March 10, 2023 | Foreign Policy

America Is Still Losing the Information War

Washington urgently needs a 21st-century communication strategy.
March 10, 2023 | Foreign Policy

America Is Still Losing the Information War

Washington urgently needs a 21st-century communication strategy.

Excerpt

In late January, the Russian Foreign Ministry launched its latest disinformation campaign, claiming that Moscow had acquired more than 20,000 documents about a supposed secret U.S. biological weapons program in Ukraine. Spreading this fake news via its official Twitter account, the ministry also claimed the U.S. Defense Department “aimed at creating elements of a biological weapon, & testing it on the population of Ukraine.” This tweet alone received more than 2 million views. The Russian Embassy in Washington stepped up next, recycling the Kremlin conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon by the U.S. government.

All of this is part of a familiar deluge of fake news coming out of Moscow, and the obvious absurdity of these claims could prompt U.S. officials to dismiss them. Such complacency, however, would be a mistake. The problem is that they draw attention away from Russia’s genocidal war and other actions, not least because articles such as this one need to be written to debunk them. Even the most far-fetched charges against the United States are taken seriously in some parts of the world—and, increasingly, among Americans beholden to pro-Russian propagandists such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. The long history of Russian and Soviet disinformation campaigns shows that they are far more successful than one might think in spreading doubt about U.S. actions and intentions, and Moscow scores a win if even a small fraction of people fall for what, to most observers, appears patently ludicrous.

Ivana Stradner is a research fellow at the Barish Center for Media Integrity at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Twitter: @ivanastradner. Anthony Ruggiero is the senior director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the U.S. National Security Council during the Trump administration. Twitter: @NatSecAnthony. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Issues:

Disinformation Russia Ukraine