Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and a former director of communications to Stephen Harper.
One evening in 1987, Dan Rather of CBS News reported that an increasing number of people around the world believed the AIDS virus had been engineered by American scientists at a military facility in Fort Detrick, Md.
The story prompted fury from the White House, and for good reason: It was part of a Russian “active measures” campaign to discredit the United States. The story was disinformation.
Operation Denver, as it became known, is the most famous example of how the KGB seeded mis- and disinformation during the Cold War using its proxies and allies. It’s concerning that we are not fully absorbing this history lesson in our new digital age.
This was my takeaway following a recent meeting among strategic communications professionals convened by NATO in Riga. The good news is, we have some terribly bright people fighting on the front lines in the war against mis- and disinformation; the bad news is, we’re fighting the Russians on their terms. And we’re losing.
Adding insult to injury, the West is responsible for the algorithmic social media technology that fuels the platforms that now serve as perfect petri dishes for Russia’s nihilistic approach to mis- and disinformation. What took the KGB four years to whisper into Americans’ ears during Operation Denver now takes mere hours for its modern-day counterpart, the FSB, to disseminate via social media. The West has gifted the Russians the tools and platforms they now use to incite us into tearing our own societies apart.
NATO and its experts understand this, of course. But there appears to be little appetite to do what’s required to turn the tide – namely, reform Western tech platforms. We cannot, and will never, “out-Russia” the Russians on social media, not with the way these platforms are currently architected and run, and not if we abide by Western principles and values. At present, social-media platforms are emotion-led, content-agnostic, and untethered to truth. Given these are Western companies, it’s within our abilities to adjust these imperatives and tilt the digital battlefield back in our favour.
To begin, we should make anonymity on social media a privilege, not a right. Protecting a limited number of legitimate whistleblowers is an easier problem to solve than cleaning up the authoritarian-authored messes enabled by mass anonymity. Next comes money: These platforms should be forced to charge for their services. No more “surveillance capitalism” and its many externalities, including mis- and disinformation. Registration and payment features, even if the amounts are nominal, would also cut down on the number of anonymous bot farms currently operating.
But enough with the easy stuff. The single most critical step the West could take to clean up its information economy, and thereby deny the Russians their advantage, would be to make social-media platforms assume the responsibilities of traditional publishers. We need to return to the days when Operation Denver was the editorial exception, not the network-effected rule. Forcing this sea change would also cut down the volume of content we’re consuming, giving the original reporting done by newsrooms a fighting chance in what has become an arms race for our attention.
The platforms will scream bloody murder, as will speech advocates. But as academics like Renée DiResta note, “free speech” doesn’t equal “free reach.” By all means, say what you want on social media. Follow who you want. But once a social-media platform’s algorithm has taken on the decision to promote certain accounts or content on the basis of what’s getting engagement – whether that’s Russian disinformation or an influencer touting stock tips – the platform should then assume the responsibilities of a publisher. And if Silicon Valley thinks that’s too tricky a task to manage, they should get out of the recommendations game and use their new pot of subscription revenue to create a more useful product.
Of course, the platforms won’t go for these proposals. As Elon Musk is finding out, we don’t value these services enough to actually pay for them. One would also expect serious Russian-led activity on social media to ensure these reforms never happen. All the more reason to do it, then. We don’t owe these tech companies a living, not at this cost. Serving up our attention to malign actors (and advertisers) is the wholly undisguised Trojan Horse of our times. There’s a reason authoritarians like Vladimir Putin don’t let these channels run wild on their watch. There’s a reason Xi Jinping doesn’t allow TikTok to occupy the attention spans of Chinese children.
The bad guys can see that the West is both angering and amusing itself to death on these platforms. And they can see it’s to their advantage, even if we can’t.