Perspective: Truth decayInformation and Democracy—A Perilous Relationship

In the 1997 James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the villain is Elliot Carver, head of a media conglomerate who has come to believe that information is a more powerful weapon than military force. He blackmails senior British leaders and ultimately tries to spark a war between China and Britain to bring his ally to power in Beijing. His plot is a combination of real-world actions—luring a British frigate into Chinese waters and then sinking it—with a global media blitz to “demonstrate” to the world that the action represents Chinese aggression and stoke the flames of British nationalism.

At one point in the film, Carver stands underneath massive television screens in the headquarters of his media empire, personally drafting the headlines—many of them referring to fabricated events—that will push the world toward war. “We’re both men of action,” he tells Bond, “but your era…is passing. Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery…Caesar had his legions, Napoleon had his armies. I have my divisions—TV, news, magazines.” Control of the global narrative, Carver suggests, will give him more power than any of those military leaders could ever wield.

The Cipher Brief writes the Bond plot offers one vision of a dystopian future:

The idea that mass media in the electronic age has become so powerful, prevalent, and capable of manipulation that—with some “real” events thrown in for leavening—they could make whole populations believe the opposite of the truth. Elliot Carver represents a turbocharged version of the historical media figures who trafficked in rumor, innuendo, and sometimes outright fabrication. Empowered by modern technology and spurred by a determination to exacerbate existing social divisions and fuel popular trust in their authorities and institutions, he brings the practice to its logical conclusion: the replacement of reality with invented fiction.

The Cipher Brief continues:

Fast-forward 20 years, and this scenario appears to be becoming reality. Using techniques far more advanced than those available to Bond villains in the 1990s, today’s practitioners of what this report terms hostile social manipulation employ targeted social media campaigns, sophisticated forgeries, cyberbullying and harassment of individuals, distribution of rumors and conspiracy theories, and other tools and approaches to cause damage to the target state. This emerging practice reflects an updated and modified version of many long-established forms of influence, including propaganda, “active measures,” disinformation, and political warfare. “Adversaries do not seek to attack their opponents physically but merely to destabilize them,” one report on the trend concludes. “They favor assaults on the beliefs a population holds about its own government … and on a population’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction.”

The subject has become a leading topic of debate in the West in the wake of reports of Russian election interference, not only in the United States but throughout Europe. As British Prime Minister Theresa May recently said of the leading practitioner of such techniques, Russia is “seeking to weaponize information…in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions…threatening the international order on which we all depend.” Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and political analyst Michael Carpenter recently argued that the effort to “weaken and subvert Western democracies from the inside by weaponizing information, cyberspace, energy, and corruption” is part of a larger Russian program of “brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy.”