Information Wars Quotes

“Disinformation is in part the cause for what Hannah Arendt once called the curious mixture of “gullibility and cynicism” of voters in modern politics. Disinformation, she suggests, helps create the strange circumstance in which people “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.” That is the goal—that there’s no empirical reality that we can all agree on. The ultimate danger is not that lies will replace truth, or that disinformation will substitute for factual information, but rather that the distinction between the two will evaporate—that the very idea of trying to discriminate between fact and fiction will no longer be a feature of our mental landscape. Then we would truly be living in a world where everything was possible and nothing was true.”
― Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

“Zuckerberg launched into a discussion about the potential of artificial intelligence to spot violent-extremist content and disinformation. He actually got excited. It was clear that Zuckerberg thought AI was the critical tool in combating extremist messaging or any undesirable content. He said it was still years away, but he thought that artificial intelligence would eventually be able to flag about 80 percent of the dangerous content that’s out there, and humans would find the remaining 20 percent. This would be much more efficient than methods today, he said. He was confident that this was a solvable problem and added that we need to use computers for what computers are good at, and people for what people are good at. This seemed to be his mantra, and it wasn’t a bad one.”
― Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

“Our adversaries are fighting to prevent people from having agency over their own lives. They are fighting to have autocrats and ideologies make decisions for us. They are fighting to dismantle the infrastructure of truth. They are fighting to undermine the idea that human beings can be moved by fact and reason. They are fighting for relativism, the idea that no idea is worth fighting for. When I was in government, I felt my job was to help people here and around the world determine their own destiny. At the heart of that fight was the idea that people could use information - factual information - to decide what was best for them. That idea is still worth fighting for.”
― Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

“Trump's election was also an enormous challenge to American public diplomacy and to the American brand. So much of what we believed and promoted as part of the American Brand --free speech, freedom of religion, the power of diversity, equality before the law, a level playing field -- was challenged by brand Trump.”
― Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It