52
BloombergBusinessweek May 18, 2020toproposedoublingitsbudget,to
$138million,forthecomingyear.A
lackoffunds,Gabriellesays,“could
havecrippledourabilitytoexecute
ourmission.”
It remains to be seen whether
Democratswillgoalongwiththebudget
request,andtherehavebeenquestions
aboutthequalityoftheGEC’swork.
FacebookInc.andTwitterInc.havesaid
theofficedidn’tprovideenoughinfor-
mationtoassessitsclaimsofRussian
manipulationinFebruary,andTwitter
saysthat many oftheaccountsthe
GECflaggedinMayactuallybelonged
toWesterngovernmentsorjournalists
andwereoftenexpressingopposition
toChinesemessaging.
Hangingoverallthisis theU.S.gov-
ernment’sbiggestobstacletoeliminat-
ingmisinformation:Gabrielle’sboss’s
boss’sboss’stendencytoamplifythe
sortsofconspiracytheoriestheGEC
wascreatedtocontain.Overthepast
threemonths,PresidentTrumphas
lurchedfromdownplayingthesignifi-
canceofthevirus—comparing it to the
flu and claiming that it would, “like a
miracle,” disappear on its own within
months—to implicitly calling for people
to disobey shelter-in-place orders, even
ones that followed his administration’s
own guidelines. The White House and
its allies have also increasingly begun
to suggest, without offering much evi-
dence, that the coronavirus emerged
from a Chinese lab. Most notoriously,
Trump stood in the White House brief-
ing room and proposed a version of
the Miracle Mineral Solution treat-
ment, involving the injection of dis-
infectant. Officials in several states
issued statements urging people not to
ingest cleaning products, as did Reckitt
Benckiser Group Plc, the company that
makes Lysol. (Trump later claimed he
was being sarcastic.)
The president’s antics have been, as
he’s often boasted, must-see TV. They’ve
also complicated the GEC’s already oner-
ous job. As Gabrielle noted in congres-
sional testimony on March 5, Russia’s
strategy has been to “swamp the media
environment with a tsunami of lies” that
could confuse and divide Americans.That doesn’t necessarily mean Russia
and China are developing conspiracy
theories from scratch so much as ampli-
fying what’s already online. In the age of
coronavirus, the noise often comes from
inside the house.The GEC’s work dates to 2011, when
the U.S. became concerned that ter-
rorist groups such as Islamic State and
al-Qaeda were using social media to
recruit large numbers of disaffected
young men. The State Department
started a precursor group, the Center
for Strategic Counterterrorism
Communications, to argue online with
propagandists and dissuade those who
might have been drawn in by them.
Among other things, it hired Arabic
speakers and paid them to Photoshop
posts from al-Qaeda affiliates in
Yemen, altering images of American
flags draped over coffins so they were
Yemeni ones instead. The idea was to
remind potential recruits that the group
was actually killing locals.
The effort was a disappointment. The
new group was short on resources, had
only a cloudy vision of its mission, and
couldn’t always count on support from
other parts of the government, particu-
larly the U.S. Department of Defense. It
also turned out that State Department
contractors make poor meme lords.
Sometimes it took more than a week to
get signoff for a single tweet. Once posts
finally got online, it wasn’t always clear
they did much good.
In his book Information Wars,
Richard Stengel, a former managing
editor of Time magazine who oversaw
the team while serving as an undersec-
retary of state from 2014 to 2016, writes
that jihadis were often just amused by
their efforts. “Your boss is going to fire
youif yourtweetsdon’timprove,”one
persontweetedata contractorwho’d
attemptedtoclapbackataterrorist-run
account. Stengel now questions whether
countermessaging online is effective. “I
welcome people trying to get good at
it, but I concluded that what we were
doing wasn’t working,” he says.
Later he worked with Megan Smith,
a former Google executive whom PREVIOUSSPREAD:PHOTOILLUSTRATIONBY731.PHOTOS:GETTYIMAGES(5);COURTESYOFCLOROX(1)Obama had appointed U.S. chief tech-
nology officer, to develop a plan to
map the spread of foreign propaganda
online rather than going tweet for
tweet with the propagandists. In the
final days of Obama’s presidency, a
month after Trump won the 2016 elec-
tion, Congress set aside $80 million to
create the GEC, earmarking most of the
money for countering Russian propa-
ganda. In his book, Stengel writes that
the first director of the agency likened
it early on to the Office of Strategic
Services, a predecessor to the CIA. For
its part, Sputnik, the Russian govern-
ment’s English-language news agency,
compared it to the Ministry of Truth in
George Orwell’s 1984.
Both assessments proved over-
blown. The Trump administration
wasn’t particularly interested in coun-
tering Russian disinformation, dis-
counting as a “hoax” the assessment,
backed by U.S. intelligence, that Russia
had used Facebook and other social
media sites to influence the 2016 elec-
tion. The administration didn’t bother
appointing a permanent director of
theGEC,anda StateDepartmenthir-
ingfreezemadeit hardfortheofficeto
staffup.Finally, in February 2019, the
department hired Gabrielle, who’d left
the military for broadcast journalism.
After a stint as a reporter at NBC’s San
Diego affiliate, she joined Fox News
as an on-air correspondent. She says
her background at NBC and Fox pre-
pared her well for the job. If you want
tounderstandthedynamicsofinflu-
encecampaigns,a familiaritywiththe
ratings-driven TV news industry is a
good place to start.The coronavirus has given many
institutions struggling with disinfor-
mation an opportunity for a fresh
start. Facebook, which was criticized
endlessly in the aftermath of the 2016
election, has been uncharacteristically
aggressive in its response to Covid. In
mid-April it said it would begin insert-
ing material from the World Health
Organization into the feeds of users
who liked or commented on misinfor-
mation. The social network, along with