundred Russian trolls in St. Petersburg. The Russians sought to sow doubt about the election, hurt Hillary, and help Trump, without any expectation that it would tip the balance.
My experience in government changed my view of the information and media industry in a fundamental way. As a journalist, I had always seen information as the lifeblood of democracy. That’s how the Framers saw it too.11 Like so many, I saw the rise of the internet as a fantastic boon to global freedom and democracy—the more knowledge people had, the better able they would be to choose how to govern themselves and live their own lives. I still do. But these new tools and platforms are neutral. As Aristotle said of rhetoric, it can be used for good or ill. I came to see that dictators and autocrats and con men quickly figured out how to use these new tools to fool and intimidate people. They used the tools of democracy and freedom to repress democracy and freedom. We need to use those same tools to protect those values.
I had always believed in the notion that the best ideas triumph in what Justice William O. Douglas called “the market place of ideas.”12 This notion is found in John Milton and John Stuart Mill and is a bedrock principle in our democracy. But everyone presumed that the marketplace would be a level playing field. That a rational audience would ultimately see the truth. I think we all now know that this is a pipe dream. Unfortunately, facts don’t come highlighted in yellow. A false sentence reads the same as a true one. It’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth does not always win.
In foreign policy, there’s the classic divide between realism and idealism. When it came to information, I’d always been an idealist. I believed that sunlight was the best disinfectant. I left office as an information realist. Disinformation, as I said earlier, isn’t a new problem, but the ease with which it can be spread on social media is. Today we are all actors in a global information war that is ubiquitous, difficult to comprehend, and unfair. It is a war without end, a war without limits or boundaries. A war that we still don’t quite know how to fight.
To say the truth is under attack is a beautiful phrase. But the problem is that people have their own truths, and these truths are often at war with one another. We no longer seem able to agree on what is a fact or how to determine one. The truth is, it’s impossible to stop people from creating falsehoods and other people from believing them.
So, looking back, there was a lot that we saw that we did something about. There was a lot that we saw that we didn’t or couldn’t do anything about. And there was a lot that we just didn’t see. I saw part of the picture but not all of it. I wish I had been able to connect the dots faster. I wish I had been able to do more. And there was always the sense that it couldn’t happen here.
The Turnstile
When you walk into the 21st Street entrance of the State Department, you have to show your ID to the uniformed guards standing outside the building. They peer down at your card to check the tiny expiration date in the upper left-hand corner before waving you through, exactly the way they have been doing it since the Korean War.
Once you’re past the guards, you have to pass through two tall, automated metal doors. To get them to open, you step onto a four-by-six-inch magnetic carpet in front of them. Some mornings you just had to touch the carpet and the doors would spring open. Sometimes you had to jump up and down. And sometimes you had to open the doors yourself. On many mornings, you would see diplomats in sensible suits hopping up and down before putting their shoulders to what must have been a two-hundred-fifty-pound door.
Once you were through the double doors and into the lobby, you needed to pass through one of five clunky-looking metal turnstiles that probably didn’t look modern when they were installed 25 years ago. You inserted your card in a horizontal slot in the main part of the turnstile and then entered your PIN on the keypad. The problem was the keypad. It was