Trump has made it nearly impossible to formulate a policy against disinformation
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Version 0 of 1. ONE ENTITY is most likely to know when a campaign is the target of a disinformation operation: the campaign itself. But retaliating against an army of invisible enemies isn’t exactly an easy task — especially without an army of your own. The lies and propaganda that ran amok on the Internet during the last election cycle still appear to be sprinting: Misleading political posts have already topped 158 million views this year. The New York Times reports that few, if any, 2020 candidates have employed teams devoted to rooting out this malicious content. The reality is a little more complicated. The Democratic National Committee says campaigns do have staff devoted to rooting out malicious content. The question is where exactly those individuals are leading: fully staffed war rooms that spend their days drawing up battle plans, a hodgepodge of staffers pulled in multiple directions or something in between? Even bids for federal office are constantly cash-hungry, and local-level hopefuls have a harder time still mustering the resources to carry out any but the most essential functions. The problem is that tracking disinformation has become one of those essentials, with foreign enemies following in Russia’s meddling fingerprints, and domestic actors who refuse to respect free and fair elections close behind. That puts campaigns in a tough spot. It’s also discouraging to mount a truth offensive when companies refuse to fact-check even the political advertisements they accept money to promote: Former vice president Joe Biden did report an ad relying on a conspiracy theory, after all, and Facebook didn’t help. These failures in firms’ policies mean even smart steps like those recommended this week by the DNC, such as developing plans in advance to deal with viral falsehoods, will land campaigns only in a constant game of catch-up. The committee is helping by providing campaigns with trainings, disinformation detection tools and points of contact at social media companies. But the committee has focused more on arming candidates than on taking up arms itself — by acting as an official conduit between campaigns and companies, say, or conducting more counterspeech on campaigns’ behalf. That’s in part because party committees are overwhelmed, too. This is, as the DNC stresses, a whole-of-society problem — yet one of society’s crucial components is glaringly missing. President Trump has made it nigh impossible for the government to formulate a comprehensive policy: leaving any explicit mention of Internet disinformation out of a signature executive order imposing sanctions on meddlers, refusing to lead a Cabinet meeting on election security, spreading Russian conspiracy theories from the bully pulpit. Campaigns, committees and companies now must figure out for themselves how best to safeguard democracy. Read more: The Post’s View: The U.S. still hasn’t done nearly enough to stop election interference Renee DiResta, Michael McFaul and Alex Stamos: Here’s how Russia will attack the 2020 election. We’re still not ready. Emerson T. Brooking: Russians are meddling in the Democratic primary. Is anyone paying attention? Michael McFaul: A high-level Senate report confirms it: Our elections still aren’t safe |