Mercyhurst expert explains the danger disinformation poses to democracy in the digital age

In mid-October, 2023, the Palestinian group Hamas alleged that an Israeli bomb attack had destroyed the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. This horrific allegation rapidly made its way around the world, fueled by hasty and inaccurate news reporting and social media posts. The Israeli government quickly disputed the claim, and a combination of open-source intelligence, overhead imagery, and communications intercepts led U.S. sources to confidently counter that the explosion was caused not by the Israelis, but by a misfired missile launched by Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally. Hamas' original, false accusation was an example of disinformation at work.

According to the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, it is important that we learn and understand three related terms: misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation. Let's say you see something on social media that you believe to be true (but isn't) and you forward it to your social circle. This is misinformation, or false information that is not created or shared with the intent to cause harm. Malinformation is a story that is based in fact, but taken out of context and used to mislead, harm, or manipulate. The most troublesome term of the three, though, is disinformation, which is false information that is willfully fabricated and disseminated for the purpose of misleading, harming, or manipulating a person, social group, organization, or country.

In early October, I traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to address 150 Georgian, NATO, and Ukrainian military officers on the threat to liberal democracies posed by Russian disinformation. In the ensuing panel discussion, I was asked a lot of questions that reminded me of the extent to which Western societies underestimate this threat, and how we continue to remain at a loss when it comes to countering Russian (and other) disinformation.

The power of lies

The Russian Federation's predecessor, the former Soviet Union, mastered the art of crafting and disseminating lies intended to mislead perceived adversaries, create and exacerbate divisions in foreign domestic audiences, and undermine foreign popular support for elected officials and government authorities. One of the earliest instances of successful Russian disinformation was when Josef Stalin and his government misled and manipulated New York Times reporter Walter Duranty into filing a succession of false news reports that obscured a Kremlin-fostered famine in Ukraine later known as the Holodomor. Benefiting from the absence of journalistic competition, Duranty and his fabrications not only misled the Western public but earned Duranty a Pulitzer prize in 1932.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a succession of KGB defectors revealed how Western intelligence services had misunderstood the role of the KGB — the former Russian secret police and intelligence agency — by underestimating the extent to which it created and disseminated disinformation. According to these defectors, every single KGB officer was required to spend fully 25% of his time creating disinformation stories and providing them to the over 15,000 KGB employees in Department A. Significantly, one of those KGB officers required to craft disinformation stories in the 1980s was a lieutenant colonel in Dresden, East Germany, named Vladimir Putin.

Purveyors of disinformation work hard at understanding the attitudes and beliefs of their target audiences. This is because the most effective disinformation story resonates and rapidly proliferates when a fabricated story aligns with what a target audience already believes. The most effective disinformation story begins with a kernel of truth, or at least with what the target audience believes to be true. Salacious stories spread like wildfire on social media. As we recently experienced in the case of the Hamas story about a "bombed hospital," and to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a lie is halfway around the world before the truth even has a chance to pull its pants up.

One case in point was the KGB's Operation Denver, developed during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, at a time when speculation and rumors abounded about the origin and nature of the deadly, then-incurable virus. According to the KGB story line, the U.S. government created the AIDS virus. The original disinformation story surfaced in July 1983 in Patriot, an English-language (and KGB-owned) magazine in India, in an article that alleged that the AIDS virus had been created by the U.S. military at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for the express purpose of killing gays and black people. In 1985, mainstream Moscow media outlets repeated the AIDS story, citing the 1983 Patriot article as their source; that same year, the KGB storyline spread like wildfire throughout Africa. In 1986, a pair of East German biologists published a scholarly journal article "confirming" that AIDS had been created in the U.S. Although that article was quickly debunked, the KGB's AIDS story would ultimately appear in more than 200 reports in 80 countries. Its greatest success, however, came on March 30, 1987, when CBS news anchor Dan Rather reported how a Soviet military publication asserted that the AIDS virus was a U.S. military weapon that had leaked from Fort Detrick. Other disinformation stories emanated from the Soviet Union in the latter years of its existence: The CIA assassinated JFK. Wealthy Americans adopted children to harvest their organs.

Disinformation targets our trust

Today's disinformation puts Soviet-era disinformation to shame. Whereas Soviet-era disinformation had to largely depend on print media, radio, and television, modern disinformation teams in authoritarian states (and in non-state actors like Hamas) are able to not only leverage the Internet, social media, and mobile telephony, but also amplify their messages with online trolls and bot accounts.

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Some disinformation stories are more plausible than others. However, it is essential to understand that the goal of disinformation is not necessarily to convince us that a lie is the truth; rather, its ultimate purpose is to degrade over time our confidence in once-respected news sources, authority figures, and the government. The disinformation disseminator's goal is not to persuade you to believe them; instead, their goal is to ultimately convince you to believe no one.

In October, 2023, Mercyhurst University Assistant Professor of Intelligence Studies Fred Hoffman traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to participate in an annual Intelligence and Security Conference hosted by the Georgian Ministry of Defense. Before joining the faculty at Mercyhurst, Hoffman taught as an Associate Professor of Military Science at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught courses on national security and the intelligence community. Hoffman has more than six years of experience as a competitive intelligence professional in the private sector. He also has 30 years of experience in the military and in multiple intelligence community organizations as a human intelligence officer and as a military attaché, serving in 28 different countries, including Afghanistan and the Balkans. 

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Mercyhurst professor explains danger disinformation poses to democracy