Disinformation poses a great threat to democracy and geopolitics, and it is both propagated by foreign and domestic actors. (Source: Creative Commons)

This Monday, the Caravel and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs co-hosted a panel discussion called“Information on Disinformation.” We invited three cybersecurity and disinformation experts, Nina Jankowicz, Katerina Sedova, and Sandra Grady, to speak on their experiences and insights into the issue.

Just a decade ago, disinformation was viewed as a nebulous security threat, and its implications were questioned even among experts. Needless to say, in the past two U.S. election cycles, disinformation has materialized into the real world, and it is evident it poses a great threat not only to democracy in the U.S. but to the future of geopolitics. Unfortunately, however, awareness has not bred solutions.

Jankowicz, Sedova, and Grady had a clear message to send: disinformation is not solely utilized by foreign actors. It has increasingly become a threat from within, propagated by our own domestic leaders and citizens, yet we are ill-prepared to combat it. Disinformation is a complicated, interdisciplinary issue involving multiple stakeholders spanning political leaders, media outlets, technology companies, down to each individual.

That’s not to say disinformation has not become a geopolitical tool—because it has. With increased accessibility to information as a result of the internet and social media, using disinformation to sow division is a political tactic with a low barrier of entry. This enables smaller states traditionally excluded from so-called “great power competition” to join in on the action and destabilize larger, more powerful nations. We saw this with the 2016 Russian interference in U.S. elections. The panel also briefly addressed China, a country already with a robust, highly censored domestic information apparatus. If its cannons begin to point in our direction, the U.S. could be fighting a losing battle.

Don’t Trust the Process

According to Sedova, disinformation affects democracies asymmetrically. A well-informed, and in particular correctly-informed, public is the cornerstone of democracy. Subsequently, disinformation attacks the very heart of how democracies organize their government and arrive at decisions. Reliable information is what enables us to participate in decision-making from as big as who should be our president to as small as which programs to fund in our local schools.

Foreign actors that spread disinformation are especially seeking to disrupt that reasoned decision-making that occurs in democracies. But more than that, the prevalence of disinformation seeps into the very trust we harbor towards our institutions and leaders. What we see as a result of disinformation is not simply bad decisions, but more insidiously, the gradual erosion of trust in our sources of information, our institutions, our leaders, and in each other. Ultimately, it causes our faith in democracy to waiver.

Online to Offline

While we talk about external propagators of disinformation, it’s also necessary to turn inwards. “We are our biggest enemies,” said Jankowicz. What we, as Americans, type in our online chat rooms, air in our primetime news shows, say in our rallies, share in our social media feeds, and publish in our print media are all means we engage with information, and potentially disinformation.

The Capitol riot on January 6, 2020 makes front page news. (Source: Flickr Commons)

“Online harms create offline consequences,” Jankowicz continued. This cannot be more evident than with the Capitol riots following the 2020 election. Continuous insistence about election fraud pushed by then-President Donald Trump, despite these claims proven false by court investigations and vote recounts, became a call-to-action for his supporters to storm the Capitol building on January 6. Following the siege on the Capitol, more have come to the realization that disinformation is an issue of national security. It undermines the legitimacy of our government, destabilizes our democracy (quite literally), and creates schisms within the societal fabric of the U.S., but it does not end there.

Like most issues, disinformation is gendered and racialized. Women, and women of color in particular, are overwhelmingly the victims of not just disinformation, but sexualized and racialized disinformation. High-profile women politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, and Ilham Omar were big disinformation targets during the 2020 election cycle, much more so than any of their male counterparts. All were targets of misogynistic and racist speculations playing on existing tropes regarding their sexuality, gender, and race circulating prominently across social media platforms. In Russia and Eastern Europe, deepfake technology has been used to fabricate pornography videos and nude pictures of female leaders.

This particular kind of disinformation can be discouraging for young women aspiring to enter the policy field. It raises the question of what implications that will have for our democracy when the participation of half the population is under attack.

Through the Rumor Mill

When the U.S. first encountered disinformation as a geopolitical threat, it was through research of the Islamic State’s recruitment methods. During the panel, Grady states that the U.S. forged its counter-messaging strategy around a very Western notion of effective communication: to counter disinformation with the insistence on fact.

Doing so, the U.S. demonstrated a level of ignorance that dismissed norms of storytelling indigenous to the communities it sought to speak to. In reality, information and storytelling are deeply baked in contextual cultural tropes and norms that push certain narratives. That is, in certain communities, especially in cultures with a rich oral tradition, the “rumor mill” may have more credibility than Western journalistic standards or a push towards science. Rumors rest upon the relationships between people—and to many, that is more personal and credible than the face of a foreigner telling them what to believe.

A QAnon believer attends a Trump rally in Minneapolis. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The dismissal of alternative methods of conveying information is not just exercised by the U.S. abroad, but also domestically. Conspiracy groups like QAnon exemplify how disinformation can spread in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. QAnon started in 2017 through a series of disaggregate rumors festering around on the internet. These rumors tapped into people’s existing anxieties and master narratives that were already somewhat accepted, which included the idea of a “deep state”or that the country is run by a group of political elites. Social media then creates an environment where these floating rumors can be consolidated to create an overarching narrative and allow its believers to join together in a community and operationalize these conspiracies. Believers in conspiracy theories often feel a sense of righteousness—that they are a small group of people that see through the truth and are fighting the good fight.

In a country as ethnically and racially diverse as the U.S., different demographics can consume information in different ways. For example, the average Chinese-American person may turn to community group chats on the social media platform WeChat for their primary source of information before any print or news media. Younger generations may trust their social media feeds and peers for news more than traditional news sources.

Grady states that we cannot assume that just telling the truth is sufficient to counter disinformation. Believing so is both woefully naive and simplistic. To combat disinformation from both domestic and foreign actors, the U.S. needs to have a clearer understanding of what it’s up against and recognize the vernacular forms of cultural storytelling that exist in communities which are the roots of disinformation.

Where do we go from here?

All three panelists agree that we, individual citizens, are at the forefront of the war against disinformation. The impetus is on us to be more responsible consumers and carriers of information and to be able to discern fact from opinion. Following that, our education systems need to support strong media literacy and critical thinking skills. We need to learn to constantly double-check the reliability and biases of sources and question our own predispositions. All of this serves to help us regain societal trust in our information sources and democratic institutions to build national resilience to disinformation attacks, within and without.

Nationally, the U.S. needs to fund public media sources like NPR and PBS, invest in civics education, and find ways to utilize trusted local resources to combat disinformation. This can be through community centers, libraries, and local leaders. Indicatively, the U.S. does not have a single media network that is trusted by a majority of Americans in a time of crisis.

What disinformation serves to do is demoralize us, force us to lose our faith in coming to an agreement, believing in facts, and seeing a purpose to civil dialogue—all necessary components to a functioning democracy. The purpose of the panel was not to feed into that cynicism but to highlight the urgency of the challenge in front of us.