Operation Infektion: A three-part video series on Russian disinformation

Russian Disinformation: From Cold War to Kanye

Adam B. Ellick and

WATCH: This is a three-part film series. Scroll down and click to play any episode.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine surprised some in the West. But Russia’s president has been laying the groundwork for warfare for decades. Disinformation has long been one of his most precious and powerful weapons. It sows division among his enemies — before firing a single shot. This three-part Opinion Video documentary, “Operation InfeKtion,” which was originally published in 2018, deconstructs Putin’s ambitious disinformation campaigns and explains how the tactics endure, from the days of the Soviet Union through March 2022 in Ukraine. The film also documents how Russia’s neighbors, including Ukraine, are among the most sophisticated nations at countering Russian disinformation.

“Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracy theories. Meet the K.G.B. spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads that tried and are still trying to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using falsehoods out of Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.

We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-internet era. Meet the KGB operatives who invented it and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.

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Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News

We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-Internet era. Meet the KGB cons who invented it, and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.

[music] This is a story about a guy and a term he likes to think he invented. “Really, the word — I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake.’ I guess other people use it, perhaps, over the years. But I’ve never noticed it.” It’s only been around for a few years. But you’re probably as sick of it as we are. Well, the thing is, fake news is actually really old. It’s just that, once, it went by a very different name. [ding] [non-English speech] Because really, this story is about a virus, a virus created decades ago by a government to slowly and methodically destroy its enemies — [water sloshing] — from the inside. But it’s not a biological virus. It’s more like a political one. And chances are, you’ve already been infected. [music] If you don’t know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that’s making you feel that way. If you feel exhausted by the news, this could be why. And if you’re sick of it all and you just want to stop caring, then we really need to talk. Ready? [music] O.K., so to start, let’s go back to July, 1983 and all the way over here: New Delhi, India. This is when a remarkable story appears in a newspaper called “The Patriot.” It claims the H.I.V. virus was secretly created by U.S. government scientists as a weapon to kill African-Americans and gay people. It even names a facility, Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the virus was supposed to have been concocted. It’s a crazy allegation printed in a small newspaper — no big deal, right? But fast forward just a couple of years, and look what’s happening. The story is spreading all over Africa. The scientific report’s even published by two East German biologists who say they can prove AIDS is made in the U.S.A. All these articles are from just a few months at the end of 1986. And then, somehow, it ends up here. [drums beating] “A Soviet military publication claims the virus that causes AIDS leaked from a U.S. Army laboratory conducting experiments in biological warfare.” That’s Dan Rather reading a fake news story to millions of unwitting Americans on national TV. But don’t be too hard on Dan. This was one of the greatest cons ever carried out on the global scale. And we’re going to show you how it was pulled off. [music] But first, let me introduce you to a few authentic grifters. Stashed away on some old videotapes, we found interviews with a bunch of ex-spies. This guy, Ladislav Bittman. This guy, Stanislav Levchenko, and this guy, Yuri Bezmenov. They all worked for the KGB during the Cold War before defecting to the U.S. And it’s thanks to them that we know so much about one of the KGB’s most secretive departments. “Only about 15% of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent is a slow process, which we call either ideological subversion or active measures, [speaking Russian] in the language of the KGB.” So “active measures,” it’s a euphemism for, well, bullshit — but not just any bullshit, the most strategic, masterful, toxic bullshit you could possibly imagine, made with one goal. “To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite of their abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.” “Within the KGB is a department that specializes in planting false stories and forged documents.” We know it was run from Department A right at the top of the KGB. And it had a multimillion-dollar budget. “At least 15,000 people, who, in the Soviet Union and outside of the Soviet Union, are involved in that kind of actions on a regular, daily basis.” You heard that right — 15,000 people. That’s more than the entire staff at the State Department after 9/11. Now these days, KGB defectors who are still breathing are a little hard to come by. But we tracked down one to a small town in Massachusetts. “Well, my original name was Ladislav Bittman.” These days, he goes by Larry Martin. He’s 87 years old. “It’s a collage — “ He likes to paint. “ — with Putin. And he was boasting about his riches.” And of course, he has a girlfriend down in Florida. “Hello!” “Hello, hello. I am still busy.” But back in the day, he was a director at one of the most legendary active measures outposts reporting to Moscow. And when it comes to bullshit, Larry’s done it all. His first ever con — “It was an operation to establish a whorehouse in Germany.” That was to catch politicians in compromising situations. And once, he even planted a treasure chest of Nazi papers at the bottom of a lake. “Now original Nazi documents.” That was to stir up anti-German sentiments. Larry’s expertise, though, was a special kind of bullshit, something called — “Disinformation. Basically, it means deliberately distorted information that is secretly leaked into the communication process in order to deceive and manipulate.” [dinging] All right. Just to avoid any confusion, let’s pause here quickly to unpack all these different flavors of bullshit. Now at the top, you’ve got your active measures, right? These are basically any kind of covert operations against another country short of starting a war. This includes forgeries and even kidnappings. But disinformation was the heart and soul of it for the KGB. You might be thinking, that’s just a fancy word for propaganda. But it’s not. Propaganda tries to convince us to believe something. Disinformation is a highly organized attempt to deceive us into believing it. Today, everyone calls this fake news. But that’s become such a loaded term — no thanks to this guy — that it’s basically useless. Anyway, we’ll get on to him later. All right, [dinging] let’s get back to it. Disinformation — it was such a big deal that every KGB agent was required to spend 25 percent of their time coming up with ideas for false stories. And in a year-end review — yes, KGB agents had year-end reviews, too — every agent was evaluated on — “How many proposals for disinformation operations he submitted.” “You’ve gotten to be fairly good at this when you were Czech intelligence, didn’t you?” “Unfortunately, I have to admit, yes.” Just how good were these guys? Well, that rumor that the C.I.A. shot J.F.K., the story about how the C.I.A. tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II, and the one about rich Americans buying poor kids from Latin America to harvest their organs — but as the first cases of AIDS spread fear around the world, the KGB saw an opportunity for their biggest con yet. [clicking] All right, so let’s go back to 1983. And we’re going to show you what really happened here. So remember this story started with an article in The Patriot newspaper? “‘AIDS, the deadly mysterious disease which has caused havoc in the U.S. is believed to be the result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons.’ There’s the crux of the crap.” It’s time you met Kathleen Bailey and Todd Leventhal. They were part of a U.S. government team that first pieced this story together back in the ’80s. [ding] “This is just the perfect example of a very effective disinformation campaign.” Well, almost perfect. There are some obvious grammar mistakes here, which tip off experts like Kathleen. Like, in English we’d say flu virus, not the virus flu. “So it’s written by a non-native English speaker. And it probably was written by a Russian-language speaker.” “They said, oh, the Indian newspaper, The Patriot — which we knew the KGB used this as an English language newspaper as a way to get stories out.” This was a classic Soviet tactic. Oleg Kalugin is another ex-KGB agent we found. He told us, they’d always try and place the story — “ — in a third-world country — ” — somewhere like — “ — say, in India, Thailand — ” — where journalists could be easily tricked or bribed. “So that gave the story acceptability when nobody was searching about the origin.” [music] The KGB let this story go quiet for a couple of years after India. But with AIDS still making scary headlines in ’85, they revived it, this time in a prominent Moscow newspaper. And the source for this story? You guessed it. [ding] It’s brilliant, really. They’ve repeated the story but concealed their hand, distancing themselves from the lie they started. So we’re now into 1986. And the KGB want to add gravitas to this lie. So they look around for a scientist, a human face, someone who could back up the lie with data. And no joke — this is the dude they found. This is Dr. Jakob Segal. Remember I said the reports had two authors? Well, here comes the co-author now. It’s his wife, Lilli. Believe it or not, these two wrote that report that claim to have evidence AIDS was created in a U.S. government lab. “This scientific gobbledygook — and you know, read this stuff, and who can understand it? But it purports to be proof.” The thing is, it worked. The KGB made sure the Segal report was read by journalists all over Africa. And they kept on pushing it until it went, well, viral. [ding] It’s appeared in 200 reports in 80 countries. Even The Daily Express in London runs with it. And finally, on March 30, 1987, the KGB hits the jackpot. “A Soviet military publication [echoing] claims the virus that causes AIDS leaked.” This campaign had a KGB code name. They called it, Operation Infection. “Good afternoon. I would like to begin the introduction to this report by stating that the U.S. image abroad is damaged. And U.S. foreign policy is complicated by disinformation. Wow. Huh. That’s a half a lifetime ago. This was handed out at a demonstration. I was so angry that they accused the United States of creating the AIDS virus, because I knew how effective that was going to be as a tool against us. And it angered me deeply. And it empowered me. It motivated me. It fired me up. I was pissed.” [music] Operation Infection, one of the most audacious and successful fake news stories ever created — and for America, the impact was toxic. “Foreign governments actually believed that the U.S. was creating this biological warfare agent. For them to think that damages their view of the United States not only as a culture, but it taints all of our policies. It’s in the back of their minds every time they discuss anything with us.” Now with so much at stake, you might be wondering what the U.S. response to this was. Well, you’re watching it. “The primary origin of disinformation about the United States abroad is the Soviet Union.” Kathleen and Todd were both part of something called the Active Measures Working Group. Nicknamed Truth Squads, it was a team that tracked and tried to expose Soviet disinformation. “Everybody was working part time on the issue.” “It was not funded lavishly.” “We all sat around a table once every week or two. And those who could volunteer their time to come in did.” Yup, that’s right. In the face of thousands of KGB agents with a multimillion-dollar budget, we had some part-time workers propping up poster boards on C-SPAN. “I see that it wasn’t very well attended. And I remember that now that I see this. But it did have an impact.” They didn’t have the budget or the time. But they were motivated by truth and did what they could, responding to the fire hose of falsehoods, calling them out, one lie at a time. “So they were working at this day, after day, after day. I think we were kept busy just knocking these things down.” But repeated exposure didn’t just lead to a couple of article corrections. Kathleen’s report exposing and debunking Operation Infection made its way right to the top of the Kremlin into the hands of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev himself. Secretary of State George Shultz was in the room when Gorby read it. “And you’re spreading all this bum dope about AIDS and the United States pushing it. And I said, come on. So we had a good, heated exchange. And there’s nothing wrong with that.” And days later, Gorbachev did the unthinkable. He bowed to pressure, apologized to President Ronald Reagan, and promised to stop spreading the fake AIDS story. “When we in the Active Measures Working Group heard about Gorbachev having read the reports — that’s cool. That is really cool. He couldn’t deny what we put in the report. And he didn’t deny it.” “Yet, it was the military who prevented the hard-line coup from succeeding.” “And then came the year 1989, 1990, when the Communist regime collapsed. Nobody believed that the Russians would continue using this weapon in future.” “Our government’s view was, problem solved.” As the Soviet Union was collapsing, Todd wrote this final report for Congress, a warning that would fall on deaf ears. “The formidable Soviet active measures and disinformation apparatus, which has manipulated world opinion for decades, has disintegrated. But many large fragments of their apparatus continue to exist and function, for the most part now under Russian, rather than Soviet sponsorship.” Don’t forget. KGB agents spent 25% of their time creating disinformation. And that was true of the entire agency during the Cold War, including a young agent from St. Petersburg who enrolled into the KGB in 1975 and who would one day go on to greater things. [music]

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We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-Internet era. Meet the KGB cons who invented it, and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.CreditCredit...The New York Times

The Pizzagate playbook: same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories.

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The Seven Commandments of Fake News

The Pizzagate playbook: Same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories. Pizza anyone?

“Co-exist!” May 21st, 2016 in Houston, Tex. This is an anti-Islam protest outside a mosque in the heart of downtown. “Our neighbors were slaughtered by these — ” And literally across the street, a counter-rally. “Pack it up!” “Take it home!” But not a single person here — on either side of the street — realizes they’ve been duped. They’ve been brought here — same place, same time — by two separate Facebook events, posts which we now know both came from the same source, thousands of miles outside Texas, in Russia. - [non-English speech] Cold War-style “active measures” in the American heartland in 2016. The same techniques, the same origin. Even the same perpetrators. “The military who prevented the hard-line coup from succeeding.” When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, pretty much everyone assumed that its disinformation apparatus died too. “Our government’s view was problem solved. No more active measures. No more disinformation.” It also meant the end of Vladimir Putin’s KGB career. But within a decade, he was back, first as head of the renamed KGB — the FSB — and not long after, as the president. “Putin is a child of the KGB. He spent years in the KGB being evaluated every year according to the active measures and disinformation he produced.” As soon as he took office, Putin got right to work. His first few years were spent testing disinformation inside Russia on Russians. But then he took it overseas, launching Russia Today, a global English-language news channel. It was soon available in millions of American homes with a memorable slogan and familiar faces. “I’ve been hearing about it. I’ve been reading about it.” Conflicts with Georgia, and then the Ukraine, gave Putin a chance to practice disinformation on a bigger stage, and he also started funding something called the Internet Research Agency, slowly putting his pieces into place. But Putin isn’t sowing all this chaos just for fun. All along, he’s had a single goal. See, in terms of population and G.D.P., Russia is actually a pretty small country, especially when compared to a unified Western world. But Putin knows that if he can pit the West against itself and break up our alliances, Russia is suddenly much more powerful and can take on other countries one by one. He’s trying to reshape the world order in his favor, and disinformation is one of his favorite tools. Now, to do this he’s using a carefully crafted game plan — a playbook of sorts — that he deploys again and again. “It’s magnificent in its conception.” “That playbook is designed to achieve a change in the behavior, perception and viewpoints of foreign audiences and governments.” Both Todd Leventhal and Kathleen Bailey fought Moscow’s disinformation more than 30 years ago for the U.S. government. “They are good.” And if you thought convincing millions of people that the U.S. government created AIDS as a biological weapon was audacious, wait til you see what they’re up to today. But first, we need to take a super-quick timeout here, because there’s an awkward question you might be asking yourself. “Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” “Hmm.” Yes, America is no stranger to interfering in other countries. “The U.S. has attempted to influence elections around the world for years.” But when it comes to disinformation, Russia is in a class by itself, with unmatched scale and sophistication. And unlike the U.S., with its myriad of investigations, Russia does it without even a shred of public or historical accountability. “We must never allow the end to justify the means.” O.K.? Time in. Now, do you remember Pizzagate, the one about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza parlor? It was everywhere just a few weeks before the 2016 election, and even inspired a believer to turn up at the restaurant with a gun. “A shooting in a D.C. pizza restaurant that was tied to a fake news story — ” But that whole story was a classic Soviet-style con, straight out of the playbook. “Look, there’s the playbook, and it’s been a playbook that’s been around for a very long time.” “And so they’re using that tool box in order to try and get what they want.” “So it’s a textbook thing that they’ve known about for 20, 30 years and actually taught as part of their tradecraft.” So this is textbook, tool box, playbook thing, whatever you want to call it, the experts we spoke to kept talking about it on these terms. Ed Lucas has studied Russia for decades. First as a journalist and now as a disinformation analyst. Dr. Claire Wardle is an authority on internet verification at Harvard. She’s been tracking online lies since 2008. And this is Clint Watts, former F.B.I. and military. He’s been shouting from the rooftops about disinformation for years. With the help of our experts, not to mention our spies and our detectives, we’ve reverse engineered the seven commandments of Russian disinformation, a time-tested, step-by-step recipe to creating the perfect fake news story. So rule No. 1, look for cracks in the target society, social divisions you can exploit and wedge open. “They look for economic, social, demographic, linguistic, regional, ethnic, any source of division.” “And how can we actually emphasize those divisions and actually make people lose trust in one another.” “So it’s like being a doctor. You have to understand a patient. Oh, he’s got a bad knee. He’s got a sore hip. He’s got a disease that causes weakness here. But instead of trying to make it better, we try to make everything worse.” Rule 2, create a big, bold lie, something so outrageous no one could possibly believe it was made up. “Also, so egregious that if they could get people to believe it, it would be totally damning.” Rule No. 3, wrap that lie around a kernel of truth. “Propaganda is most effective when there’s a little bit of truth in it.” “The most successful operations of that kind contain some truthful element so that the disinformation is eventually accepted as a whole.” Rule 4, conceal your hands, making it seem like the story came from somewhere else. “Nobody was searching about the origin, how it started, who published the story first. This was, of course, a method then repeated again and again.” Rule No. 5, find yourself a useful idiot. “Useful idiots are essentially people they would identify who unwittingly will take the Kremlin’s message and push it into the target audience, the foreign population they want to reach.” “They were idiots in that they didn’t see what was obvious, and they were very useful.” And what happens when those pesky truth-seekers try and debunk your fake story? Well, Rule 6 has you covered. “Deny, deny, deny. Even if the truth is obvious, yet deny, deny, deny.” “They will bluster their way out of things, because they’ve realized that our attention span is quite short.” And finally — and this is a really important one- play the long game. “Russia’s willing to play a long game, put large resources into things that may not bear fruit for many years to come.” “The accumulation of these operations over a long period of time will result in a major political impact.” “And if you think about it as a drip on a rock, today the drip doesn’t have any impact. If that drip hits for a long period of time — years — there will be a hole in the rock. And they know that.” These seven simple rules were a powerful weapon for the KGB, and they applied them again and again and again. But then something came along which changed the game entirely. “The internet has brought anonymity, ubiquity and immediacy in combinations that we didn’t have in the era of telex machines, and shortwave radio, and rotary printing presses.” “During the time of my involvement, one operation can reach maybe 100,000 people if the paper had a nice circulation. Now that’s ridiculous.” And with the internet’s help, Russia has scored some big wins. The explosion at the Louisiana chemical plant that was caused by ISIS. The deadly phosphorous leak in American Falls, Idaho, and the list goes on and on. There’s the claim MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets. The thousands of Americans who supposedly petitioned to return Alaska to Russia. There’s the queen warning of a third world war. The Syrian massacre that never happened. Sweden adopting the Islamic State flag. A made-up attack on a U.S. Air Force base. Roy Moore, Brexit, immigration. And in stories that will sound eerily familiar, there’s the claims the U.S. was behind the Ebola outbreak and the Zika virus. From Black Lives Matter, to the gun lobby, wherever there’s been a division in society, Russia has used disinformation to pry it open, sowing chaos across the political spectrum. And now that you know the rules of the playbook, you can see how effective a weapon it really is. Pizza, anyone? To understand what really happened here, we need to go back to March 19, 2016, and just here, actually, Washington, D.C. This is the time and the place where hackers got into the Gmail account of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. “So the Podesta emails were the information, the power, the Pizzagate conspiracy.” And you can guess who was behind the hacking of those emails. “Tied to the Russian intelligence services.” Big surprise. In fact, we now know the hacker worked directly for the G.R.U., Russia’s C.I.A. The divisive 2016 election was the perfect crack to wedge open with disinformation and, well, the lies don’t get much bigger than a presidential candidate running a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza parlor. The playbook says you should mix little bits of truth into your lie and John Podesta’s emails provided loads of factual details to weave into the story. Comet Pizza’s a real place, and there were emails between Podesta and the restaurant’s owner. Rule 4 says you need a way to conceal your hand. Well, six months later — “WikiLeaks posted more than 2,000 additional emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta.” Using WikiLeaks was a genius idea, helping to keep its hackers in the shadows. Meanwhile, Russia continues to push the story with fringe social media accounts, all run from the Internet Research Agency. “Over 50,000 accounts communicated automatically and in synchronization we’ve never seen in the history of social media.” Meanwhile, there were no shortage of useful idiots who were duped into backing up the lie. “Pizzagate is real. The question is, how real is it? What is it? Something’s going on. Something’s being covered up.” Now, the story should be laughably easy to debunk. For a start, the pizza restaurant in question doesn’t even have a basement. But there’s a rule for that. “Deny, deny, deny.” So when intelligence exposed Russia’s WikiLeaks connection, WikiLeaks and RT knew exactly what to do. “We can say that the Russian government is not the source.” “Despite there being no evidence to prove this, Isn’t it nice to have your own TV channel? “If I had to rewrite RT’s slogan, it’d be question more, answer less.” “80 percent of their coverage is actually excellent coverage. And because 80 percent of the time they’re doing quality journalism, when 20 percent of the time they’re not, then it enables people to say, well, no, look at this. We are journalists. We have policies. We know what we’re doing.” With days to go before the election, the story had taken on a life of its own, the magnificent long game beginning to pay off. That said, even Russia couldn’t have imagined what came next. “A shooting in a D.C. pizza restaurant — ” Two insane lies, 30 years apart. One story took six years to take hold, the other barely six months. But they both share the same DNA, the same unmistakable trace of active measures and the same goal, to shift the world’s balance of power by turning Western countries on themselves. We’re at war, and we’ve got absolutely no idea. “Those were Russians.” “They were not Russians. I don’t go with the Russians.” And we’re facing a sophisticated weapon designed to bring down democracies from the inside, just as the KGB envisioned all those years ago. “Fighting war on the battlefield is the most stupid and primitive way of fighting a war. The highest art of warfare is not to fight at all, but to subvert anything of value in your enemy’s country, anything. Put white against black, old against young, I don’t know, wealth against poor, and so on. Doesn’t matter. As long as it disturbs society, as long as it cuts the moral fiber of a nation, it’s good.” “The virus that causes AIDS leaked.” “An assault rifle targeting a Washington, D.C. spot — ” “And then you just take this country when everything is subverted, when the country’s disoriented and confused. When it is demoralized and then destabilized, then the crisis will come.”

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The Pizzagate playbook: Same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories. Pizza anyone?CreditCredit...The New York Times

Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.

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The Worldwide War on Truth

Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.

[buzzing] [static] [laughter] It’s time to fight back against disinformation. But these are the people leading the charge. “Can you please explain to us the difference between a bot and a troll?” “Is Twitter the same as what you do?” “You can look at a lot of gray hair and realize that my technology capabilities are very shallow.” Not very encouraging, is it? But this isn’t the first time the U.S. government has been asleep at the wheel on this. “Mr. Allen, how can we compete with this Communist propaganda?” You know now that Russia has been attacking the U.S. like this since the ’50s, but did you know that for the first 30 years of that, no one in the U.S. government took it seriously? “There was not a very high awareness of disinformation or “active measures.” So there was a tendency to want to keep the waters smooth.” “They use all the means of communication.” The thinking went, if you respond to a fake story, you dignify it. “I don’t think we grasped it intellectually.” Then, in 1980, a new cowboy rode into town. [pow] “Ronald Reagan — his point of view was we ought to be bold. We ought to tell the truth.” [dramatic chords] “Truth ought to be put front and center, and that if somebody were speaking the opposite, we ought to expose it.” “Get up!” “Presidents are very important.” “To the danger of espionage is added active measures, designed to subvert and deceive, to disinform the public opinion upon which our democracies are built.” Reagan created the Active Measures Working Group. You know, that government truth squad, which Kathleen Bailey led from 1985 to ’87. “I came at the problem believing that I could grab the tiger by the tail and whirl it over my head. I was going to win.” They brought down the AIDS myth — Operation Infection, one of the greatest disinformation campaigns ever created. Proof that the best defense against disinformation is exposing it. Well, actually, it’s not that simple. “ — and I know the government administer AIDS — ” Decades later, surveys have found that millions of Americans still believe AIDS was cooked up by the U.S. government. The lie lives on in our music, on TV — “My parents believe the government created H.I.V. in a lab, and the C.I.A. spread it in the prisons to kill blacks and gays.” — in comics, on YouTube, even in churches. “ — weaponize pathogens to hit selected groups of humans.” Fighting disinformation, it’s like a nightmarish game of whack-a-mole. No matter what you do, the lies just keep popping up — “ — biochemists create ethnospecific epidemics, injecting the public in clinics, then when — ” — all of which makes us wonder, do we really stand a chance against disinformation? Or is this a virus that can never be cured? “It ain’t little green monkeys, it’s little white honkies, crossing bovine leukemia — “ [music] Mark Twain once said, “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.” [ding] Except even that’s a lie. That quote’s been attributed to loads of people. But whoever said it was right. We know now empirically that lies do have an unfair advantage over the truth, spreading further and faster, gaining traction every time they’re repeated. “Repetition is part of the game, and the more a bad story is repeated — repeated, repeated, repeated — the more real it becomes to everyone.” But Twain’s “around the world” part is also true. This is a global problem. In Iran, the government’s deploying their own version of the Soviet playbook, calling their operation “nefak” which is Farsi for “discord.” Myanmar’s been brewing up endless conspiracy theories to justify ethnic cleansing. And in Pakistan, the establishment sees C.I.A. plots everywhere. That last one even ensnared one of our own journalists here at The New York Times — an experience that was so upsetting to him, it led him to make the film you’re watching right now. Isn’t that right, Adam? “That’s right. I was living in Pakistan. Al Qaeda accused me of being part of a C.I.A. anti-Islam plot. See, conspiracy theories are kind of like a national sport over there. And even today, I still get blasted on Twitter for being either a C.I.A. spy or a dead terrorist.” Wait. A dead terrorist? “One of the country’s most popular TV talk show hosts accused me of being one of the attackers in a school massacre that murdered dozens of children. Here I am, dead, in the Pakistani press. But this stuff is kind of normal over there. I mean, it happens all the time. What I never imagined is that we’d be seeing this kind of toxic disinformation here at home in the States.” So is there anything we can do? “I think so. I also used to live in Eastern Europe.” [polka music] “Estonia, Ukraine — they lag behind us in many things. But when it comes to fighting disinformation, there’s so much we can learn from them.” For instance, if you turn on the TV in Latvia on a Sunday night, you’ll see this. A prime-time show all about Russian lies. In the same slot where we’d be watching “American Idol,” folks in Riga are tuning in to watch the latest disinformation be systematically described, debunked and destroyed. It’s not just Latvia. Ukraine has a bilingual stop-fake-news show broadcast by dozens of TV stations. “Disinformation never stops, and neither do we. Welcome to “Stop Fake,” the place where — ” The Czech government monitors disinformation as a form of terrorism. Lithuania has thousands of volunteer cyber-warriors — they call them elves — who relentlessly troll the Russian trolls. And in Estonia, there’s a kind of digital national guard — thousands of volunteers who, among other things, fight disinformation. “The countries that have been exposed to this the longest are the best at dealing with it. They see things we don’t see. They smell things we don’t smell.” Meanwhile back here, we’re just learning the hard way what happens when we don’t fight back. “The Pizzagate conspiracy — no journalist was going to actively debunk that because they didn’t think that anybody truly believed that. We now know that they did, and actually it seems that we should have done more coverage during the election that there was a rumor circulating, and let’s debunk it.” So this is the prescription, right? Fact-checking. Media literacy. Engaged citizens rallying around good journalism to create a culture of critical thinking. [buzzer] Ah, who are we kidding? Media literacy is great and all, but we need something way stronger. And for that, we’ve got to talk about the responsibility of this guy. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube — they were designed primarily by a group of quite young people, mostly men, on the West Coast of the U.S., in Silicon Valley.” “I think there’s a lot of people who went into the tech industry because they were very, very good at tech, not because they were good at civics or political science.” “And they really believed that they were building technology that would connect the world and would actually be a positive force in society.” Well, naivety eventually morphed into flat-out denial. “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth — ” The platforms have spent years shamefully ignoring information warfare. “The ads and posts we are here today to discuss — ” “ — the number of accounts we could link to Russia — ” “ — relatively limited.” “ — comparatively small — “ “We’re a very small fraction of the overall content on Facebook.” “There’s still a level of astonishing, kind of political and cultural illiteracy where they think connecting people is good.” So what exactly are they supposed to be doing? Well, there’s no silver bullet, but there are a ton of ideas for things they could be doing, from improving transparency — “ — about who’s paying for posts.” — to fighting anonymity — “Is there a real person behind this account? Is there a real person behind this platform?” — to helping us know whether we can trust what we’re reading — “ — a nutritional label on sources in your Google Search findings — “ — and getting serious about punishing violators. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I’m sorry.” Now, companies like Facebook have recently been taking some baby steps along these lines — [ticking] — but don’t get your hopes up. Social media platforms are dependent on the emotional hyperpartisan stories that make great disinformation. The bottom line — [cash register] — their business models are riddled with perverse incentives. “If I am Twitter, and I have shareholders to keep happy, and I have to go back to my shareholders and tell them how many active monthly users I have, and the truth is that 22 percent of them are not human, I don’t actually want to tell my shareholders that. I want to give them a lovely big number that means that we still have value and that we still make money.” And that’s the problem — asking just isn’t enough. We’ve got to force the platforms to change. And that means regulation. That’s right. It’s time for Uncle Sam to get in the game. [sirens] The problem is, Uncle Sam knows how to mobilize when we get attacked like this, but when the warfare is digital, well, you know — “There are days when I wonder if the Facebook friends is a little misstated. It doesn’t seem like I have those every single day.” “How many data categories do you store — does Facebook store?” “Senator, can you clarify what you mean by data categories?” These are the people who are supposed to be protecting you from information warfare. “Do you store any?” “Senator, I’m not actually sure what that is referring to.” “Yeah. So I’ve testified five times to the Senate, either about terrorism or Russian active measures. There is a very diverse level of understanding of social media.” “ — have people say, well, yeah, because my 13-year-old son, you should see how he uses it.” “Now, my son, Charlie, who’s 13, is dedicated to Instagram, so — ” “I feel very fortunate that I have not had to go to the House to testify. I think it would be a giant waste of time.” “ — to disinform the public opinion upon which our democracies are built.” History tells us that the fight against disinformation starts with strong leadership. And I’ve got to to tell you, we’ve been let down on this for a long time. Now, I’m not talking about him just yet. I’m talking about him. “Americans and Russians share common interests that form a basis for cooperation.” “It was really hard to get the Obama administration to take Russia seriously as an issue.” “We could have looked at sanctions earlier. We could have talked about measured cyber-counterattacks, or even diplomatic negotiations. But that didn’t really happen. The Obama administration kind of got played into a box by recognizing it too late.” Obama actually signed an executive order to counter foreign disinformation, but he was so obsessed with the threat from ISIS, its mandate only covered terror groups. State actors, like Russia, were free to carry on unimpeded. To his credit, Trump actually reversed this, and some people in his administration are talking tough. “Russia is known for its disinformation campaigns.” But the higher up you go, let’s just say, the less enthusiasm there is. “The point is, if it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that. We can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they’re going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.” So what has been done? Well, Congress put aside $120 million to fund our defense against disinformation. The Trump administration sat on it silently for 18 months. And when they did release it, they gave just a third of it. Not much of a counterstrike, is it? I mean, where’s the urgency here? These Russian attacks were first plotted way back in early 2014, and we’re only now coming to grips with them. “We are still playing catch-up from a long way behind. We are looking in the rearview mirror, getting less bad at working out what Russia just did to us. We’re still not looking through the windshield, find out what’s happening right now and what’s going to be happening next.” This is one of the great unsolved policy questions of our time. A functioning government would at least come together to publish full detailed reports of all these attacks. [drumroll] But the problem isn’t just our lackluster government. It’s actually much scarier than that, because now the threat is coming from inside the White House. It’s finally time to meet President Disinformation. [dramatic music] Donald Trump is a one-man wrecking crew for the truth, and he knows all the moves. First, there’s Trump the denier. And when it comes to disinformation, he even denies we’re being attacked. “And if it is Russia, which is probably not. Nobody knows who it is.” Never mind what his own officials say. “ — that information, manipulation, outright lies — ” “ — literally upped their game to the point where it’s having a significant impact.” Then there’s Trump the useful idiot. This is a man who’s never met a conspiracy theory he wouldn’t tweet. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden — Sweden! The same person votes many times. You’ve probably heard about that. They always like to say, oh, that’s a conspiracy theory. Not a conspiracy theory, folks.” We also know he shared stories originally planted by the Kremlin. I mean, not even the KGB could have dreamt up a useful idiot as prominent and powerful as Trump and his administration. And then there’s Trump the disinformation natural. He doesn’t just regurgitate this stuff, he invents his own. “It was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan. I said, wait a minute. There’s a lot of wiretapping being talked about. We’ve signed more bills — and I’m talking about through the legislature — than any president. ICE, they actually liberate towns. They liberate towns. We have become an energy exporter for the first time ever just recently.” [cheering] It’s weird, but this is somehow worse than the Cold War. Back then it was just us versus them. But now it’s us versus them, and us versus us. [sad music] Here’s the thing about democracies — they can’t function unless we all agree on a basic set of facts. We can’t debate anything — health care, immigration, gun control — unless we’re aligned — left and right — about what is actually true. Disinformation pollutes those waters, confusing us, so we end up debating facts instead of discovering solutions. And as we spiral downwards together, our adversaries applaud from behind the curtain. And here’s the kicker. The things that make democracy good, living in an open society with a free press and political diversity, those are the things — weirdly — that make us vulnerable. Any country with an authoritarian leader and limited freedom of speech, they’re the ones with the advantage right now, which kind of raises the question that maybe only history can answer. Can the good guys ever win? “You absolutely never win. Never.” “This problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.” “The next few years are going to be worse than the last few years.” “And they will continue using it, regardless of what we say here in the discussion, regardless of the outcome of the discussion and investigation.” “But we will not always be losers in this game. There will be victories here and there. It’s only when we quit the game, quit trying to expose them, that we lose. As long as we can expose them, they’re losing.” It’s like an exhausting never-ending game of whack-a-mole that we’ve got no choice but to play. We’ve got to find disinformation as best we can, whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. [ringing] We’re in this for the long haul, whether we like it or not. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” “ — in the mysterious murder of former D.N.C. staffer Seth Rich.” “And they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.” “ — who apparently was assassinated at 4 in the morning.” “The president still strongly feels that there was a large amount of voter fraud.” “The 9/11 hijackers are alive and well.” “People who are behaving like actors.” “The murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years.” “You had the NATO base in Turkey being under attack by terrorists.” “This is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power — ” “This video that you linked to appears to be a hoax.” “All we did was put out what he had on his internet.” [thump]

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Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.
Directors Adam B. Ellick Adam Westbrook Andrew Blackwell
Director of Photography Jonah M. Kessel
Executive Producer Adam B. Ellick
Assistant Producer Leah Varjacques
Editors Adam Westbrook Jonah M. Kessel
Animators Erica Gorochow Tom McCarten
Research Director Dahlia Kozlowsky
Design and Development Jessia Ma Aaron Byrd
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Adam Ellick and John Sipher, a former C.I.A. station chief, answered questions about Russian disinformation in a Reddit Ask Me Anything.

Adam B. Ellick is the director and executive producer of Opinion Video at The New York Times. He has produced Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy-winning video journalism.

  @aellick Facebook

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