A Civil War of Information: A realist assessment of fake news

The paper defends the provocative claim that the current political climate of partisanship, polarization and radicalization merits the dramatic label of “civil war of information”. The widespread epistemic uncertainty and the proliferation of fake news, in other words, can be seen as the aftermath of factional psychological warfare waged within western democracies. This labelling has also clear normative consequences. So long as we want our democracies to survive, it is imperative that partisan propaganda is kept within reasonable levels. The first part of the paper claims that current partisan communication exhibits a sinister resemblance to a war of information. Parties and affiliated interest groups resort to the same sophisticated strategies of propaganda deployed in contemporary psychological warfare operations. While political propaganda is by no means a new phenomenon, the difference is today’s sophistication and ruthless effectiveness of the strategies deployed. I draw this parallel by connecting scholarly works on fake news and polarization with the literature in international relations about information wars, as well as from de-classified psy-ops manuals from security specialists. Wars of information are clearly different from regular wars. For once, they do not employ violent coercion. Yet they are not necessarily harmless either, and can do severe damage to a country’s command and control. Indeed, all regular wars involve information operations as well, because information campaigns can sap the will to fight. For example information war played a significant part in the USA’s defeat in Vietnam. The literature on information wars generally exhibits a state-centric bias. For example, the notorious Russian meddling in the 2016 US election is portrayed as a (successful) operation of information war by Russia against the USA. Yet this literature discounts cases where the very same strategies are deployed by private actors, and specifically by political factions. The Russian meddling can be also interpreted as the act of one party against the other. To appreciate the specific effects of information war within countries, I turn to the scientific literature on civil wars. Civil wars are obviously internal affairs but are classically understood in the narrow sense of violent engagements. By coupling this theory with the literature on fake news, I conclude by suggesting that the current level of partisanship, polarization and radicalizations may be a sign of a looming, if not current, civil war of information. In closing, I reflect on the normative implications of such parallel by suggesting that it makes a realistic case for the desirability of controlling the spread and impact of fake news and other partisans’ propaganda. So long as we care that our democratic political order survives, a centralized effort to curtail parties’ propaganda machine is required.