You can win the information war in your mind. The government can’t win it on the internet.
Plus: fractured peacemakers, meet me in Michigan, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
You can win the information war in your mind. The government can’t win it on the internet.
In an article for The Washington Post coauthored shortly before his death last month and published Tuesday, former Sen. Joe Lieberman says the U.S. government can “start winning the information war” by producing and distributing some slick propaganda.
Of course, he and his coauthor, former Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey, do not use the word “propaganda.” But were this proposal entertained in any adversarial nation, that’s exactly the word we’d use, and rightly so. For the sake of national security, they write, to counter malign messaging from “malefactor regimes in Russia, China and Iran,” Washington should push a “counternarrative that asserts our values and ideals and explains the priceless advantages of freedom, the rule of law, a free press, and freedom to assemble and express opinion.”
To do this, Lieberman and Humphrey suggest following the model of the USIA, a federal office closed by Congress 25 years ago:
As for lack of means, since 1999, when Congress unwisely abolished the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the United States has lacked the capability to fight back using counternarrative. We have the invaluable Voice of America, of course, but VOA’s product is news. News is not counternarrative. It is not the marshaling of truth and fact to tell our story. Putin’s high standing in domestic polls and in some nonaligned countries is proof we need more than news to achieve victory on the battlefield of the human mind. We need counternarrative as well. […]
As a measure of the counternarrative lost when the USIA disappeared, its archives contain 20,000 films it produced. One even won an Oscar. The films were not newsreels; they were documentaries meant to persuade. They served as counternarrative to Soviet lies and distortion. Very little counternarrative in modern form—videos that could be disseminated on social media—has been produced since.
As a contemporary example, the article points to a video made by the State Department appealing to the Russian people to reject their government’s invasion of Ukraine. (Moscow responded by making threats, releasing a parody video, and denouncing the U.S. effort as propaganda.)
That example may be slightly misleading, though, as the primary audience Lieberman and Humphrey want to target is our own people, not foreign publics. “Americans are particular targets of false narratives designed to sow confusion about our institutions—including our elections—and to undermine American confidence,” they warn. So it is to Americans, presumably, that this new “counternarrative” would mainly go.
This idea is no doubt well-intended, and certainly there are many advantages to laud in our First Amendment rights. But even setting aside the inherent tension in contending for American ideals like a free press with state propaganda, this proposal—and other top-down attempts to combat misinformation, especially those that would make the federal government an adjudicator and propagator of truth—suffers from a profound ignorance of our information environment and human nature.
I see this ignorance chiefly in three ways. One is that would-be propagandists seem to have no sense of the scale of the internet. When I worked at The Week, our final parent company put me on a company-wide task force concerned with misinformation. The notion seemed to be that somehow, as a media company, we would fight it.
Some of the ideas, like making sure each outlet in the company had honest journalistic practices that could be verified by outside observers, were good in their own right. But I thought the idea that we could somehow put a dent in online misinformation by publishing better, more truthful content at our handful of websites was fundamentally blinkered. It’s like putting a few drops of food coloring into the ocean.
So with this. The State Department could pump out 20,000 Twitter videos tomorrow and my guess is they’d shift the conversation not a whit. Well, I suppose they might become fodder for jokes for the first few weeks, before everyone turned their attention elsewhere.
The second point of ignorance is the assumption that well-produced “marshaling of truth and fact to tell our story” wins a battle against pixelated, barely intelligible memes. A lot of worry about misinformation focuses on articles that are wholly fabricated or a careful mix of truth and lies. But we should realize by now that, often, you don’t need to do that much work. Often, a far more effective way to spread a narrative is to slap a couple unsourced lines in comic sans onto a black background with a picture of a Minion or Bernie Sanders or Thomas Jefferson in sunglasses and send it out into the world to wreak its havoc. This is a 2-minute endeavor, no State Department resources needed.
To be clear: I am not saying the federal government should make memes. I’m saying there’s not a predictable line from we make a nice video that tells the truth and put it online to people share and believe the video instead of the garbage coming through their feeds. The garbage is probably less tedious and more fun, and it has the key advantage of being what its recipients want to believe.
You see, even if scale weren’t an issue, this isn’t really a supply-side problem. The problem is demand. Misinformation (and worse) spreads because people like it. Insofar as propaganda from other countries works on Americans, it’s because it tells them things they’re already inclined to think. It asks them to take a half-step farther in the same direction, not reverse course.
Third, and closely related to this second point, is that despite the involvement of “malefactor regimes,” the information war is very much fought at the popular and populist levels. The kind of people who could be persuaded by a State Department video already believe that stuff; most everyone else won’t be persuaded—and especially not the people this kind of project most hopes to persuade.
I wrote about this at The Daily Beast a while back:
[P]residents and other large-scale solutions may be uniquely disadvantaged when it comes to fixing Americans’ troubles with trust and truth. Top-down interventions to steer people away from groundless suspicion and false beliefs—like the Biden administration’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board—tend to exacerbate these ills rather than abate them. What are they trying to hide?—the thinking goes. We must be onto something if they're responding like this.
Such interventions also tend to confuse the source of our social and informational chaos. A disinfo board goes after content, but the supply of content shouldn’t be our main concern. That’s not to absolve social media companies of responsibility for what appears in their networks, but it is to say lies and divisive insinuations are primarily a demand-side conundrum. “The problem isn’t that there are liars,” as author Freddie deBoer has argued, because “there will always be liars. The problem is that people believe them… It has to start with the believers, not with the belief.”
This is why, in Untrustworthy and elsewhere, I’ve focused so much on the internal problem (us as information consumers and truth claim assessors) rather than the external one (that there is misinformation and falsehood out there).
If “winning the information war” means eradicating or at least drowning out the misinformation and falsehood on the internet, then it can’t be won (unless you go full North Korea). But if it means you, personally, developing intellectual virtues and becoming a person with a feel for truth and an instinctive distaste for informational garbage, then yeah, keep at it.
You’ll lose some battles but can prevail. State Department video propaganda cannot.
2. What I'm reading this week
Poems by C.S. Lewis. Starting tonight!
3. A recommendation
“Fractured are the peacemakers,” reported by my colleague Sophia Lee in Israel and Palestine. An excerpt:
Salim’s students in Bethlehem asked him questions that went beyond his theological education: “Should we join the demonstrations?” “Can we throw stones at the soldiers?” “Jewish settlers robbed my family’s land, saying God gave them that land. What does the Bible actually say?”
Meanwhile, Salim was also teaching Jewish Israeli students at a Bible study center in Tel Aviv-Jaffa who struggled with their own identity issues: “How can we be Jews and believe in Yeshua?” “How can we call ourselves Christians when Christians persecuted our people for centuries?” Salim thought it would be edifying for his Jewish and Palestinian students to hear each other’s identity struggles, so in 1990 he organized a meeting between them.
“It was a disaster,” Salim said. Almost immediately, students were yelling at each other. Neither side could agree on what language to use to describe current events. Was it an occupation? Resistance? Terrorism? Talking about theology—what does the Bible say about the land of Israel?—only made matters worse. The conversation disintegrated. It was like the two sides were reading completely different Bibles, unable to arrive at a shared narrative.
Perhaps a meeting of pastors would go better, Salim thought. He invited 14 pastors—seven Jewish, seven Palestinian—to a church in Jerusalem to discuss current events. “That went even worse,” he told me. That disturbed Salim. Could the body of Christ not find some common cause on this issue?
4. Recent work
A theologian’s vision of ‘peasant’ politics is surprisingly lordly | Christianity Today (unlocked link)
Against false hopes | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
Will you be at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids next week? Come meet me at the CT table in the exhibit hall, and join us for this event with CT’s
magazine.
Misinformation (and worse) spreads because people like it.
Sadly true. Human nature at its worst.