Foreign information manipulation remains an active tool in the hands of autocratic adversaries, especially Russia and China. The Russians have continued conducting targeted malign information operations in the United States, including a campaign that took advantage of artificial intelligence to discredit the U.S. Agency for International Development. During last year’s presidential election, Chinese state actors created fake social media users to influence the political debate inside the United States. The New York Times recently published a cautionary and credible article outlining how the Chinese could launch a major information operation to support aggression against Taiwan.
The good news is that the United States and Europe, in different ways, have identified means to mitigate the damage. The bad news is that the Trump administration has begun dismantling U.S. government assets that have finally started to deal with the problem.
When it comes to the fight against foreign information operations, the dumb approach for democracies to take is content control, or censorship. The better way is to focus on transparency, authenticity, and integrity. That means exposing foreign information operations and deceptive practices big and small — for example, identifying a foreign-origin propaganda campaign and exposing the practice of mislabeling a post as domestic when it is in fact foreign-sourced. It could mean asking social media platforms to be transparent about their practices to boost or limit some sorts of posts and to be open to outside researchers investigating internal procedures, including whether safeguards are operating as companies claim.
These are the defensive steps countries can take to protect themselves. But democracies also have options for going on the offensive, including fighting propaganda with real information and support for free media. Countries that are targeted can also hit back through sanctions and other financial tools, plus, when possible, through cyber operations. With the United States, hopefully only temporarily, taking itself out of the fight against foreign information manipulation, the European Union is poised to step up. As it does, however, it may find itself in yet another fight with the White House.
Progress, Finally
After an uneven start and hesitation, especially from the Obama administration in 2016, the U.S. government finally began tackling foreign information operations the right way. It organized itself to expose foreign information manipulation campaigns in something like real time, working with private sector digital researchers — groups that have grown in number and sophistication — and with key allies, including the EU, the United Kingdom, and members of the G7.
In 2018, under the Trump administration, U.S. Cyber Command issued a document stating that the United States would “defend forward” and “persistently contest” malicious cyber activity, including Russian and Chinese information operations. In 2019, the FBI set up its own shop to counter foreign malign influence. In 2022, the United States also established the U.S. Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), operating under the Director of National Intelligence, with the mission of identifying and exposing foreign (and only foreign) malign influence operations, defined as subversive, undeclared, coercive, or criminal activities. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), originally established under the Obama administration as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to combat Islamist extremism, which it did with uneven results, turned to combating foreign malign influence operations, working under a new and welcome congressional mandate from the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.
These outfits, with mandates from the first Trump administration and then the Biden White House, quickly produced results. Cyber Command attacked and temporarily disabled the notorious St. Petersburg “Internet Research Agency,” a troll farm that had been targeting the United States. The FMIC was active during the first Trump administration, publishing its “Notification Framework” that outlined criteria for notification of foreign interference. It hit its stride during the 2024 election cycle, publishing regular reports exposing foreign (again, only foreign) information manipulation operations and working with the Five-Eyes intelligence network of countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It also supported efforts by teams from the FBI and the Department of Justice to go after illegal activity associated with foreign influence campaigns. FMIC’s reports noted that Russian information operations generally favored then-candidate Trump while Iranian information operations tended to favor Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
The United States labeled purveyors of foreign information operations under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and even went further: in September 2024, the Department of Justice used FARA to indict two Russians employed by the Kremlin propaganda arm RT for illegal information manipulation operations. In September 2024, the Justice Department used money laundering and trademark laws to seize 32 internet domains used by the Russian government for malign information operations (known as “Doppelganger”); Treasury followed with parallel sanctions actions. These actions included the Sept. 5, 2024, indictment of Dimitri Simes, a well-known and prolific exponent of Kremlin policy, for sanctions violations on behalf of a Russian state-owned television network.
Energized by its new mission, the State Department’s GEC stepped up its efforts to expose Russian information operations around the world, funding efforts to identify and combat them and assembling an information “framework” of 21 countries to combat foreign-sourced information operations. The GEC was especially active in Africa, where it worked with local governments and exposed Russian information operations.
In sum, the U.S. government was, by the end of the Biden administration, pushing back on foreign information operations, the most sustained U.S. effort to do so since the Reagan administration took on what it called Soviet “active measures.”
Reaction and Reversal
The political support for continuing efforts to defend against foreign information operations, has considerably weakened under the second Trump administration, especially among Republicans.
Since 2016, much of the Trump political coalition has regarded focus on foreign, and especially Russian, malign information operations as a partisan attack on them. Some in Trump world — for example, Tucker Carlson — seem to have ideological affinity for Vladimir Putin’s form of rule; some may have concluded that Russian information operations in the United States were politically useful to them. In any case, action came fast. In his remarks announcing a State Department reorganization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the GEC of seeking “to censor speech it disagreed with.” At the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President JD Vance accused the Biden administration of having “bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.”
There are indeed examples of sloppy conflation of charges of “disinformation” with right-wing media. And norms for addressing the way social media platforms promote various stories should be refined and better developed. But wholesale accusations of censorship or that efforts to tackle foreign disinformation are pushed by a “censorship-industrial complex” seem more partisan hype than reality, especially when applied to U.S. government efforts to grapple with foreign malign information ops. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals (5th Circuit) found that while the White House and FBI had crossed a line in their contacts with social media companies regarding domestic-origin posts, the State Department’s contact with social media platforms did not go “beyond educating the platforms on ‘tools and techniques’ used by foreign actors.”
The attacks on efforts to combat foreign propaganda, however unjustified or exaggerated, have been effective. Although the GEC enjoyed bipartisan support at its creation, under pressure from some on the political right, its authorization was not renewed and it was closed in December 2024. Rubio shut down its follow-on office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, in April.
In February, the Department of Justice dissolved the FBI task force assigned to monitor foreign malign information operations. The White House has also cut programs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, which was expanded during the first Trump administration) that detected cyberattacks against election systems and broader infrastructure. Whatever the motive — lingering grievance over Trump’s loss in 2020, general aversion to taking on foreign information ops, or something else — the result has been to weaken U.S. defenses.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to shut down U.S. government-funded broadcasting: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Marti (with a Cuba focus), declaring their umbrella organization as “unnecessary,” without elaboration, and “the most corrupt agency in Washington, D.C,” again, without credible evidence or even detailed allegations. In fact, broadcasting has had a good record in helping the United States go from defense to offense as it fights China, Russia, and others in the information space. The political right’s attacks on these broadcasters is another about face, especially given the long support such efforts had enjoyed from conservatives (and the long skepticism in the 1960s and 1970s about RFE/RL from some on the political left).
Europe’s Forward-Leaning Approach
Europe’s efforts to tackle foreign malign influence operations have proceeded in a somewhat different direction. The EU’s closest counterpart to the FMIC is the unit of the EU External Action Service, its foreign ministry equivalent, devoted to countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). The EU’s FIMI outfit is tasked with exposing foreign influence operations, and, like FMIC, it wisely focuses not on content but on methods of malign influence operations. Its plans include developing the basis for sanctions against the most egregious purveyors of such manipulation and interference.
The EU has also regulated social media platforms to fight information manipulation. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), adopted in 2022, applies to social media platforms, mostly Chinese and American (foreign from an EU perspective). It seeks to apply standards of transparency to social media platforms’ algorithms, their regulation of political advertisements, content moderation, and social media checks on disinformation. Enforcement can include large fines. There has been no American equivalent to the European legislation nor, given the politics of the issue, is there likely to be for the foreseeable future.
The EU is seeking to enforce the DSA and has launched investigations of X , META, and TikTok, based on perceived weakness of X’s “community notes” to counter questionable information and perceived vulnerability of X’s blue check marks to deception; suspicion of deceptive advertising by META; and Tik-Tok’s measures — or lack thereof — to shield minors from harm on the platform and its violent and terrorist content. The EU regulatory approach has yet to be tested, but, if successful in crowding out foreign malign information operations, it could prove a basis for some regulatory fixes to social media.
Whether the EU regulatory approach can survive the Trump administration, however, is not yet clear. Tech billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk may fight EU regulatory strictures over X and may be able to enlist the power of the U.S. government to oppose them, a questionable use of public power to advance private interests. In his speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance attacked what he termed European “censorship,” an attack that is likely to be leveled against enforcement of the DSA.
At home, the U.S. government’s commitment to combat foreign malign information operations is very much in question. The issue is toxic within the administration, and personnel engaged in such efforts are being sidelined and pressured and then dismissed.
But those dismantling U.S. efforts to shape the global narrative should remember the U.S. history of countering foreign information operations. In the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used information operations against European democracies and the United States. These were seen at the time as successful, even triumphant. George Orwell wrote with despair that “history stopped in 1936,” by which he meant that Soviet propaganda was so effective that objective truth could no longer stand. Orwell could have been describing current pessimism about a “post-truth world” emerging in an age of manipulated social media and general demagoguery.
But Orwell’s pessimism proved wrong. Democracies found ways to deal with Stalinist propaganda in the early Cold War era. The United States moved from beleaguered defense to offense on the information side of the Cold War, partly through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcasted into the Soviet empire. Later, the United States supported underground free media, especially in Poland, through the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan-era creation. Dissidents at the time and after made clear that the news they received was of massive importance. The side of democracy ultimately won the information wars and the Cold War.
Today, it is easy to be pessimistic again. The United States and the EU had been trying, in complementary fashion, to grapple with a real problem. It took years for them to identify the most effective ways to deal with malign information operations in today’s chaotic media landscape. Just as they began to make progress, the political winds in the United States turned against those who want to tackle the problem in a way consistent with democratic values. This shift is paving the way for foreign propaganda and information operations to flourish, risking terrible damage to the American public’s understanding of the world. And it leaves Europe’s democracies to fight this problem without, for the time being, their American friends. Let’s hope the United States recovers itself before much more damage is done.
