InfoWars: A critical weapon in the global authoritarian attack on democracy and truth

American and other democracies are in a bitter, existential InfoWar against forces of foreign and domestic authoritarianism. In essence InfoWar constitutes a combination of dark free speech (divisive lies, slanders, bigotry, crackpot reasoning, irrational emotional manipulation, etc.) and dirty tricks. The big gun is dark free speech.  A WaPo opinion (not paywalled) focuses on the foreign InfoWar that China wages against the US:

The PRC is increasingly controlling global narratives and silencing critics

The United States is not yet losing the global information war, but we soon will be — unless we act quickly and make the most of our strengths.

Russia recently amped up its disinformation and misinformation around the U.S. election. The United States recently accused RT, Russia’s state media, of out-and-out intelligence activities. Still, of all the globe’s information warriors, the most formidable is still China, which spends billions each year to dominate the world’s information space. More than missiles, ships, drones or guns, this is the real threat to our national — and global — security. Listen to China’s president, Xi Jinping, as quoted by then-Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) during a congressional hearing last November: “Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend.”

How is China controlling global narratives and silencing critics? By buying television and radio frequencies around the world, partnering with news organizations, seeding pro-China content into local media, courting journalists and content creators with trips, training and new equipment and winning over their bosses with free content.

The PRC targets both Chinese and non-Chinese audiences worldwide, far beyond its own borders. China’s largest media conglomerate, Xinhua, has 37 bureaus in Africa, far more than any other news agency, African or non-African — a dramatic increase from just two decades ago. The PRC is running information operations into Latin America, from Cuba to Nicaragua to Venezuela and beyond.

Even in countries boasting a free press, China’s free-for-the-taking content lures the cash-strapped media industry: Consider Xi’s visit to South Africa in 2023, when he put his name to an article hailing China and South Africa as “comrades and friends.” Three leading South African newspapers reprinted the talking points verbatim on their front pages. 

In China, the PRC has made tremendous progress fortifying the so-called Great Firewall, deterring citizens from accessing outside information while funding party-approved, entertainment-focused content to lull them into cocooning themselves within.

Once again, critically important but shockingly under-reported issues related to defense of democracy bubble up from all the usual MSM fluff and noise. This is the heart of MSM's weakness:

American capitalism is not compatible with the level of MSM professionalism and blunt honesty needed to (i) properly alert the public to authoritarian dangers, or (ii) to adequately defend democracy and truth against foreign and domestic authoritarian dark free speech. Regarding defense of democracy and truth, I continue to give the MSM an F. American professional MSM is far too damaged by its fealty to the profit motive. America's authoritarian propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, faces no sanction for its role in fomenting domestic kleptocratic authoritarianism, i.e., DJT and MAGA. Weakness and subversion of America's professional MSM is a key weakness in our defenses against internal and external authoritarianism. Maybe a decisive, lethal weakness.

A NYT opinion comments (not paywalled) about Russia's worldwide authoritarian  tactics of hiring thugs to beat dissidents up or assassins to murder them:

Putin Is Doing Something Almost Nobody Is Noticing

In November 2022, my editors asked me to be careful about what I ate and stop ordering takeout. Initially, I didn’t think much of it. But I soon realized the importance of their advice when, just one month later, my colleague Elena Kostyuchenko discovered she had been poisoned in Germany, in a probable assassination attempt by the Russian state.

Such stories have become routine. Last year, an investigative journalist, Alesya Marokhovskaya, was harassed in the Czech Republic; in February, the bullet-riddled body of a Russian defector, Maxim Kuzminov, was found in Spain. In both cases, the Kremlin was assumed to be involved. Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.

But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war — or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence — away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent, or inadequate prevention, of the countries to which they have fled.

It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.

So there we have it, democracy and truth fans. American kleptocratic authoritarians like DJT and their wealth and power MAGA movement are not much different from the goons that rule China with an iron fist. But so far, the US dictator squads still rarely resort to breaking knee caps and murder, like the fun-fill Putin and his hired thugs and murdering monsters.