Have you ever read something so timely, so thorough, and so real that you’re constantly reminded of it, that you start noticing things everywhere that fit the framework or prove the point? Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America is one of those important, relevant books.
Before we get into why, let’s acknowledge the thorny backdrop: Whether informed or not, everyone has an opinion on “the media.” That’s understandable, because media shape how we think of our families, neighbors, nations, and world, not to mention ourselves. And as our interactions are increasingly online and screen-based and less frequently face to face, and as we approach the 2024 “inflectelection” (my term), the quality of the information we get through media is even more crucial. Sadly, when the power to influence and stakes increase, restraint and ethics often decrease: welcome to a planet-wide proliferation of deliberate deception.
Thankfully, works like Attack from Within can help inoculate us by making intentionally false or misleading information, aka “disinformation,” easier to spot, put in historical context, and counteract. The title and most of the book would seem to point toward doom and gloom, but McQuade – a national security and data privacy expert, law professor, and former federal prosecutor – offers solutions, too. Though our media landscape might be littered with the landmines of seductive, expertly crafted, sometimes incendiary lies, if you read through to the final two chapters, you’ll know she doesn’t think that’s written in stone or any other permanent medium. By the end, the book’s tone averages out to one of duty, mission, and even hope.
But back to the doom and gloom … I mean, back to McQuade’s somehow readable 374-page, 1,717-footnote vaccination against disinformation. Her “The Authoritarian Playbook” chapter shows us the continuous historical arc of these shady methods. The media strategies of today’s dictators, power-hungry politicians, disingenous economic interests, and other disinformers are not new. The means for spreading their propaganda, however, are new, and accursedly effective. Choose-your-own-views news (trademark Dan Carsen) and algorithm-controlled, vitriol-boosting, profit-driven social media are unprecedentedly efficient for reaching millions of people or for targeting niche groups, depending on disinformers’ desires. Though the larger goal – deception – might be the same, there are logistical differences between, say, convincing populations that your particular dictatorship is actually pretty cool and peaceful, versus getting random people to commit sabotage and terrorism when you don’t want an outright declared military war, versus preventing minorities from voting. And now, AI is making mass deception easier and cheaper.
Unfortunately for the United States, when it comes to modern disinformation, a nation’s strengths can be weaknesses: Our cherished rights to free expression and our unique diversity, especially combined with vacuums left by vanishing real journalism, siloed information sources, and our media illiteracy, mean the U.S. is particularly prone to certain deception techniques. And Alabama, certainly not immune, tends to rank even lower in media literacy education than the nation at large.
Beyond the garden-variety dishonest bragging or smearing of opponents or competitors, some of those disinformation techniques are meant to sow division. Domestic “divide and conquer” still works to win elections or stifle legislation, regulation, and movements, but our international adversaries are also happy to “divide and weaken” or even “divide and destabilize” or “divide and paralyze.” Seen Congress’s recent legislative track record? How about January 6th? Our polarization and paralysis are partly the culmination of disinformation efforts. For example, Russian operatives have been pitting us against each other for decades, but now they use fake websites and social-media accounts blasting out divisive hate- and fear-mongering manipulation, which is then artificially amplified through armies of fake, automated “bot” accounts. That further spreads the deception and the disheartening impression that those beliefs are more popular than they are. Russian bots (and American disinformationists like Alex Jones) spread lies that contributed to “Pizzagate” in 2016, when a heavily armed North Carolina man shot up a Washington, DC pizzeria after driving there to investigate Hillary Clinton’s supposed child sex ring operating out of the restaurant.
It doesn’t even take a well-funded, government-supported “bot farm” run by shady experts to deceive and divide. You can try it for yourself through an entertaining online video game where you’re the “Chief Disinformation Officer” inflaming a fictional town. It’s fun … unless you think too hard about how easy it is.
Other disinformation techniques sow doubt in institutions that keep society intact and democracy strong. Seen any ginned-up attacks on schools or educators lately? How about law enforcement? Libraries? Public health? Election workers? Hmmm. Some foreign and domestic interests are all too happy as we attack – with words, images, and deeds – the institutions that sustain our safety, health, and democracy. And don’t forget the longer-term chilling effect. Would you choose to be a police officer or an election worker or run a vaccine program or a library right now?
Other techniques sow doubt about information itself. I mean, if everyone lies all the time, how can I trust anyone or anything? Why pay attention at all? All those “enemy of the people” journalists and academics and scientists and elites and experts not only look down on me but lie to me, so I’m just going to tune out (and therefore not know anything beyond my own immediate experience and what I’d already believed). Maybe I’ll criticize or even attack some evil journalists or media researchers who point out bad things about the leaders I like, the leaders who, coincidentally, told me all those people are liars … Reporters and critics begin to self-censor out of fear, people are less informed, and disinformation fills the vacuum even more.
Sometimes disinformation sows division and doubt about information itself: Operatives have set up authentic-looking websites and social-media pages and accounts on opposing sides of heated issues, with the intent of drawing people into online and real-life conflict. Even if these plots are discovered before violence happens, animosity builds and people view real organizations with more suspicion.
These ploys and others work to misinform, misguide, numb, neutralize, isolate, divide, enrage, and dehumanize human beings. That might seem hyperbolic, but it’s actually an incomplete list. Over time, these carefully calibrated messages even help radicalize people into extremists and terrorists. By the way, as I write this, we’re just beginning to learn a little about the man who by all appearances tried to kill Donald Trump on July 13, one day before I typed this sentence. Wild guess: he didn’t live in a media-free cave. As McQuade puts it, “What I failed to see [after 9/11] in 2001 was that the most potent weapons would be not bombs or airplanes but words, images, and lies.”
Attack from Within connects the dots and shows that to be true. Strangely, though, it was one of McQuade’s suggested solutions that made me realize even I hadn’t sufficiently grasped the centrality of our media. “Even I” because I’m a many-decade – aka “old” – media-observer who’s read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death (that’s my way of begging you to read that seminal work), who teaches about media, and has heavily used or worked in media his whole professional life. Anyway, here’s that solution:
McQuade thinks government should subsidize people’s news website paywall costs.
Huh? Yeah. Struck me as odd and unrealistic, too. A lot of voters apparently don’t want to pay taxes for the roads, schools, emergency services, military, and more that we all depend on. But website access? Well … (I began thinking … uh oh) … government often pays for people’s other needs – food, shelter, medical care, energy bills … And in a functioning democracy, information is a necessity. And the most reliable, edited, fact-checked content is often behind paywalls. So, should there be yet another class divide when it comes to being informed – an information caste system? Sounds terrible when you puzzle it out, doesn’t it? Should poor people, perhaps through a credit system, have access to good information that not only helps them but maintains democracy? Well … Yes, I guess so. Yes.
But any big, complicated problem has multiple partial solutions. Hers also include regulating processes rather than constitutionally protected content. Congress could amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to strip internet service providers and other online outlets of legal immunity for fee-paid and algorithm-boosted content. We could prohibit anonymous users and bots. We could require disclosure of funding sources for paid-for posts, and apply the FCC’s “equal time rule” to online media. (Those last two are already requirements for broadcast media but not online media. Ridiculous, right?) Notice that many of these measures might muster bipartisan support: Even if for somewhat different reasons, Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to mind going after big media.
On the “demand side,” McQuade offers strong support for something I’ve believed for decades: We need continuous media literacy education (logic education too), similar to how we teach math or reading, from day one, early and often. If Finland can do it, so can we. Imagine a population savvy enough to spot nonsense rather than getting riled up and clicking “share.” Imagine Americans being up on the latest telltale signs of deceptive accounts. Imagine consumers corroborating what looks like news with multiple sources or using fact-checking resources like FactCheck.org, Politifact.com, or Snopes.com.
Truth matters. Facts matter. For so many reasons. One that should be clear to Americans is that our imperfect but hope-inspired, two-and-a-half-century experiment with representative citizen rule can’t last if We The People don’t have basic information. As McQuade puts it, “Our democracy is too precious to simply surrender to authoritarians, fascists, foreign influence operations, and scammers.”
Attack from Within is an enlightening, thorough, all-too-necessary account of the processes by which those bad actors warp us by warping “the media,” which people across the ideological spectrum sense is doing us harm. Luckily, if you read the whole book, and I hope you will, you’ll see that we can solve this problem that we’ve caused. But it’ll require learning, adaptation, individual restraint, political will, and common sense to win this worthy, high-stakes fight.
Dan Carsen teaches English, Creative Writing, and Media & Journalism. He’s also been a freelance-writing stay-at-home dad, an editor in an educational publishing house, and an award-winning writer and reporter. Share your fact-based thoughts with him at CarsenWords@gmail.com.