It was just over half a decade ago that I first experienced how naïve Silicon Valley was when it came to the potential for nation state adversaries to misuse their platforms to conduct information campaigns to sow chaos and discord across the world. Upon explaining to public policy representatives on the sidelines of an event the level of sophistication of state information warfare activities and that they were effectively guaranteed to see governments actively exploit their platforms in the next several years, if not already, the response was utter dismissiveness. That such talk was merely hyped hysteria, that anyone believing companies of their immense technological capacity could ever be misused in such a way simply had no understanding of technology and that their vaunted security and engineering investments guaranteed they could never fall victim to such misuse. Suggesting they engage even in passing with the counterintelligence community or simply read about the history of propaganda and information warfare to learn more how governments use information channels to deceive and sow chaos fell on deaf ears. Had Silicon Valley been a bit more humble and willing to acknowledge that technology exists in a very human world outside its borders, we wouldn’t be talking about Russian election interference in 2018 or only now boosting staffing in the counter-trolling arena. Unfortunately, the companies seem to have learned little from their failures.
Governments through time have been exceptionally adept at leveraging the technologies of each era towards their needs of surveillance, propaganda and information operations. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Internet era is the degree to which the US failed to anticipate how the digital world could be used against itself. That the birthplace of the popular web and the social media era could also allow itself to become a case study for adversarial state-sponsored disinformation campaigns using those very platforms is a testament to the utter failure of imagination of both the US intelligence agencies and the social media platforms themselves.
As with most such campaigns, the activities experienced by the social media platforms in conjunction with the 2016 presidential election were far from unexpected. The tactics were well understood by our European colleagues who had been an early testbed for the Russians and frontline witnesses to previews of the tactics and approaches that would be used in the United States. When I spoke in 2016 at a European intergovernmental event regarding evolving tactics in information warfare, I was struck by the sheer number of information operations European countries had observed and their incredible diversity in tactics, approaches and focuses. Much as the US could have learned much from its Middle East allies when first confronting ISIS tactics online, the US and its social media platforms could have learned an incredible amount from its European allies that would likely have helped it minimize and potentially even entirely avoid the election interference of 2016.
At the same time, platforms should greatly expand their investments in helping to build a more information literate citizenry. Placing the entire burden of identifying false information exclusively on social media platforms is simply untenable. No matter how sophisticated their tools and no matter how much they invest in detecting such campaigns, there will always be information operations that slip through. The only true solution to fighting online information campaigns is to train the world’s seven billion citizens to treat everything they see online with a degree of skepticism and to vet and verify every piece of information before they share or trust it. Indeed, populations in some parts of the world are so accustomed to propaganda and information campaigns as part of their daily lives that they are far more adept at identifying false information operations. As my colleague Maria Belovas, Head of Press & Public Diplomacy at the Delegation of the European Union to the United States and formerly Head of Communication at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia put it best last year, the best and only true solution to the false information epidemic is to invest in a “a population that can recognize what a fake story is and [is able] to understand the wider context of why it is taking place.”
In the end, the events of 2016 were the result not of an unforeseeable event or technological breakthrough, but rather of hubris and failure of imagination. Only by governments and social media platforms treating information campaigns as a serious threat and working together to combat them can we truly take meaningful steps towards reining in the future of online informational warfare, while the only permanent fix is to focus on creating an information literate online citizenry.
This report was first published by Forbes in September 2018
