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Abstract

America is in a state of persistent competition with nation-state adversaries, including Russia and China, which seek to subvert the post-WWII rules-based international order and undermine American legitimacy abroad. Some of this competition takes place through traditional statecraft and across each of the instruments of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. However, much of this competition also takes place in the gray zone, defined as a spectrum between the higher threshold of armed conflict and the lower threshold of ordinary statecraft. In other words, while all relations between nations involve degrees of leverage and relative advantage, gray zone conflict is best understood as a state of hostilities in which the means and methods involved are restrained in such a way as to avoid escalation to outright armed conflict. Among these gray zone tactics, arguably none has caused greater harm over the last decade than disinformation. Foreign disinformation is defined as false or misleading information deliberately created or spread by foreign actors to deceive the public. Infamously, the Russian government conducted “sweeping and systemic” influence operations against the United States during the 2016 presidential election to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, divide American citizens, and weaken a potential Hillary Clinton presidency.  Although Russia’s engagement in political warfare is anything but new, the fallout from the 2016 election triggered a seismic shift in American strategic priorities and elevated the threat of Russian information operations in the American public’s consciousness. As part of the strategic response to the threat of disinformation, the U.S. government has adopted a whole-of-government approach that includes significant activity by the Departments of State (DOS), War (DOW), Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DOJ), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), respectively. However, despite ample attention and resources, these counter-disinformation efforts have encountered two distinct but related obstacles. First, because the most effective disinformation is typically grounded in partial truths or intended to exacerbate genuine social tensions within the target population, efforts to counter or label disinformation can take on a partisan political character, thereby losing legitimacy. Second, the First Amendment, which includes the right to receive ideas as a corollary of the recipient’s “meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom,” limits the ability of the U.S. government to combat disinformation through the regulation of third-party social media platforms or by directly targeting foreign malign influence campaigns. 

This article argues that although disinformation is indeed a critical threat to national security, transparency should be the guiding principle in how the United States confronts it. In some contexts, transparency means exposing hidden hands or unmasking foreign actors behind online influence campaigns rather than censoring content based on viewpoint. In other contexts, transparency involves the government publicly disclosing its efforts to influence content moderation policies by third-party social media platforms or other entities. Finally, this article examines the potential for open-source research, characterized by transparency in sources and methods, as an underrealized avenue for the DOW or other agencies to conduct information operations abroad and for traditional media to build greater information literacy domestically. Although the United States’ and other open societies’ commitment to free speech, independent press, and individual privacy creates distinct disadvantages in competition with autocratic societies in the information environment, such openness also represents their best defense. Ultimately, greater transparency in how the United States wages the information war is not only consistent with laws and values favoring a “light-touch regulatory scheme over the internet, one free of government interference and intrusion,” but also vital for inculcating critical thinking and building resilience to foreign malign influence in the general public.

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