The relationship between the tech sector and global politics is examined in the project.
Two countries have gone all in as the information domain becomes more consequential. Both China and Russia have developed strategies to advance their interests. The Kremlin has turned to military intelligence assets to carry out more targeted information operations, instead of relying on proxy troll farms to generate large quantities of polarizing content. Beijing has become less risk-averse in its use of "wolf warrior" diplomats to push conspiracy theories online due to the concern that it might be blamed for the Pandemic. Washington needs to develop a strategy to push back on the internet.
Moscow's information manipulation is evolving.
Russia, a declining power, seeks to compensate for its weakness through asymmetric means by disrupting its neighbors and competitors in the near term. The Kremlin has little to lose and a lot to gain from the public's knowledge of its activities. In order to keep the community distracted, divided and unable to carry out a confident, coordinated foreign policy that could be detrimental to its interests, the Kremlin uses disinformation.
Moscow uses at least two techniques that are a maturation of its tactics since it interfered in the U.S. presidential election. First, it co-opts domestic voices and institutions within target societies in order to cast information operations as authentic advocacy, often by hiding troll within a target population, renting the social media accounts of local citizens or recruiting real activists to stoke protests. It does so partly to evade platform detection mechanisms and partly to increase the politicization of content moderation debates in the United States.
The Kremlin's disinformers realize that they don't need to perpetuate an operation at scale in order to create the impression that they or others have, and that the impression alone is enough to sow doubt about the validity of election results. Moscow can leverage widespread concern about the potential for manipulation to achieve its goals by claiming that manipulation has happened even in the absence of a successful operation.
Beijing is following in the footsteps of Moscow by writing its own plays.
China is a rising power with little to gain and much to lose from public awareness of its interference activities. It prefers a stable international order that is more in line with its interests than the current U.S.-led framework. The information domain is primarily geared toward promoting China's image as a responsible global superpower and stifling criticism that would tarnish its prestige, while denting the appeal of democracy by casting the United States and its partners as ineffective and hypocritical.
Beijing has pursued these interests by piggybacking on the propaganda networks of other strongmen, manufacturing the appearance of popular support and co-opting conversations on its rights record. China relies on a constellation of alternative thinkers, many of them Western, that are a fixture of Russian propaganda. China's wolf warrior diplomats engage with false personas on the social networking site, highlighting the difficulty of generating support for pro-China positions. In order to push back on criticisms of its rights record, it attempts to co-opt discussions on the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang using # campaigns and slick videos.
Sometimes autocrats align.
Moscow and Beijing have the same objectives, which include damaging the global prestige of democracy, weakening the international institutions and subverting democratic alliances. The two countries use the same tactics.
The United States is being painted as hypocritical on issues of race. Both use clickbait to get people to follow them on the social networking site. Both traffic in multiple, often conflicting, conspiracy theories to cast doubt on official accounts of political events, evade blame for their activities and create the impression that there is no such thing as objective reality. Both have extensive propaganda apparatuses that spread their preferred narratives.
Many of the same narratives are deployed by them. The United States and its allies have been portrayed as ineffectual by both countries because of their low confidence in the safety record of certain Western COVID-19 vaccines. Russia is mostly focused on pushing divisive content and pushing back on what it characterizes as anti-Russian bias in the media. China is interested in highlighting the benefits of its governance model while painting its rights abuses as hypocritical. Russian domestic politics are rarely covered by Kremlin state media. Moscow wants to drive audiences away from the political West, not bring them to Russia. The opposite is true for China.
Much has been said about the state of cooperation between Russia and China in their competition with the United States. There is little formal coordination of their information activities beyond symbolic agreements. That is not a surprise. Beijing doesn't need to formally cooperate with Moscow in order to amplify Kremlin-promoted narratives or to emulate other successful elements of the Kremlin's information strategy
What will happen in the future?
Russian and Chinese information strategies are evolving. China is taking a more assertive, less subtle approach than before, while Russia is becoming more targeted and harder to detect. Russia's changes appear to be the result of growing awareness of its activities since 2016 and the implementation of new platform policies and detection mechanisms that ushered in an era of partisan debates over election legitimacy. Changes to China's information strategy seem to be driven by the global crisis of salience that it has to contend with, and will continue to create opportunities for Beijing to test new approaches.
The United States needs to know how Russia and China approach the information domain. A robust strategy would include using American cyber capabilities to prevent or impose costs on those who would conduct destabilizing disinformation campaigns, as well as implementing legislation that would make platform transparency, particularly with trusted researchers, the norm. The United States should more forcefully defend freedom of information because it is good for democratic societies and creates challenges for authoritarian competitors.
In the contest between democratic and authoritarian societies, autocrats have seized the initiative. This collection of measures is a starting point for responsible action to ensure that the United States regains it. To succeed, the U.S. and its democratic partners must act quickly.
