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Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do about It

Richard Stengel

4.09 · Rating details · 53 ratings · 18 reviews

Disinformation is as old as humanity. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But the rise of social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious in our current era. In a disturbing turn of events, governments are increasingly using disinformation to create their own false narratives, and democracies are ...more

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Hardcover, 368 pages

Published October 8th 2019 by Atlantic Monthly Press

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Sep 02, 2019 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it

3.5 If you are one, like myself, who wonders why our government is slow to act, seemingly taking forever to get anything done, this is the book to read. Chronicling his time in the state department, he shows the many divisions, turf wars, constant meetings where little is accomplished, he shows how hard it is to put any new programs into place. He also shows how disinformation is put in place, ads targeted to specific audiences, who spread these false beliefs. He talks of the dark web and its ...more

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Sep 30, 2019 Venky rated it really liked it

Shelves: information-technology-ai

Gleb Olegovich Pavlovsky a Russian political scientist and a self-proclaimed “political technologist”) once famously exclaimed that to get people to vote the way you want, “you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.” Who better to assimilate this fact than Richard Stengel. Mr. Stengel, in his capacity as the longest serving Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in American history (2013-16) spent his entire tenure directing all resources at his Gleb Olegovich Pavlovsky a Russian political scientist and a self-proclaimed “political technologist”) once famously exclaimed that to get people to vote the way you want, “you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.” Who better to assimilate this fact than Richard Stengel. Mr. Stengel, in his capacity as the longest serving Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in American history (2013-16) spent his entire tenure directing all resources at his disposal to counter the threat of global disinformation.

In a hard-as-nails, quasi memoir Mr. Stengel regales his readers as in a quest to combat the plague of disinformation, he unwittingly locks horns with two of the deadliest purveyors of the tradecraft of disinformation. No.55 Savushkin Street in St Petersburg, four story limestone building with neither razzmatazz nor name was the very motherlode of disinformation. The machines of propaganda were lubricated and greased in this otherwise nondescript building. No.55 Savushkin was Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s “troll factory.” Registered to the “Internet Research Agency”, “a shadowy Russian company that seems to do everything from creating sock puppets to practicing cyber vandalism…every day, in two shifts, a few hundred young people spend their time writing blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, VKontakte posts and much more.” Spewing out thousands of content or rather malcontent at a speed which would put the reproduction of rabbits to utter shame, this troll farm was the veritable synonym of malicious disinformation.

As Mr. Stengel reveals in startling detail, the other most insidious source of disinformation emanated from a less tranquil but unlikeliest of settings. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Iraq and Levant (“ISIL” a.k.a “ISIS”) may not strike one as popular mediums of news enjoying stellar ratings. Yet, the two most murderous terror outfits wreaking mayhem across the globe, also double up as genius peddlers of disinformation. As Mr. Stengler, was briefed by a senior intelligence officer, who employed an element of morbid humour for added effect, “ISIS is a distributed network. Al-Qaeda is Yahoo. ISIS is Google.” As Mr. Stengel explains, the twin kingpins of terror while not slaughtering civilians in Syria or reducing cities to a rubble in Iraq, were busy circulating English language magazines. While Al-Qaeda’s online publication was – ironically titled “Inspire”, ISIS’s competing offering was named “Dabiq.” Writing about Dabiq, Mr. Stengel says, “it was a digital publication…it actually had a pretty sophisticated layout and decent pictures…. the two publications debated each other about Islamic theory. They were like the Time and Newsweek of medieval Islamic theology.” Incidentally before accepting a job with the State, Mr. Stengel was Time ‘s 16th Managing Editor from 2006 to 2013.

Attempting to combat the pernicious princes of fake news, let alone conquering them, as Mr. Stengel realised was an unenviable if not an insurmountable task. To add insult to injury, the weapons available in his arsenal was turning out to be woefully inadequate. The State was grossly ill-quipped to deal with the sophistry and chicanery of both the Russians and the reprehensible terrorists. As Mr. Stengel elucidates, the actual canary in the coal mine was not the physical war and bloodshed but the information war that was engulfing and enveloping the digital world in a sweep, all encompassing. When Putin’s special Spetsnaz forces invaded Crimea, backed by a narrative of white lies and brazen denial, they were merely paying obeisance to the principles of Igor Panarin and Alexander Dugin, Russia’s two primary theorists of information warfare. Dugin, popularly known as “Putin’s Rasputin” coined the term “netcentric warfare”, a military line of effort. Hand in glove with the digital propaganda machine was RT the English language Russian TV channel. Conceived by former media minister Mikhail Lesin, and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s press spokesperson Aleksei Gromov, RT in the words of Mr. Stengel, “used all the traditional tricks of tabloid TV: attractive anchors, colourful graphics, wacky guests, sensational chyrons.” Even Julian Assange was provided a TV segment for his hosting. However, at the helm of all this glitz and glamour is Margarita Simonovna Simonyan, editor-in-chief and master orchestrator of the disinformation campaign.

Similar was the strategy adopted by ISIS. Their suave imagery, magnetic resonance and the affiliation towards a cause acted as an irresistible lure to the youth to either join them in their homicidal escapades or to essay the role of Lone Rangers in wreaking havoc through individual acts of mindless mass shooting and suicide bombings. Someone even termed ISIS the Muslim version of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

With a view to countering the “Russification”, and radicalization of the world, Mr. Stengel undertakes some bold and ingenious steps. In addition to creating and overseeing the Global Engagement Center, the United States’ only stand-alone anti-ISIL messaging entity., he also co-opted foreign allies in establishing the Sawab Center in Abu Dhabi. Initially nursing honest ambitions, the Sawab Centre has become a model organization for disseminating anti-ISIL messages and campaigns. The Under Secretary also oversaw the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program is a competitive. This was a merit-based scholarship program funded by the U.S. Department of State. FLEX students who pass multiple rounds of testing earn a scholarship to spend an academic year in the United States living with a volunteer host family and attending a U.S. high school. Unfortunately, Russia prohibited its students from enrolling in the FLEX programme following a false allegation of the abduction of a Russian boy, who was part of the FLEX programme.

Even while dealing with a subject as serious as that of disinformation, Mr. Stengel juxtaposes a blend of sardonic wit with dollops of wisdom. For example, while describing the filtering process to which Mr. Stengel was subjected to before being cleared for service as the Under Secretary of State. “For the SF86 and the Senate Foreign Relations Questionnaire, you have to list every foreign trip you have taken over the past 14 years, every significant relationship you had with any foreign national on the trip, and to the best of your ability, an estimate of how much you drank on these trips, Oh, and whether you had any illegal drugs.”

Mr. Stengel also recounts a painfully embarrassing personal encounter while experimenting with 140 characters on Twitter. Tweeting in a fit of fury about the downing of MH-17, a Malaysian Airlines commercial jet with 298 passengers aboard, by Ukraine separatists, who fired a Russian made BUK missile at it, Mr. Stengler overcome by rage, expresses his disgust on the incident. However instead of employing the hash tag #UnitedForUkraine, he falls prey to the auto-complete function and chooses the first hash tag to appear on screen. Thus #UnitedforGaza instead of #UnitedforUkraine. As may be expected, even though he deletes the tweet subsequently, he gets panned on Twitter by Twitterati, of silly and sublime breed alike.

So long as there are warring factions with entrenched beliefs in their ideologies however manic or senseless, the armoury of disinformation will not be lacking in myriad weapons. This has been evidenced in eviscerating detail by the Trump campaign and the Russian involvement in it. However, hope quelling maliciousness is brought to bear, courtesy, the indefatigable efforts of intrepid people, the likes of Richard Stengel. ...more

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Nov 22, 2019 Cary Giese rated it it was amazing

My five star rating of this book is based on the last chapter!

Before the last chapter the book chronicled the goings-on in government as the various interested parties grappled with counter messaging verses ISIS, the Russians, and others. They were struggling to get partners and develope a strategy for global response centers around the world. Bureaucratic ownership of the issue slowed the process but eventually a clear understanding of what to do and who is to do it evolved.

I was reminded that ...more

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Nov 11, 2019 Himanshu Modi rated it liked it

Shelves: memoir, non-fiction, politics, globalisation, terrorism, psychology

Richard Stengel, as a former editor of TIME, sure knows how to put out an headline to grab attention. The title was what drew me to the book in the first place. It was definitely more appealing than the alternative, more accurate title: Richard Stengel (Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy) - A Memoir.

No, I would not have picked a memoir of a government official. Unless he was going to go all-out and put out stories like Snowden or Assange, the book would be a bit of indulgent Richard Stengel, as a former editor of TIME, sure knows how to put out an headline to grab attention. The title was what drew me to the book in the first place. It was definitely more appealing than the alternative, more accurate title: Richard Stengel (Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy) - A Memoir.

No, I would not have picked a memoir of a government official. Unless he was going to go all-out and put out stories like Snowden or Assange, the book would be a bit of indulgent reminiscing by an ex-government official, or an exercise in Diplomacy and Public Relations itself. Or so I would have assumed.

Regardless, I think the book was quite ok in the end. Stengel's reminiscing is not of the romantic-nostalgia kind. If anything, the Dilbert like damning of the office culture in the US Government was actually funny. A government body putting out a yeah-right kind of a sarcastic video to tell potential jihadists to NOT join ISIS is the kind of grim humor I did not expect going in the book. Or the labyrinthine corridors in the offices of Governments. They definitely had a I-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-that quality to it.

Stengel's background does mean that he knows how to weave a story to capture the attention of a reader. But it felt like he took the task of organizing a whole book worth of material, akin to editing a magazine article. That didn't work very well. For one, there were the constant jumps between Russian, ISIS and towards the end, Trump's disinformation. Plus there were always the personal experiences, since this really is a memoir. While you can follow the train of thought, the book feels like a collection of loosely connected anecdotes.

That perhaps was my biggest gripe. I wanted to understand more about the dynamics of information wars. We get some of it. But because the book is not just about it, it simply doesn't feel comprehensive enough. Perhaps, subconsciously, I imagined more of a Michael Lewis like handling of the subject. As unfair an expectation that might be, I do wish the book was more about Disinformation, and less about Stengel's stint as under secretary. A lot of the material is still relevant, and things that I had no clue about before I read this book - things like cancellation of the Russian students in exchange programs. Heck, how the purpose of exchange programs is to flex soft power by nations. But, by ring-fencing the subject of dis-information by Stengel's job-description, I think a lot of other areas are blatantly absent. Heck, cambridge analytica doesn't get discussed at all. Neither does China find much of a mention. Heck, use of Information warfare in Indian politics has reached staggering proportions. I wish someone would write a book about that!

In the end, as I said, the book did add net value to my over all understanding of the world. But I will have to look elsewhere for more on the subject. ...more

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Dec 13, 2019 Антон Санков rated it really liked it

All in all a good read, and provides a good insight about how the Government works from the inside from the view point of an outsider.

What I did not liked about the book is that it is way too long, and the main topic is only established in the last few chapters.

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Nov 12, 2019 Zohar - ManOfLaBook.com rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It by Richard Stengel is a non-fiction book about disinformation and how we fight it on the new front of social media. Mr. Stengel, former editor of Time magazine, was at the frontlines in this new type of warfare while serving in the Obama administration as an Under Secretary of State.

Information and disinformation wars are as For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It by Richard Stengel is a non-fiction book about disinformation and how we fight it on the new front of social media. Mr. Stengel, former editor of Time magazine, was at the frontlines in this new type of warfare while serving in the Obama administration as an Under Secretary of State.

Information and disinformation wars are as old as time, however with the rise of social media it has been easier than ever before to muddy the water with disinformation designed to confuse the populace. In his book, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It author Richard Stengel writes of a firsthand account he had being an Under Secretary of State trying to figure out how to build a counter narrative.

The author writes about the Russian fascist, strategist and political analyst Aleksandr Dugin who wrote the “playbook” that Russia has been using the past several decades for their information warfare:

“Alexander Dugin is especially scary, he is known as Putin’s Resputin and has advocated the rise of conservative strongmen in the West, as Russia works to replace liberalism by the conservative superstate of Russia. “He has said all truth is relative and a question of belief; that freedom and democracy are not universal values but peculiarly Western ones; and that the U.S. must be dislodged as a hyperpower through destabilizing American democracy and the encouragement of American isolationism.”

Mr. Stengel makes an excellent case about the first part of his subtitle, but sadly the second part “what can we do about it” is not convincing. Mostly because of the government bureaucracies, slow moving administrative machinery, and simply the way democracies work. After moving from Time magazine to the State Department, Mr. Stengel “found government too big, too slow, too bureaucratic. It constantly gets in its own way.”

The government is not the answer, the author believes, but it is part of the solution. He calls for the media to be more responsible, check before they report. But that’s not enough, he adds, consumers of media need to also use reasoning and critical thinking before pressing the “share” button, disseminating disinformation to hundreds, if not thousands of people.
It only takes 10 to 30 seconds for most of those.

The book was a bit choppy, but fascinating nonetheless, and somewhat disturbing. Mr. Stengel does drive in the point that disinformation is dangerous to democracy, and has been weaponized by our geopolitical enemies to great effect. ...more

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Dec 10, 2019 SeaShore marked it as to-read

Library/ publisher's summary :

Physical Description: 357 pages ; 24 cm.
Contents: Welcome to State -- Getting There -- The Job -- Information War -- The Battle Is Engaged -- Disruption -- What to Do About Disinformation.
Abstract: "In February of 2013, Richard Stengel, the former editor-in-chief of Time, joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Within days, two shocking events made world-wide headlines: ISIS executed American journalist ...more

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Nov 29, 2019 Dan Dundon rated it really liked it

I almost didn't pick up Richard Stengel's book on the information (AKA disinformation) wars. Having read many of the news stories about Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, I suspected this book was just going to be a rehash of earlier news stories.

However, I was wrong and actually learned a great deal more about Russia's efforts. Unfortunately more information makes Russia even more scary. For example, Stengel describes how Russia Today is a widely viewed television ...more

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Nov 17, 2019 Jonathan rated it really liked it

Shelves: trump

"There is not much irony in diplomacy"

Perhaps the best sngle line from this well written book. Stengels class as a journalist shines through this book. As a former managing editor at Time magazine and collaborator with Nelson Mandela on Long Walk to Freedom and other books Stengel brought some serious class and clout to his role as under secretay of something or other at the state dept, I don't remember the exact title and Stengel has some exasperated fun with the various acronyms and mysterious ...more

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Nov 08, 2019 Carsten Hansen rated it really liked it

Shelves: arc-other, history-20th-century, various-non-fiction

Former TIME editor and Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs discusses his times, challenges and experiences during his three-year stint in the State Department under John Kerry.
During his time he, the department and the Obama administration dealt with the challenges combating ISIS's information campaign, the Russian attacks, and disinformation on Twitter and Facebook, the rise of Trump and much more.
I found the book to be an interesting look behind the curtains, the problems ...more

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Oct 28, 2019 Brijesh rated it it was ok

Point of view of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs who was leading TIMES magazine before this post , although the topic is listed as Information wars, the book is more about his time at White house , it was a bit let down , but still the books talks about Russia , ISIS , middle east Iran , Iraq , Syria , media tweaking , white house politics , information leakage at White house,; etc..

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Sep 19, 2019 Annarella rated it it was amazing

A well researched and well written book that helped me to understand the information world and what is going on behind the scene.
it's one of those books that are seminal for understanding what is going on in the contemporary world.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

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Oct 09, 2019 Ietrio rated it did not like it

Shelves: junk

The hysterics of an ignorant: something that is as old as the concept of information, blown out of context to fit the agenda of the petty fear monger. Only things are much better now. Now "we" have the Internet and we can see Snowden talk, instead of relying on the "love thy leaders" crap published by the media frequented by Stengel.

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Dec 01, 2019 Anthony rated it it was amazing

Shelves: h-l, l-english, non-fiction, politics, research, research-automation, research-communication, research-cyber-security, research-data-security, research-info-ops

Most excellent read on information warfare. Best advice on how do deal with government sponsored social media information warfare as actors try to take away agency from citizens.

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Sep 10, 2019 Erika Kraus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: goodreads-giveaway

I won this book in the giveaway! Richard Stengel is very informative and I learned a lot of inside information that is not often publicized.

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Oct 26, 2019 Cherie is currently reading it

Invaluable

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Nov 11, 2019 Charlie Nagelschmidt rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobook, business, innovation, non-fiction, political, spy-espionage

Best line: "propaganda is a misdemeanor, disinformation is a felony"

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Oct 28, 2019 Robert A. Yaffee, Ph.D. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Richard Stengel nicely regales his readers with his experiences in the U.S. State Department's Public Diplomacy sector. The book is packed full of useful information about the cyberspace and the threats emerging within it, especially to those who have not been savvy to the use and emerging abuse of the world wide web. . At the end of the book, he suggests a repertoire of means of counteracting these lurking threats as they render cyberspace less welcoming.
He explains how ISIS and the Russians, ...more

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About Richard Stengel

Richard Stengel

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Richard Stengel is the former editor of TIME. He collaborated with Nelson Mandela on his bestselling 1993 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and later served as coproducer of the 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary Mandela. He is also the author of January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, a South African Town. Stengel is married to Mary Pfaff and they have two sons.