Commentary: The Foreign Malign Influenced Election
Aggressive Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation enabled by digital platforms, AI, and a passive U.S. government
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The Foreign Malign Influenced Election
By Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard Co-CEO
Did Kamala Harris commit a hit and run accident in California leaving the victim paralyzed? Did Donald Trump declare that 9/11 was “the work of the U.S.?” Did Tim Walz groom young male students when he taught at a Minneapolis high school? These and many other false claims created by operatives of the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese governments to slur U.S. candidates, divide America, and pervert the country’s democratic process make this a foreign malign influenced election.
It’s no surprise that countries hostile to the West would take advantage of the open internet and new tools for spreading false claims far and wide. What’s more surprising is that those who could counter foreign influence — social media platforms, AI companies, and the U.S. government — haven’t done nearly enough to fight back.
Making it easy for disinformation: Compared with earlier elections, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X reduced their already inadequate efforts to inform their users of who’s feeding them the news or whether claims on their platforms are false and spread by hostile governments. When NewsGuard analysts debunked a claim made in a podcast by a Russian disinformation operator that Walz had sexually abused an exchange student from Kazakhstan, platforms such as Rumble and X continued carrying the podcast with no disclosure that the accusation was false. And AI companies have seen hostile governments use their tools to achieve instant scale. One example: Iran’s network of sites masquerading as local news sites with names such as Savannah Time use AI to write partisan commentaries falsely attributing them to American public figures.
The U.S. government is doing not nearly enough to inform Americans of the hostile campaigns targeting them. The intelligence community’s ambitiously named Foreign Malign Influence Center, which launched in 2019, has called out a few of these campaigns, but operates on a tight set of criteria, including that its findings need to start with intelligence findings rather than simply alerting Americans to false claims on the open internet emanating from hostile governments. Last week, the center did promote an alert on how “Russian actors manufactured and amplified” an AI-enhanced video falsely depicting election ballots being ripped up in Pennsylvania. But NewsGuard’s Election Misinformation Tracking Center now includes 55 other false claims just since September 1.
Last week, we made public our Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository as a way to explain in detail how Russian disinformation affecting elections works. John Mark Dougan is a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled as a fugitive to Moscow, where he has become perhaps its best-know disinformation operative.
From our introduction to the Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository: “His contributions to efforts directed from Moscow at the United States and other democracies are breathtaking in their range and scale — from producing phony documentaries about the Nord Stream Pipelines and a non-existent U.S.-funded bioweapons lab in Ukraine, to launching 171 websites posing as local news publishers that promote Russian hoaxes about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky being so corrupt that he was able to buy King Charles’s High Grove estate and Sting’s Tuscan vineyard, to promoting a series of stories charging vice presidential candidate and former school teacher Tim Walz with pedophilia, to threatening our co-CEO in a call to his unlisted home phone after a NewsGuard report resulted in some of Dougan’s disinformation videos being removed from YouTube.”
There have been tens of millions of views of this kind of foreign disinformation. While it’s impossible to know how much these false claims affect voters’ views of the candidates, it should be bipartisan policy to push back against any malign foreign influence. U.S. elections are for Americans, not for hostile governments to spread falsehoods about candidates and put their thumbs on the scale of the American democratic process.
Gordon Crovitz is the Co-CEO and Co-Editor-In-Chief of NewsGuard. Previously, he was publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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