Disinformation, the distribution of intentionally false information to manipulate a target audience, threatens democracy. By infusing a democracy’s information ecosystem with falsehoods, splintering political consensus, and eroding trust in journalism, disinformation threatens electoral integrity and allows foreign malign actors to influence democratic politics. State-sponsored disinformation campaigns are not new, but the mass adoption of social media in the 21st century has made them more harmful. Social media usage lowers the barriers to entry for disinformation operations, heightens the anonymity of malign actors, and greatly increases the quantity and diversity of disinformation.
The vastness of information on social media makes the elimination of disinformation impossible and would make blunt efforts repressive. The United States must address online discourse as it would any other sensitive ecosystem: carefully and accounting for the interdependence of all its stakeholders. The U.S. government should cultivate a cleaner, fact- based global information environment by creating mechanisms to better share factual information, forging partnerships with key allies and organizations, and implementing programs that minimize the spread of disinformation by foreign malign actors on digital platforms. In light of the complexity of online discourse, this strategy seeks to reduce, rather than eliminate, disinformation.
In order to achieve the desired end–state, the U.S. government should: (1) directly combat disinformation overseas through the Department of State (DOS), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Intelligence Community (IC) under the coordination of DOS’s Global Engagement Center (GEC); and (2) partner with private actors, including social media platforms and civil society organizations (CSOs), to innovate and counter disinformation. The focus of this strategy is on foreign malign actors and their efforts overseas, and not on domestic disinformation by domestic actors. The authors acknowledge, however, that given the complexity of globalized communications in the Internet Age, domestic disinformation can be quite harmful to U.S. democracy as well.