The Threat of Foreign Disinformation.by General Wesley Clark
'Two hundred forty-four years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” With the final signing of our Declaration of Independence, these rights of man became the foundation of the American experiment. On every Fourth of July, we celebrate the birth of American independence, and recall the magnificent courage of those patriots who signed this bold statement.
Our American “experiment” has survived many difficult challenges over those 244 years. We overcame the injustices of slavery by a vicious, bloody Civil War that cost over 600,000 American lives and wrecked the economies of many states. We struggled to find a way to live with our native Americans – and left a record of violence, broken treaties, and what we would call today ethnic cleansing which today we are still struggling to set right. We built an industrial state on the backs of immigrant labor, and then fought decades of struggle to recognize the value of hard work and honest labor. We overcame a crushing Depression that left a quarter of America’s work force long-term unemployed. We mobilized for two World Wars, built the world’s finest systems of public education, and brought in successive waves of immigrants. We gave women the right to vote, and struggled to deal with the consequences of slavery, decade after decade. The Sexual Revolution and the Civil Rights movement brought such issues to the fore again in the late twentieth century, and there is much left to be done for both women’s rights and overcoming centuries of racism. We endured a four decades-long Cold War against the Soviet Union, and emerged as the world’s lone superpower, only to suffer the awful strikes of terrorists in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have brought war, and two severe economic crises, and the current pandemic. Now, the United States faces rising international challengers in China and Russia.
Why did American democracy survive? Because, in the face of adversity, American democracy continued to prove self-correcting. Common sense eventually prevailed. Americans saw, read, felt, and despite not always understanding the nuances and details, voted. But common sense wins over individual self-interest only when Americans have access to information. Our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, the right to assemble, and freedom of the press are the essential guarantors that common sense will ultimately prevail. This has been true despite the fact that bias has always existed in journalism, the press, the media, and indeed, all sources of information. Truth is always somewhat relative to the perspectives and beliefs of the observer. Inflammatory rhetoric has also remained the norm in American politics. Yet somehow the common sense of the voter has prevailed time and again to see us through.
When the Soviet Union fell, we thought that the great challenges to the American experiment had been left behind. We were wrong. The collapse of the Iron Curtain enabled incredible global interconnectivity, further enhanced by cell phones, messaging, and the explosion of social media. Yet these developments also exposed our democracy to great peril: the threat of disinformation, strategically designed to sow division, spread false narratives, sway opinions and use our own freedoms as vectors of attack against our country.
However, the success of these new disinformation campaigns by our adversaries depends on the gullibility, naivete, or willfulness of the American people. Members of both parties have mistakenly or purposefully shared Russian, Chinese and Iranian false messaging, and it is this domestic amplification of propaganda and disinformation that give it the punch to hurt us. Sometimes even our leaders tweet and share intentionally false information online, deceiving and misleading us. . .
So, what can be done? Many throw up their hands and complain about the technology itself. But at Renew America Together, we believe modern communications technology is not only an avenue of attack but also offers us the best means to solve this problem – by enabling hundreds, and even thousands of alert Americans to spot and call out the fake news, social media bots, disinformation and foreign propaganda, in real time, on a person-to-person basis. To this end we intend to highlight and publish information on active disinformation campaigns, to create tools that teach Americans about this threat to our democracy, and to invite all Americans to join together to identify, call out, and work against disinformation in all its forms.'>>>
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