THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 29
of a memo—“Inauguration of Orga-
nized Political Warfare”—written in 1948
by George Kennan, the diplomat and
intellectual architect of U.S. policy to-
ward the Soviet Union in the early Cold
War. Throughout the fifties, the C.I.A.
funded the publication of gossip, tab-
loid, and music magazines for East Ger-
man audiences which blended ideolog-
ical content and actual fabrications with
more anodyne fare. A 1965 American
best-seller, “The Penkovsky Papers,” os-
tensibly the memoirs of a Soviet intel-
ligence officer turned American spy, was
a C.I.A. forgery. That raised the ques-
tion of who, exactly, had been misled:
the Soviet state or the American pub-
lic? As the Polish-British journalist Vic-
tor Zorza noted at the time, democra-
cies “suffer from the grave disadvantage
that in attempting to damage the ad-
versary they must also deceive their own
public.” Disinformation cannot be tar-
geted with precision—to release a false-
hood into the world is to lose control
over its trajectory and impact.
In the latter years of the Cold War,
the United States had largely retreated
from the boldest forms of political war-
fare, at least as directed against the So-
viet Union, but Moscow was still churn-
ing out lies and half-truths. Perhaps the
best-known K.G.B. active measure of
that period—and the most resonant
today with what the World Health Or-
ganization calls the “infodemic” sur-
rounding Covid-19—was a disinfor-
mation campaign known as Operation
Denver. The K.G.B., along with the
East German Stasi, propagated false
scientific research and planted press re-
ports to suggest that H.I.V. did not leap
from primates to humans in Africa but,
rather, had been cooked up at a U.S.
Army laboratory in Fort Detrick, Mary-
land. In 1987, an Associated Press story
out of Moscow caught the eye of a tele-
vision producer in New York, and the
Fort Detrick theory became the sub-
ject of a credulous report by Dan Rather
on the “CBS Evening News.”
It’s impossible to quantify the effect
of Operation Denver, but numerous stud-
ies over the years have shown that those
who disbelieve the science on the ori-
gins of H.I.V. are less likely to engage
in safe sex or to regularly take recom-
mended medication if infected. And the
theory has proved to have an extraordi-
narily long and persistent life. In the
2005 song “Heard ’Em Say,” Kanye West
raps, “I know that the government ad-
minister AIDS.” Thabo Mbeki, the Pres-
ident of South Africa from 1999 to 2008,
repeatedly cast doubt on the scientific
underpinnings of the H.I.V. and AIDS
epidemic, citing the Fort Detrick con-
spiracy, among other discredited theses.
As a result, South Africa delayed wide-
scale implementation of antiretroviral
therapies, at the cost of as many as three
hundred and thirty thousand lives.
But Rid points out that in the U.S.
the most vociferous propagators of the
notion that H.I.V. had American ori-
gins were gay-rights activists and the
African-American press—communi-
ties that did not need the K.G.B. to
convince them that their own govern-
ment could treat their health and lives
with disregard. In the early eighties, the
Reagan Administration was callously
unconcerned by the toll that the virus
was taking on gay men. And the chill-
ing precedent of the decades-long Tus-
kegee syphilis experiment, to take one
example, demonstrated the state’s will-
ingness to treat African-Americans as
unwitting guinea pigs in secret medi-
cal experiments.
Indeed, when we’re judging the effect
of modern-day disinformation, “the dis-
tinction of domestic-versus-foreign is
outdated,” said Marietje Schaake, a for-
mer member of the European Parlia-
ment from the Netherlands and the in-
ternational policy director at Stanford
University’s Cyber Policy Center. Whena particular meme has begun to travel
from one online platform to the next,
identifying its origins is often impos-
sible; more important is how a targeted
population acts in response.
Weiner documents how the “IRA’s
shock troops,” as he calls them, “con-
nected with at least 126 million Amer-
icans on Facebook, 20 million people on
Instagram, and 1.4 million on Twitter.”But those scary-sounding numbers don’t
tell us much. “What’s more important
is not how many people were exposed
to a message, or even were convinced by
a message and changed their behavior
as a result, but, rather, the impact from
that change in behavior,” Schaake told
me. The fact that, throughout 2016, var-
ious Black Lives Matter activists en-
countered I.R.A. content—including a
social-media campaign called Blacktiv-
ist—altered little about the tenor, aims,
or wider influence of the movement.
(The same would seem to be the case
with more recent I.R.A. fronts like Peace
Data, an obscure site that has trafficked
in topics and arguments already preva-
lent in American left-wing circles.) By
way of contrast, Schaake brought up an-
ti-vaccination propaganda: “Now, if even
two per cent of parents stop vaccinating
their children, it can have a very large
effect on over-all community health.”
When it comes to COVID-19, the ap-
parent result of the combined disinfor-
mation campaign of Trump and Fox
News has been devastating. A working
paper released by the National Bureau
of Economic Research in May analyzed
anonymous location data from millions
of cell phones to show that residents of
Zip Codes with higher Fox News view-
ership were less likely to follow stay-
at-home orders. Another study, by econ-
omists at the University of Chicago and
elsewhere, suggested a disparity in health
outcomes between areas where Fox
News viewers primarily tuned in to
Tucker Carlson, who, among Fox hosts,
spoke early and with relative urgency
about the danger of COVID-19, and places
where viewers preferred Sean Hannity,
who spent weeks downplaying its se-
verity. The economists found that, in
March, viewership of Hannity over
Carlson, in the locales they studied, was
associated with a thirty-two-per-cent
increase in infections, and a twenty-
three-per-cent increase in COVID-19-
related deaths.S
ince the Cold War, propaganda has
evolved in a direction opposite to
that of most other weapons of war: it
has become more diffuse and indis-
criminate, not less. As Peter Pomerant-
sev writes in “This Is Not Propaganda,”
a lively and perceptive tour of what dig-
ital tools are doing to our minds and