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In 2019, I was sitting in a classroom at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., with a bunch of guys about to get their full birds and a few invited civilians. The instructor asked, “What is our greatest national security threat?” It wasn’t terrorism, it wasn’t nukes, it was cyberattacks.
This week, Elon Musk’s social media platform X showed just how insidious foreign cyberattacks can be, as he made it possible for users to view the country of origin of any account, and almost immediately, some of the most corrosive users purporting to be Americans turned out not to be.
One fake account called itself “ULTRAMAGA us TRUMPus2028,” (with American flags in the name) and claimed to be based in Washington, D.C., but is actually listed as being based in Africa. Another, now-deleted, was “Trump Is My President” listed in Macedonia. A very patriotic account named @American, had a profile picture with a bald eagle over an American flag, but it is, as it turns out, based in South Asia.
We’ve known since the aftermath of the 2016 election that malign foreign governments have used fake social media accounts to sow discord. In one example from the Mueller Report, a fake Russian account organized an actual, physical political rally in America.
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As I wrote about in this column back in June, the MAGA movement, in particular, has been targeted recently by foreign influence seeking to break it apart. Fake foreign accounts can not only create the appearance of great influence through clicks and likes, they can also fund malicious users through monetization.
The bad news is that our nation is particularly vulnerable to informational attacks precisely because we are a free society, we are dominant militarily, economically and diplomatically, but our Achilles’ heel is information, the free exchange of which we value more than safety.
For example, in no universe would China allow the United States to feed its kids an endless doom loop of propaganda as it does to our kids with TikTok. And even if it were banned, as Congress tried to do, another would simply take its place. The First Amendment ties our hands.
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This is why, and I hate to throw something on top of everyone’s busy day, but this is why the only thing that can mitigate these foreign information attacks is a well-informed citizenry. There really are very few other meaningful solutions.
Because we are a free society the government cannot truly protect you from bad foreign actors pretending to be a Denver housewife, which is why Musk’s decision to add country of origin to accounts is such an important game-changer.
But using that important tool is not enough. We must remain diligent in always remembering, in every online moment, that what we are interacting with may not be real, and may be trying to do us and our nation harm.
It is a daunting responsibility, no doubt, to constantly question what we see online, but only because freedom itself is daunting, and there are some giveaways and tells to look for.
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When you are told that such-and-such an influencer has an incredible sway over their online audience, ask yourself if you have ever seen an example of it offline. Do they hold physical events? Have you ever heard anyone talk about them in real life?
As I wrote about in this column back in June, the MAGA movement, in particular, has been targeted recently by foreign influence seeking to break it apart.
Then ask yourself who might benefit from the discord and doubt these influencers plant in our society, the distrustfulness of each other, even the dehumanization of each other. The obvious answers are Russia, China and Iran.
I feel fairly certain that my instructor at the Army War College lo those years ago would applaud Elon Musk for adding a country-of-origin label; it is a tremendous blow against foreign information operations, but he’d also point the finger at us and tell us to be diligent.
In the end, it is important to remember that most of our neighbors, our fellow Americans, are good and decent, and that when our online screens purport to show us otherwise, we should always be skeptical, because our enemies are not going to stop pressing this advantage.
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