In the runup to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, much attention has been placed on rampant influence campaigns emerging from U.S. adversaries like China, Iran, and Russia.  Over the last decade, fear of influence campaigns has risen with the popularity of social media usage and the public routinely eschewing traditional media and turning to alternative sources.  Unsurprisingly, such sources have proven a fertile ground for a deluge of all types of stories, misinformation, disinformation, and other fictions.  Why this should come as a surprise is uncertain as the Internet has always been this way teeming with self-proclaimed authorities spouting opinion as expertise and pushing here say as fact.  To a discerning consumer, much of this can be entertaining and even frightening depending on what is being promoted but most of it is essentially noise in search of a receptive audience.  Still, even with so much being written about influence operations, a legitimate question needs to be answered: are influence campaigns as grave a threat as some public and private entities would like us to believe?

A good definition for influence campaigns (aka influence operations) are “purposeful projects to skew how people see the world.”  The same source correctly distinguishes misinformation from influence campaigns and acknowledges that the latter can use the former but the two are not the same, as influence operations can also promote a true albeit lesser narrative to overwhelm online discourse.  In this context, influence campaigns are seen as malicious, even if they are pushing a legitimate narrative because they are seeking to elicit a specific reaction from consumers.  And while such intent is self-serving the interests of those orchestrating the campaigns, the manner in which they are executed is no different than what advertising and marketing campaigns do when they look to influence their customers in order to push a brand, entice a purchase, or solidify loyalty.

This important nuance may have been a reason that Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a paper on what makes an influence campaign malign, providing three case studies as examples.  The paper established a three-part criterion based on the transparency of the origins of the campaigns, the quality of the information shared, and what calls to action (if any) are present.  Carnegie maintains that in the context of democracies, all criteria must be met.  This framework certainly helps frame the problem and provides better context to what has been transpiring in recent years, it is solely state-focused.  While it has become clear over the past several years that state proxies and bot farms have helped fuel state-run influence operations, they by no means constitute all of the individual accounts, some with a considerable amount of followers, conducting similar efforts.  Are these purposeful malign campaigns or merely people expressing their own views of hot-button issues?  

One challenge that exists is the fact that influence campaigns are more prominent and commonplace than many may suspect, and likely have been occurring long before the moniker was created to describe such activities.  While news is rife of those campaigns conducted by China, Iran, and North Korea, Google recently revealed in a blog that it had been tracking campaigns linked to India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Granted, not all campaigns are seeking big objectives.  Some of the ones highlighted in the Google blog were meant as political criticism of parties and leaders – yes, still to sway audiences, but maybe not to the level of inciting aggression to forcibly unseat them.  Such cannot be said for the United States, who perhaps was involved in one of the more caustic influence campaigns when it made its argument to the world to invade Iraq in 2003.  Per the Carnegie paper, the U.S. government invested considerable effort to get allies and the public on its side, citing Russ Hoyle’s book that illustrated how the United States co-opted U.S. and international media, employed public relations firms, and lobbied the United Nations to condemn Iraq for its alleged weapons of mass destruction. 

The Carnegie report underlines transparency as a key indicator of a maligned influence campaign, going as far as to stress that an operation leveraging true information but obfuscating the campaigns’ origins is an unacceptable practice.  While this makes sense, it should be noted that even transparency in traditional media outlets is harder to come by, especially as politically biased entities amplify the political divisiveness felt in the United States through the omission or commission of facts that would provide a more holistic understanding of stories.  With more and more incidents becoming apparent to consumers where the news concealed or just flat-out censored news-worthy stories, it is evident why people are turning from them.  Such blatant lack of objectivity has created a general feeling of “no confidence” in today’s media.  In fact, trust in media has hit record lows due to political biases and inaccurate reporting that it has made people turn to an unregulated social media ecosystem for an alternative even if they don’t trust the results.  If legitimate news outlets are at least partial purveyors of their own influence campaigns, how can anyone realistically expect that a private or public sector entity to be able to be a fair arbiter of determining which influence campaign is “acceptable” ?

In 2021, Carnegie published its findings on Measuring the Effects of Influence Operations, concluding that after examining long term mass media operations and short term social media operations, empirical research on how influence operations can affect people and societies was “limited and scattered.”  Challenges in establishing causality and accounting for cultural and political context when measuring effects were cited as problems.  I would add that further complicating matters is that increased volume of influence campaigns that are occurring from not just governments, but media, botnets, and any popular social media influencer that can be hired to spread a message.  With so many sources creating, repeating, and bringing attention to influence content, it seems that trying to stem the flow would be a near impossible task, and if perceived to be done with bias, a potentially dangerous one to pursue.  Who gets that power, and how can they be trusted to remain objective and not swayed, browbeaten, or coerced by higher authorities to act a certain way.  Given that as of 2023, only two out of ten Americans trust the government to do what is right “just about always,” giving more power to the government is doubtful to resonate with the public.

Of course, a simple way to remediate this problem would be for traditional media outlets to return to reporting the facts, avoid trying to break stories without multi-source corroboration, and try to earn back public trust though fair and objective reporting.  That doesn’t seem to be too hard of an ask, especially given the swath of research that has revealed how influential traditional news outlets and social media can be on consumers.  But it appears that ship has sailed, at least for the foreseeable future, and we are left with the current environment and a government ever ready to pounce on the chance of being the arbiter of information as evidenced by the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board.  Though that was ultimately stayed, recent reporting suggests that the government may still want that role.  According to one news source, a Congressional committee subpoenaed the Department of State’s  Global Engagement Center, an entity supposed to be focused on foreign propaganda, for its alleged involvement in attempting to target domestic journalism it deemed as disinformation.  And while most Americans believe that disinformation is a problem, according to a recent poll, they believe that news outlets and journalists should be adamant about policing the news they produce and disseminate, not the government.

Combating influence campaigns begin with the intended target of them – people.  With so many influence campaigns transpiring there is realistically little chance to stem their flow without stepping over the line with respect to censorship and draconian control.  And that is antithetical to an open and free Internet espoused by so many in the West.  Responsible news consumption starts with the individual, because otherwise is to put the responsibility of what is disseminated into the hands of public and private organizations that may have a vested interest in editing what you see.  And that doesn’t sound like something anyone used to freedom of information should want.