Information is the world’s lifeblood. It pulsates in torrents of facts and images. We are swamped with it.
But information can be poison, a dangerous weapon. Disinformation, or organized lying, can be used to wage political warfare. As the historian Thomas Rid wrote in “Active Measures,” his book on the subject, disinformation can weaken a political system that places its trust in truth. “Disinformation operations, in essence, erode the very foundations of open societies,” he wrote.
A disinformation operation now being waged by Russia shows in stark detail how this malevolence works. Taking a program by the United States that was intended to make people healthier and safer in the former Soviet Union, a program it had welcomed and participated in for 22 years, Russia twisted facts into a cloud of falsehoods. The campaign, rooted in decades-old traditions of disinformation by the Kremlin, has intensified during Russia’s ruinous war on Ukraine in the last year.
In a previous editorial in this series, we examined how young people who posted freely on social media have been wrongly arrested and sentenced to years in prison by authoritarian regimes. This editorial looks at disinformation as a tool of dictatorship. Disinformation is not just “fake news” or propaganda, but an insidious contamination of the world’s conversations.
And it is exploding.
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