32 United States The Economist February 26th 2022
RealityagainstPutin
T
he internet, microchips and semiconductors are all pro
ducts of American defence spending during the cold war. An
other, less wellknown, is a school of social psychology that Presi
dent Joe Biden has drawn on heavily in recent weeks. It has been
evident in his administration’s remarkable openness with intelli
gence in both its diplomacy and public messaging on Ukraine.
This effort started shortly after the administration concluded
last October that Vladimir Putin’s military buildup was an inva
sion plan. It began reclassifying the supporting intelligence in or
der to make it widely available within nato. From early December,
when it published an intelligence assessment that Russia meant
to invade Ukraine with 175,000 troops in early 2022, it applied the
same tactic to its communications. For example, it released details
of a supposed Russian plot to topple Ukraine’s government and
another to create a pretext for invading eastern Ukraine by means
of a “very graphic propaganda video” of fake attacks by Ukrainian
troops “which would include corpses and actors who would be de
picting mourners”. Naturally, Russia denied it. The administra
tion also released alleged intercepts of Russian officers complain
ing that the Americans were broadcasting their schemes.
A senior administration official explains this “unprecedented”
transparency as a lesson learned from previous fights with Rus
sian disinformation (especially the downing of a Malaysia Air
lines plane over eastern Ukraine in 2014). It appears to have suc
ceeded. By releasing Mr Putin’s designs, corroborated by publicly
available satellite imagery, the administration prevented him
from dividingnato and the American public and establishing a
pretext for his aggression. It may even have delayed his invasion,
which began in an earlymorning assault on February 24th.
Security experts are impressed. Stephen Hadley, a former na
tional security adviser to George W. Bush, praises the administra
tion’s tactics and believes only the president could have overrid
den the intelligence agencies’ customary attachment to secrecy.
After years of gloomy news on disinformation, this looks like a no
table blow for reality—especially given the lead role Russia has
played in America’s own epistemological crisis. Its disinforma
tion helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. And if the extent of that
assistance is hard to gauge, the former president does not hide theinspiration he takes from Mr Putin’s truthbending. This week Mr
Trump described the Russian president’s bogus claim to be ad
vancing into eastern Ukraine to keep the peace—immediately pro
ven false by his subsequent invasion—as “genius”.
The administration’s tactics originated in a smaller crisis, 70
years ago, over the collaboration of a few American prisonersof
war in Korea with their Chinese captors. This prompted the agen
cies to fund research into how such “brainwashing”—a term
coined to describe the Korea phenomenon—could be resisted. The
psychologist William McGuire duly considered new information
to be a form of virus that the mind could be defended against
through a mild version of the pathogen, just as bodies are immu
nised against actual viruses.
This “inoculation theory” rested on two insights that have
loomed ever larger in the fakenews age. False narratives, as Mr
Trump’s stolenelection lie demonstrates, can be extremely conta
gious. And heading them off, through a preemptive dose of the
facts, is much easier than deprogramming a mind where the virus
has taken hold. Experts such as Andy Norman of Carnegie Mellon
University call this approach “prebunking”—and the administra
tion’s approach to Ukraine appears to illustrate it.
This success also highlights how much more difficult it is to
counter disinformation at home. The power of the administra
tion’s approach lies in its combination of promptness and clarity
about the alleged distinction between truth and falsehood. Both
qualities are much harder to achieve domestically. The federal
government cannot spy on American socialmedia trolls as it can
on Russian military intelligence. Nor can Mr Biden’s administra
tion preempt the biggest troll, Mr Trump, because half the coun
try would condemn that as a political act.
In a democracy that enshrines people’s right to spout non
sense, politicians can also be reluctant to draw stark lines between
truth and falsehood—even, as with antivax conspiracy theories,
when the nonsense causes real harm. And when preemptive ac
tion is essential, there is no time for hesitation. By the time the
2020 election took place, around 70% of Republicans already be
lieved it had been stolen and, as it turned out, were not persuad
able by evidence to the contrary. Similarly, by the time Mr Biden
sought to introduce a federal covid19 vaccine mandate, around a
fifth of Americans were irredeemably antivax. Battling such en
trenched belief is a lost cause. A chronic condition
To preserve preemptiveness and moral certainty, the protruth
lobby must be more creative. The rapidly evolving field of disin
formation research (which Mr Trump unwittingly helped inspire)
suggests some possible ways. Protruth campaigners in America
should now anticipate, for example, a welter of disinformation
ahead of every election. The conspiracist American right is even
more predictable in this regard than Mr Putin.
To counter it, suggests Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet
Observatory, which studies online information flows, govern
ments must seek the help of trusted interlocutors. Doctors and re
ligious leaders stood a far better chance of heading off antivax
conspiracies than politicians, for example. But the administration
did not make a sufficient effort to organise them for the purpose.
Learning from its recent success, it must do better against the
next wave of disinformation. And there will be onesoon.Disinfor
mation is an evolving virus. Immunisation is possible.But it is not
a single treatment so much as a permanent struggle.nLexington
The administration is countering Russian disinformation on Ukraine