Fuel on the Fire: Information as a Weapon

On December 7, 1941, the United States was thrust into the Second World War when Imperial Japan launched a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor. While there were already warning signs of Japanese aggression, the surprise assault still caught America sleeping.

It is hard to determine when exactly the third surprise attack that caught America sleeping actually started, because it did not begin with a bang, but a whisper. That third assault is still underway today, though as yet few are aware that it exists. 

That new threat is Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). It lurks on the social media sites we visit, and in the various ways we obtain our news and information. Another term for it is “disinformation.” Ironically, that name is itself a deception. In choosing a word to describe the “active measures” the Soviet Union carried out to manipulate the truth in other countries, Joseph Stalin chose the word disinformation (дезинформация) because, he said, it “sounded French,” so people would not know where the term originally came from.

Winning this war of words and deepfakes will not be easy, but neither was defeating fascism in the Second World War, nor was taking on the global threat of terrorism. But we cannot keep sleeping; we must win this war if democratic societies are to survive.

Information is vital to our social fabric; we shape much of our decision-making by the information we receive. For centuries, people relied on their elders and religious leaders to guide them in interpreting new information. They advised what was worth worrying about and what was trivial. In many nations during the 19th and 20th centuries, religion’s guiding hand was replaced by new “-isms” (communism, fascism, capitalism, liberalism, nationalism, etc.). Like religious gurus, modern political leaders managed the flow of news to the masses and instructed them on the proper ways in which to interpret it.

Today, religion and political ideologies exert less influence on many people, but the flow of information has not decreased. In fact, thanks to the internet and modern communications, we can access more information than ever. But that information no longer reaches us via the advance review of editors, station managers, political and religious censors, and others who shaped what we saw and heard in the past. The result is a chaotic blitz of stimulants.

Every nation seeks to influence audiences in other countries and to convey its values. That is a natural part of diplomacy and public communications. But malign information manipulators do not play by the same rules. They hide their true identities behind false websites, proxy agents, copycat organizations, trolls, bots, and deepfakes, because they know that their audiences will be skeptical if they know that the real source of their information is the Kremlin, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)/Da’esh.

Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference is defined by the U.S. government and by the European Union as “the clandestine use of propaganda and disinformation to create an international information environment conducive to a nation’s policy objectives.” FIMI is an intentional abuse of the free flow of information, with clear intent to deceive. It seeks to hide the true identity of those behind it. It tries to manipulate public opinion to create further division and distrust, and it uses social media and other online tools to clandestinely raise funds, recruit allies, and undermine fact-based journalism.

“Disinformation,” or the intentional conveying of falsehoods and distorted information, is one aspect of FIMI. It leads to “misinformation,” which is when someone shares wrong information without realizing that it is incorrect. Disinformation specialists know full well that they are spreading lies, and do so anyway to misinform as many people as possible and increase their effects.

As with alcohol, the wrong distillation process or too much of a good thing can create harmful effects. Information manipulators are master brewers, able to mix truth with fiction and mimic reputable sites in such a way that many consume distorted news without realizing what they are swallowing.

Also, like alcohol, manipulated information amplifies emotions. It turns normal political differences into bitter confrontations, it undermines confidence in those we need to trust, and it can destroy longstanding relationships. The purveyors of disinformation and distortion know their craft, and they know that the best way to make information stick is not with cold hard facts, but with emotive conspiratorial whispers, ideally spiked with a sense of extreme urgency.

Think about the memories you retain from when you were young. Do you recall the more routine days of your childhood, or mostly a few moments when you were particularly angry, frightened, surprised, joyous, or sad? Likewise, information manipulators prey on our emotions and convey information that evokes instant fury, fear, shock, elation, or sorrow. 

For many years, the Kremlin pushed FIMI campaigns that claimed, inter alia, that the U.S. military created HIV, COVID-19, and other diseases as part of a biological weapons program; that the United States had invented diseases that only targeted specific ethnic populations; and that American vaccines would make Asian women sterile. No matter how the logical part of your mind tells you that such a claim is ridiculous (which it is), your heart might still skip a beat as you think about the consequences, especially if you are Asian yourself. There is no need to provide any proof of such claims; the emotional damage has already been done by just reading the headline.

Shaping a FIMI effort around what people fear most is a great way to make it go viral. According to anthropologist Bob Deutsch, fear and reason operate in different systems in the brain, and “fear reduces cognitive capabilities.”  

In his book Risk: the Science and Politics of Fear, Dan Gardner outlined 18 irrational fears that most people have. Among them are catastrophic potential (massive fatalities in a single event, rather than small numbers over time, which is why people are more frightened of airplane crashes than the more dangerous public highways); unfamiliarity (why you are more scared walking down an unknown street in the dark than walking in your own neighborhood at night); lack of understanding (if you know how something works, it is not as scary to you as when you do not); loss of trust (if you do not have confidence in an institution to do what it should, your sense of risk rises); and danger to children (anything that threatens children or future generations evokes a stronger emotional reaction).

In Primal Fear: Tribalism, Empathy and the Way Forward, Robert M. Smith added three other core irrational reactions that most humans share: (1) fear of outsiders who do not share the same cultural values; (2) fear of disruptions to our routine social order and cohesion; and (3) fear of being left behind or kept out of the loop (everyone else knows what is really going on, and is laughing at me).

If we put these together, we find a common theme in almost all FIMI efforts to manipulate information and influence public audiences: (1) a sense of urgency; (2) an appeal to emotions; (3) an exaggeration of irrational fears; (4) a perceived threat to one’s ethnic, religious, or social group; and/or (5) a conspiratorial whisper that “THEY don’t want you to know about this information, but I’m sharing it with you and you should share it with others.”

In 2016 and 2017, while the author was teaching at George Washington University (GWU), Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players began to kneel during the national anthem as a protest about race relations in the United States. A group of GWU graduate students looked at tens of thousands of social media posts made at that time on all sides of the issue. Some posts defended the players, praising the peaceful nature of their protests, but calling on all Americans to rise up and join their cause. An equal number of posts brutally criticized the NFL players, stating that they were “trampling on the American flag and kneeling on the graves of U.S. veterans,” and urging those who agreed to rise up immediately and protest their actions.   

What the students uncovered is that almost two-thirds of the posts originated not in the United States, but in St. Petersburg, Russia (where very few NFL fans live). They were coming from Russian troll farms. Each troll was sending inflammatory messages to those on both sides of the debate. They were not interested in defending the players’ rights, promoting African-American causes, or defending the U.S. national anthem. They were using the incident to provoke anger and resentment and create social conflict in America using emotion, urgency, and perceived threats. 

That is what FIMI is all about — not inventing new controversies, but pouring fuel on existing disagreements to turn them into social wars.

The denizens of the Kremlin, Chinese Communist Party, and the Ayatollahs in Iran all have many years of experience propagandizing their own citizens. They are experts at stretching the truth as it suits them, without the watchdog role played by independent media, since they have all silenced any domestic voices of dissent. Over the past two decades, they have turned those same efforts to international audiences, walking through the open doors that the West’s freedom of speech affords them to manipulate social media networks and advance authoritarian interests.

FIMI is inexpensive, deniable, and — even if some individual lies do not stick — cost-effective. States that feel overmatched by NATO or other international alliances or by Western economic dominance may see it as something that gives them an advantage, or at least levels the playing field. Russia’s core disinformation doctrine claims as justification that it is the best way to match the strategic advantage of the United States. And all of our adversaries recognize that their strategic messaging is less successful when it is identified as coming directly from their capitals — Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran — than when they can disguise it as other voices, emanating from other locations.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which operated from 2016 to the end of 2024, focused its daily efforts on identifying and countering FIMI from Russia, China, Iran, the global terror networks of al-Qaeda, ISIS/Da’esh, ISIS-Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), and al-Shabaab, and other violent extremist organizations. These groups all have separate goals, but they also all have a long track record of using FIMI to disrupt adversaries, recruit new followers, raise funds, evade sanctions, and advance their political ideologies and economic interests.

The Kremlin’s information manipulation and interference efforts against the United States and NATO began long before its second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. While many Russian FIMI efforts today focus on degrading global support for Ukraine, the principal goals of the Kremlin’s influence efforts have been, and remain, much wider. They are to undermine public support for core Western institutions, exacerbate domestic political differences, undermine existing alliances, and facilitate an expanding Russian sphere of global influence that the United States and its allies are too paralyzed to prevent.

Indeed, from the Potemkin villages created in 1787, to the 1903 Tsarist secret police forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the Soviet Union’s blending of revolutionary agitation and propaganda (agitprop), the Kremlin’s tactics of deception, fabrications, and proxy networks have not changed over the past three centuries. A recurring Russian tactic is the use of media “echo-chambers” — planting an article in a Kremlin-friendly foreign publication and then requoting it repeatedly in Russian and friendly international media to enhance its credibility and amplify its reach. Whenever their black operations are exposed, Okhrana, Chekist, KGB, GRU, or FSB actors cry out that “Russophobia” is unfairly targeting them, while they swiftly move on to new FIMI campaigns.

Russian chauvinist and Kremlin advisor Alexander Dugin summarized these goals in 1997 in his book Foundations of Geopolitics, which was later adopted as a core text at Russian military officer training academies. Dugin wrote: “Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution. The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism and the strategic control of the U.S.A., and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.” 

The CCP tends to be much more subtle than Vladimir Putin’s agents of manipulation, but the PRC spends even more resources than Russia to spin the world their way. Beijing has invested billions of dollars to construct a new information ecosystem in which PRC propaganda and disinformation gain traction and become more dominant. The PRC’s approach features five primary elements: leveraging propaganda and censorship; promoting digital authoritarianism; exploiting existing international organizations and bilateral partnerships; pairing cooptation with pressure; and exercising strict control of Chinese-language media, both at home and abroad.

Together, these five mutually reinforcing elements enable Beijing to exert control over the narratives in the global information space by advancing false or biased pro-PRC content and suppressing critical voices. The PRC offers other countries where media organizations are struggling to remain economically competitive a magical Trojan horse: free or low-cost access to international news, sports, and documentary content in return for signing an exclusivity agreement that they will only publish or rebroadcast content from Xinhua, China News, or China Central Television. 

The CCP also practices “digital sovereignty,” or the use of digital infrastructure to foster authoritarianism, repress freedom of expression, censor independent voices, promote officially sanctioned disinformation, and deny human rights. Beijing has propagated information control tactics, with a particular focus on Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and has promoted authoritarian digital norms that other countries have rapidly adopted. As others emulate the PRC’s rules of information control, each nation’s information ecosystem becomes more receptive to future propaganda, disinformation, and censorship requests from Beijing.

The Ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps do not have the same global reach or billion-dollar FIMI budgets that Russia and China do, but they make similar efforts to spread their ideology and manipulate information to advance their interests, particularly in the Middle East. Iran’s long arm of repression reaches around the world to intimidate and — often — murder journalists and other opposition to their authoritarian regime. Iran also clandestinely funds the online activities of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other internationally designated terrorist organizations, helping those terror groups raise funds, recruit new members, appeal to disaffected local audiences, and run online campaigns that mischaracterize their brutal attacks on civilians as holy war victories.

In addition to Hamas and Hezbollah, other violent extremist organizations (al-Qaeda, ISIS/Daesh, ISIS-K, al-Shabaab, etc.) lurk in both hidden caverns and on the dark web as well as, at times, brazenly on open websites. These violent extremist organizations use social media to communicate with their own followers and seek those who hope to join them. Their social media messaging continually urges new violent attacks, seeks new ways to raise funds and acquire weapons, and tries to aggressively advance their group’s brand over their rivals. It was this threat that led to President Barack Obama’s Executive Order to create the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), an interagency center devoted to tracking what terrorist groups were saying online and hampering their ability to clandestinely promote their cause. CSCC later expanded into the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which retained a division dedicated to this counterterrorism role until its demise in 2024.

With our adversaries able to manipulate emotions and stoke fears while remaining largely anonymous or covert, it should not be surprising that FIMI has persisted since the first rise of social media networking, or that it remains a major threat today. It is not going away, because it is a useful tool for anyone seeking to degrade U.S. national security interests and weaken the global alliances that have averted nuclear conflict and maintained a stable global economy with relative peace since the end of the Cold War.

The GEC’s eight years of experience fighting FIMI gave us a chance to recognize what does not work well. Ignoring the issue only allows it to fester. Gainsaying every false narrative, known as the “whack-a-mole” strategy, also does not work. The adversary then simply claims that their falsehood must be true to prompt such an aggressive response, and they are, after all, less interested in winning each debate than simply planting more seeds of doubt.

“Going on the offensive,” using the same information operations against the adversary, may be justifiable under conflict conditions, but it is hard to pursue in countries where state censorship is pervasive and where there is no free speech, as we see today in adversaries such as Russia, North Korea, the PRC, and Iran.   

FIMI is a multi-dimensional challenge, and governments that do not share information and coordinate regularly among their homeland security, defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs agencies — and nations that do not share FIMI information with their allies and neighbors — tend to duplicate efforts, flail inconclusively, and win a few minor battles, but lose the strategic information war.

However, there are four areas where the GEC found solid success and where its successors would be well advised to concentrate:

First, keep the pressure on America’s adversaries by exposing and disrupting their networks. Do not waste time going after each lie but instead educate the public about the clandestine networks that are funneling malign information to them. Show the public the history of the individuals and organizations who are regularly spreading falsehoods and, where possible, use carefully declassified information about their methodology, together with open-source information, to throw sunlight onto their vulnerabilities. This undermines their ability to spread further half-truths. The GEC’s foundational reports on the pillars of Chinese and Russian disinformation are examples of this approach.

In some cases, it may be useful to pre-bunk FIMI campaigns before they start. This can be a very effective deterrent, if we are aware what is being developed by our adversaries. For example, a message that “country X is going to lie to you soon about Y” can cause the adversary to drop its FIMI campaign. But this tactic must only be used when you have irrefutable evidence and when there is an urgency to prevent severe damage or loss of life. An example of this approach was the GEC’s effort to get ahead of the dangerous Russian campaign in Africa that alleged Western health organizations were collecting DNA to develop new biological weapons. The GEC pre-bunked these reports when they first appeared. Otherwise, as Russian disinformation, they would have led many Africans to become unwilling to get necessary health care. However, if used too often, pre-bunking can turn into a “boy who cried wolf” syndrome and make audiences skeptical. 

Second, the United States should work hard to build interagency and international coalitions and to enhance the capacity of likeminded nations to develop their own capacities to detect and counter FIMI. There is both strength and added credibility in a united front. Many nations now recognize the threat that FIMI poses to their own national security and have strengthened their multilateral engagement on this issue. This makes it harder for malign actors to find the shadows they need to hide in to manipulate the truth. Among the top international partners in fighting FIMI today are the European Union’s External Action Service, NATO’s Strategic Communications unit, and the two dozen countries that are signatories to the State Department’s Global Framework to Counter FIMI.

Third, we need to continue to deliver training and assistance to everyone who consumes online information. Educational organizations and independent media outlets are ideal partners in this effort. The GEC even developed some free online games (https://harmonysquare.game and https://catpark.game) to teach people how easy it is to sow discord through manipulated information, and how to enhance their personal radar to detect it.

For example, years ago, do you recall receiving emails from a “Nigerian prince” who wished to share his riches with you if you would only first provide your bank account information? A few people actually fell for that trap. Today, most of us delete and disregard any such requests. Modern information manipulators are now much more subtle and devious, but with enough training in how to recognize disinformation, we can build up a resistance to these new poisons, too. Any time a social media message or email triggers a strong emotional reaction in you or and urges you to act immediately, you should think “Nigerian prince?” and take a few minutes to assess it. If you have any doubts about the sender or content, go to a reputable fact-checking website or research the background of the person or organization that sent the message before you share, comment, repost, or act. If enough adopt this approach, the trolls of this world will have fewer people to prey on.

Finally, we must acknowledge that artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the speed with which our adversaries can spread FIMI, and enhancing its quality and ability to deceive us. But AI can also be our ally. We can use new technologies to detect disinformation in any language more quickly and to trace its origins more efficiently than ever before.  

Five decades ago, the number of commercial airline hijackings — by criminals, terrorists, and deranged people — skyrocketed. There were over 305 airline hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since 2015, there have been only 13 attempted hijackings, most of them unsuccessful. Improved airline security has helped, but a greater deterrent was international cooperation that made it harder for hijackers to fly to third countries like Cuba to claim asylum and get away with their crimes.

The hijacking of our social media sites will continue until we develop the same resolve — to improve our threat awareness, to deter weaponized access, and to make it harder for the malign actors to escape punishment. America and its allies rose up to defeat the Nazis and Japanese militarists in the 1940s, and to weaken the terror grip of al-Qaeda in the 2000s. If we unite with the same resolve, we can prevail again and make our online environment safe for democracy in the future.

Karl Stoltz is Foreign Policy Advisor for Deft9 Solutions.

This article appeared originally at Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).