Todd C. Helmus & Khrystyna Holynska
Introduction
Nation-states have increasingly turned to the sowing of false narratives and online influence operations as a tool of statecraft. The Oxford Internet Institute, for example, identified 81 nations that used government or political party actors to manipulate online opinions. This figure is up from 70 identified in 2019, 48 in 2018, and 28 in 2017.1 In addition, Diego Martin and colleagues documented a significant rise in the number of influence campaigns “advocating controversial viewpoints and spreading disinformation,” from 1 detected in 2011, to 18 and 16 in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Thirty such campaigns were ongoing as of 2020. Russia, Iran, and China key U.S. adversaries—were among the most prolific in authoring such campaigns.
With this rise in internet-enabled disinformation, we can already observe that warfare will not be immune from such efforts. Russia famously and systematically operationalized disinformation in its cold war against the United States.3 False narratives were a common refrain in the Syrian war and included false claims about the White Helmets, the Syrian humanitarian organization that worked to save victims of Syrian air strikes, as well as denials about Syrian use of chemical weapons.4 False narratives about the threats to Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and south of Ukraine fueled the annexation of Crimea and start of the war in Donbas.5 The Israeli war against Hamas, spurred by the October 7 Hamas attack against Israeli settlers, has also proved a breeding ground for false claims.6 Indeed, the 2,500-year-old maxim “In war, truth is the first casualty,” attributed to Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, remains as true as it ever was.
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