38 The New York Review
Disinformed to Death
Jonathan Freedland
Active Measures :
The Secret History of
Disinformation and Political
Warfare
by Thomas Rid.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
513 pp., $30.00
The Hacker and the State:
Cyber Attacks and the New
Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan.
Harvard University Press,
412 pp., $27.95
Lie Machines :
How to Save Democracy from
Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots,
Junk News Operations,
and Political Operatives
by Philip N. Howard.
Yale University Press, 221 pp., $26.00
For the better part of four years, those
sounding the alarm about the dangers
of fake news and the perils of a post-
truth world struggled to make the case
that this was a matter of life and death.
Try as they might to argue that a secure
foundation of facts was the very basis
of a liberal, democratic society—that
such a society could not function with-
out a common, agreed- upon basis of
evidence—the concern seemed some-
how abstract, intellectual, even elitist.
Their angst was easily dismissed by
their populist foes as the self- interested
whine of a snobbish establishment.
And then came the coronavirus.
When a pandemic is raging, it be-
comes harder to deny that rigorous,
truthful information is a mortal ne-
cessity. No one need explain the risks
of false information when one can
point to, say, the likely consequences
of Americans’ coming to believe they
can deflect the virus by injecting them-
selves with bleach. (The fact that that
advice came from the podium of the
president of the United States is one
we shall return to.) In Britain, Con-
servative ministers who once cheer-
fully brushed aside Brexit naysayers
by declaring that the country had “had
enough of experts” soon sought to re-
assure voters that they were “follow-
ing the science.” In the first phase of
the crisis, they rarely dared appear in
public unless flanked by those they now
gratefully referred to as experts.
So perhaps the moment is ripe for a
trio of new books on disinformation.
All three were written before the virus
struck, before we saw people refuse to
take life- saving action because they’d
absorbed a baseless conspiracy theory
linking Covid to, say, the towers that
emit signals for 5G mobile phone cov-
erage. But the pandemic might mean
these books will now find a more re-
ceptive audience, one that has seen
all too starkly that information is a re-
source essential for public health and
well- being—and that our information
supply is being deliberately, constantly,
and severely contaminated.
The most vivid example remains the
intervention by Russian intelligence in
the US presidential election of 2016,
in which 126 million Americans saw
Facebook material generated and paid
for by the Kremlin. But the phenome-
non goes far wider. According to Philip
N. Howard, professor of Internet stud-
ies at Oxford, no fewer than seventy
governments have at their disposal
dedicated social media misinformation
teams, committed to the task of spread-
ing lies or concealing truth. Sometimes
these involve human beings, churning
out tweets and posts aimed at a mainly
domestic audience: China employs
some two million people to write 448
million messages a year, while Vietnam
has trained 10,000 students to
pump out a pro- government
line. Sometimes, it is auto-
mated accounts—bots—that
are corralled into service.
The previous Mexican presi-
dent had 75,000 such accounts
providing online applause for
him and his policies (a tactic
described by Thomas Rid in
Active Measures as “the on-
line equivalent of the laugh
track in a studio- taped TV
show”). In Russia itself, al-
most half of all conversation
on Twitter is conducted by
bots. Young activists for Brit-
ain’s Labour Party devised a
bot that could talk leftist pol-
itics with strangers on Tinder.
Still, Howard writes in Lie
Machines that the place where
disinformation has spread
widest and deepest is the US.
He and his team at Oxford
studied dozens of countries
and concluded that the US
had the “highest level of junk
news circulation,” to the point
that “during the presidential
election of 2016 in the United
States, there was a one- to- one
ratio of junk news to profes-
sional news shared by voters
over Twitter.”
It’s tempting to say that
such material only has an
impact at the margins, that
only a relatively small number of peo-
ple would ever be swayed by it. But the
2016 election was decided at the mar-
gins, the votes of fewer than 80,000
people in three swing states tipping
the presidency to Donald Trump. In a
50–50 nation such as the US, a nudge to
51–49 is all it takes.
So these “lie machines”—consisting,
Howard writes, of the governments or
political campaigns that produce the
lies alongside the social media plat-
forms, algorithms, and bots that dis-
tribute them—matter gravely. They
attack not just their specific target,
such as Hillary Clinton in 2016, but
what Rid calls the “liberal epistemic
order, or a political system that places
its trust in essential custodians of fac-
tual authority,” a category that includes
science, the academy, journalism, pub-
lic administration, and the justice sys-
tem. For Rid, this is the order that in
turn enables an open and liberal politi-
cal order; “one cannot exist without the
other.” Now that people can see the dif-
ference between a scientist warning of
a coming pandemic and a demagogue
implying that such warnings were a
“hoax”—and now that they know the
consequences of heeding one over the
other—such arguments have gained aconcreteness and urgency they might
have lacked before.How, then, should we define disinfor-
mation and how does it work? In Ac-
tive Measures, the fullest, most elegant
of these three books, Rid, a professor
at Johns Hopkins University who grew
up in what used to be West Germany,
opens with an essay that clears up a
few confusions. Foremost among themis the misconception that disinforma-
tion is necessarily false information.
On the contrary, the hack- and- leak
tactic, deployed to such potent effect
against Clinton and the Democratic
National Committee in 2016, worked
only because it revealed information
that was genuine. The leaked John Po-
desta e- mails really were e- mails sent
to and from the chairman of Clinton’s
presidential campaign. But as Rid notes,
“even if no forgery was produced and no
content altered, larger truths were often
flanked by little lies, whether about the
provenance of the data or the identity of
the publisher.” So while Podesta’s risotto
recipe was real, the hint by WikiLeaks
that the e-mails had come from a DNC
insider, possibly the young staffer Seth
Rich, who was killed in a shooting inci-
dent in Washington, D.C., in July 2016,
was not. (In his 2019 report, Robert
Mueller went out of his way to dismiss
the Rich theory as false, setting out how
WikiLeaks had, in fact, been in touch
with the Russian hackers who were the
true source of the e- mail cache.)
All three books present accounts of
that 2016 operation, which remains the
definitive example, supremely instruc-
tive in the mechanics of disinformation.
Ben Buchanan, who teaches at George-town’s School of Foreign Service, pro-
vides a helpful reminder in The Hacker
and the State of the sheer diligence and
seriousness of purpose exhibited by the
Russians in their mission. The work
began in 2014, possibly even earlier,
as staff at the now infamous Internet
Research Agency in St. Petersburg
studied closely the ways Americans use
social media, even traveling to the US
several times that year to observe.
By 2016, IRA agents were posing as
Americans online, making
contact with political activists
and organizers, assessing the
lay of the land, concluding
that they needed to focus their
attention on “purple states,”
a phrase they used internally.
Next, they created hundreds
of bogus social media ac-
counts, crafting a persona
for each one, complete with
interests and hobbyhorses,
always keeping a careful eye
on the time zone inhabited
by their fictitious alter egos.
Just as call- center employees
in Bangalore, working for UK
companies, receive a regu-
lar digest of the plot twists of
British soaps, enabling them
to make apparently natural
conversation with their cus-
tomers, so the IRA’s trolls
were supplied with a list of
US public holidays, the better
to pass as American citizens.
The IRA rented servers inside
the US and arranged relays so
that their traffic appeared to
originate on US soil.
But they did not work alone.
They created groups on Face-
book organized around the
most divisive issues in Ameri-
can life: race, religion, identity.
Buchanan provides examples:
Secured Borders, Blacktivist,
United Muslims of America,
Army of Jesus, Heart of Texas—each
one founded and administered by an
agent of Vladimir Putin. Pretty soon,
these groups were boasting hundreds
of thousands of members. Some “were
Russian operatives with fake accounts,
but many were Americans who did not
know they had fallen for a foreign influ-
ence campaign,” Buchanan writes.
The groups’ focus was unambiguous:
to hurt Hillary Clinton. IRA managers
told their staff to “use any opportunity
to criticize Hillary and the rest (ex-
cept Sanders and Trump—we support
them).” They had productivity targets,
so that if the number of anti- Clinton
posts dropped off, the trolls were
scolded, with a reminder that criticism
of Clinton was nothing less than “im-
perative.” The output was either anti-
Clinton or pro- Trump—or, in a third
category usually aimed at minorities,
some posts advised black Americans
in particular that the choices were so
awful that they would be better off not
voting at all.
Some of the messages made the leap
from Facebook to the campaign itself,
with Trump surrogates and operatives
picking them up and repeating them,
unwittingly parroting themes origi-
nated in the Kremlin. To give thingsMembers of a CIA-sponsored West German group using a weather
balloon to deliver leaflets to East Germany, early 1950sBStU/Enrico^Heitzer