Truth Decay Is Putting U.S. National Security at Risk

RAND has worked for years now to better understand and combat Truth Decay. It has shown how America’s media echo chambers feed into Truth Decay; how online trolls from Russia and China exploit it; how it fires up controversies over everything from racial justice to mask mandates. But researchers had not fully assessed the many ways that Truth Decay could harm national security.

McCulloch and coauthor Heather Williams, a former intelligence officer, decided that needed to change. They convened focus groups and interviews with nearly three dozen experts at RAND, specialists in military strategy, terrorism, foreign policy, history, and political science. They asked the experts to identify vulnerabilities—some obvious, some not—where Truth Decay could undercut national security. They defined “national security” broadly, as the safeguarding of people, places, and the American way of life.

The experts generally agreed that Truth Decay is getting worse. Several said they think political leaders now lie more shamelessly and more constantly about issues of national security. Some had worked in the Intelligence Community and described trying to brief “very ideological” policymakers who would sometimes reject assessments that didn’t fit their views.

Those expert insights allowed McCulloch and Williams to begin piecing together a much bigger picture of Truth Decay and national security. They developed a framework to help the public, policymakers, and future researchers better understand the risks and guard against them.

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Framework for Identifying Vulnerabilities That Impact Truth Decay

The individual level focuses on human actors, including leaders, policy decisionmakers, and members of the public.

The institutional level focuses on institutions or structures of governance, such as Congress, the military services, and the Intelligence Community.

The societal level focuses on impacts on society—whether U.S. society or the societies of U.S. allies or adversaries—and usually indicates broader trends, such as domestic stability or economic stability.

The normative level focuses on impacts at the conceptual or norm-based level, such as belief in the traditions, customs, or best practices of the country, including democracy and civic pride.

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It starts with individuals—those average people on the street as well as political leaders, now more rigid in their beliefs and more isolated in their news bubbles. That growing polarization is driving important policy debates to extremes. Pew polls in 2021 found that people who rely mostly on right- or left-leaning news sources have much sharper views of China than other people, even in their own political party.

From there, Truth Decay attacks American institutions. Spreading through Congress, it gums up the gears of effective government and raises real doubts that politicians could pull together in a crisis. But it also strikes at the military, threatening to undermine unit cohesion, and undercuts confidence in the Intelligence Community. In an age of dizzying technological advance and rapidly multiplying threats, it makes it that much harder to recruit the brightest minds to government service.

It also hurts America on the world stage. As Russia massed troops and tanks on its border with Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. released evidence that the Kremlin was planning to fake a Ukrainian attack as a pretext for war. The impact that intelligence had on world opinion depended on American credibility—and American credibility is directly in the path of Truth Decay.

China, Russia, and other adversaries already know this. They have weaponized disinformation—seeding the internet with rumors and conspiracy theories in the panicked early days of COVID-19, for example. That helped slow the response and almost certainly cost lives. But it also makes it harder to hold up American democracy as a model for the world.

“You could walk up to most Americans and ask them, ‘What are our national interests?’ and there would actually be a lot of agreement,” said Williams, the associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Program at RAND. “Now, how do we achieve those national interests? There are lots of legitimate views about that—but Truth Decay makes it harder for people to have a reasoned debate. Partisanship and political self-interest get pushed to such an extreme that there is no middle ground where compromises, let alone consensus, can be achieved.”

But she added: “This doesn’t have to be a bad-news story. Truth Decay doesn’t have to be the villain behind every storyline.”

RAND’s framework points to opportunities to fight back. The U.S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies are already investing in efforts to swat down misinformation and disinformation before they take hold. Efforts to strengthen media literacy and civics education in school could also help strengthen the public against Truth Decay, especially on questions of national security.

Political moderates should also raise their voices more and present facts and analysis as nonpartisan. The military, which still has widespread public trust, can play this role as well. Tech and social media companies bear “significant responsibility” for the spread of Truth Decay, the researchers noted, and should do more to moderate what they allow on their platforms.

The need is urgent. The United States relies on the strength and credibility of its institutions, both at home and around the world. That makes it vulnerable to the corrosive effects of Truth Decay in a way that many of its adversaries are not. “There is no Truth Decay in North Korea,” one of the RAND experts pointed out. “There is only [what the state calls] the Truth.”

Doug Irving is a communications analyst at RAND. This article is published courtesy of RAND.