To Fight Disinformation, Treat It as an Insurgency
More heavy-handed efforts to alter the digital battlefield by better policing social media companies and removing individual purveyors of disinformation would, however, fall short without measures to build resilience within the target population—perhaps the defining tenet of counterinsurgency. Such measures, often mockingly described as winning hearts and minds, are essential.
Successful insurgencies—the Viet Cong in Vietnam, for instance, or the more recent Hayat Tahrir al-Sham blitzkrieg in Syria—have survived and eventually triumphed by ingratiating into local communities. They serve as de facto governments in their regions and earn the local population’s trust. Eventually, that population protects the insurgents from prying eyes.
In her commendable Strategist article, my colleague at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Meg Tapia, blamed ‘the malicious actors and networks creating harmful content’ as the root cause of disinformation, advocating for an organized-crime approach. Tapia’s contention, however, seems to overlook the important role of digital consumers.
Countering disinformation online requires addressing both supply and demand. Not only must counterinsurgents address the prevalence of lies online; they must also consider why untrue or plainly misleading content remains so attractive.
Describing future wars, US army Lieutenant General William B Caldwell reflected that ‘the allegiance, trust and confidence of populations will be the final arbiters of success,’ indicating that governance and content moderation standards might be unsuccessful without deeper efforts to build resilience to disinformation within targeted communities.
Democracies must highlight the virtues of their systems and rally against autocratic and authoritarian movements around the world and give digital denizens the tools to better protect themselves from disinformation. The most sustainable inroads will be made by online users themselves, employing counterinsurgency’s local-forces approach to defend against harmful content. For example, certain states on the frontlines of the disinformation battlefield, such as Lithuania, have created both state-sponsored and civilian-run fact-checking networks to counter disinformation in real time.
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. In the US, for example, polling has suggested Republicans trust Russian President Vladimir Putin over former US president Joe Biden, and that nearly half of Republicans support a drawdown in NATO support. These results would have been unthinkable at any point in the Cold War. Iran, meanwhile, has freely dispatched pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah narratives onto US college campuses.
Such infiltrations by our adversaries pose significant risks to both strategic competition and the digital health of future generations. Only a whole-of-society counterinsurgency approach will mount an adequate response.
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
