TRUTH DECAYTo Fight Disinformation, Treat It as an Insurgency
Today, state purveyors of disinformation operate in an environment more susceptible to their tactics than at any moment since the end of World War II. Such infiltrations by our adversaries pose significant risks to both strategic competition and the digital health of future generations.
We need to treat disinformation as we deal with insurgencies, preventing the spreaders of lies from entrenching themselves in the host population through capture of infrastructure—in this case, the social media outlets.
Combining targeted action with efforts to build resilience in the population, counterinsurgencies offer valuable lessons for the construction of a longer-term, society-wide plan to combat online disinformation. If we don’t win this campaign, we could suffer severe setbacks in strategic competition and risk the radicalization of future generations.
Efforts to combat disinformation must focus on the issue’s center of gravity: social media companies and their ability to hide behind free speech protections to evade responsibility for content on their platforms.
In their book on the future of terrorism, Christopher Wall and the late Walter Laqueur write that ‘terrorism is not an exogenous feature of the modern nation-state but rather a symptom of bad governance.’ This points to the importance of active government roles in preventing emergence of safe havens where digital insurgencies exploit enforcement vacuums.
Our response should focus on shoring up digital governance systems. In many Western countries, such action is underway. The 2022 EU Digital Services Act, for instance, threatens significant fines against social media companies that fail to adhere to European data laws. Australia’s eSafety commissioner, meanwhile, has publicly feuded with X over content moderation decisions.
Ironically, the United States, where many major social media platforms originated, lags behind. The US regulatory conversation increasingly swirls around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1990s law that protects social media companies from liability over content on their sites. Bipartisan teams of politicians now routinely collaborate in seeking to end the protections. In my own work, I have called for precisely such a move, which would at least force social media companies to rethink their absolute protection of free speech.
In tandem with efforts to build more sustainable governance structures, counterinsurgencies also kinetically target leaders of insurgent movements and ideologies. In the disinformation counterinsurgency, content moderation replaces military action. This involves takedowns of particularly egregious violators, for example through removal of specific content or even outright access bans for repeat offenders. Such measures are essential in keeping notorious peddlers on the defensive and limit their reach. Many companies, including the behemoths Meta and X, are instead moving in the opposite direction and loosening moderation standards, opening the door for foreign disinformation campaigns.
