The thing about a virus is it
doesn’t destroy you head on. Instead, it brings you
down from the inside, turning your own
cells into enemies. This story is about a virus — A virus created five
decades ago by a government to slowly and methodically
poison its enemies. But it’s not a
biological virus. It’s, uh, more like
a political one. And chances are, you’ve
already been infected. And yes, it’s also a
story about this 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 have used
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, it’s
actually really old. It’s just that once it went
by a very different name. - [russian] If you feel like 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? 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. A scientific report
is 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. “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 a global scale. And we’re going to show
you how it was pulled off. 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 percent 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 the abundance of information, no
one is able to come to sensible conclusions in
the interest 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. I am still busy.” But back in the day,
he was the 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.” 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 with 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. 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 US, 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. “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 say flu
virus, not the virus flu. “This was 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 uses 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 — “ — Japan — ” — or bribed. “That gave the
story acceptability when nobody was searching
about the origin.” The KGB let the 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. 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 wants 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
report 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 claimed to have
evidence AIDS was created in a U.S. government lab. “This scientific gobbledygook. And, you know,
you 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. 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 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 US
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.” 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 backs
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 all 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 had seen 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. 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 report — 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 the 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 percent 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 he would one
day go on to greater things. “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. “ — prevented the hardline
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 till 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?” “Mm — [mumbling]” 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 at 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 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 hand, 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, deny, deny, deny.” “They will bluster
their way out of it 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 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 phosphorus 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 US 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 that powered 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 into 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 the nation, it’s good.” “The virus that
causes AIDS leaked — “ “ — an assault rifle targeting
a Washington, DC spot.” “And then you just take this
country, when everything is subverted, when the country
is disoriented and confused, when it is demoralized
and then destabilized, then the crisis will come.” - [chuckling] 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 here 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’s been asleep at the wheel on this. “Mr. Allen, how
can we compete with this Communist propaganda?” We 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. “Ronald Reagan,
his point of view was, we ought to be bold. We ought to tell the truth. Truth ought to be
put front and center and that if somebody were
speaking the opposite, we ought to expose it.” “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, the government
Truth Squad which Kathleen Bailey led from 1985 to ’87. “I came out 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 creating
ethno-specific 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 — ” Mark Twain once said, “A lie
is halfway around the world before the truth has
even got its boots on.” 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. 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 primetime 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. And 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
volunteers 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, engage
citizens rallying around good journalism
to create a culture of critical thinking. 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, naivete 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 — “ “Were 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. But don’t get your hopes up. Social media platforms
are dependent on the emotional
hyperpartisan stories that make great disinformation. The bottom line,
their business models are riddled with
perverse incentives. “If I’m 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. 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 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 — “ 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.” “You 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
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 mandates
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 preempt 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 rear view mirror, getting less bad
at working out what Russia just did to us. We’re still not looking
through the windshield to 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. But the problem isn’t just
our lackluster governments. 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. 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 it’s probably not. Nobody knows who it is.” Never mind what his
own officials say. “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 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 dreamed 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. They actually liberate towns. They liberate towns. We have become an energy
exporter for the first time ever just recently.” 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. 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 applauds
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 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 fight
disinformation as best we can,
whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. 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.” “The mysterious
murder of former D.N.C. staffer, Seth Rich.” “And there were
the masterminds behind the Bowling
Green massacre.” “So apparently he 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 its
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.”
Interesting stuff
You should cross post to r/documentaries
Quick, vote this video up while the Russian Trolls are still asleep.
You can see this being done on reddit right now, in an attempt to pit America (and Canada) against China. It's undoubtedly likewise being done on Chinese forums.
Except they have a puppet in the White House dictating foreign policy to add further credibility to the disinformation (and in some cases make it a reality).