Don’t Believe The Lies

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation has been eliminated, as of an 11:15 AM meeting this morning. Undersecretary Darren Beattie has announced the closure of the office and the termination of all remaining positions. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub was a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns. 

Why is this a problem? The elimination of the office leaves the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like those of Russia, Iran, and China. While conservatives have long complained that this department unfairly targeted conservative voices in domestic media, they never offered any evidence that supported their claims.

Darren Beattie, the controversial pick for undersecretary—was fired as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration for attending a white nationalism conference, has suggested that the FBI organized the January 6 attack on Congress, and has said that it’s not worth defending Taiwan from China—had instructed the few remaining staff to be “pencils down,” meaning to pause in their work. This is something that is straight out of Project 2025 and a significant and under-the-radar win for the administration.

Why is this a problem? About an hour earlier, NewsGuard, in cooperation with YouGov, released the latest survey showing a full third of Americans believe Russian disinformation. This is the type of activity that R/FIMI should be flagging. If a third of Americans fall for the Russian dupes now, how much worse will it get as all other agencies watching for digital disinformation have been disbanded as well? This doesn’t look good. There are too many people willing to believe too many things.

But Wait! There’s more! Three-quarters of Americans are unable to consistently identify Russian disinformation narratives as false. The results also show that Americans are widely vulnerable to believing falsehoods spread online across a range of topics including health and medicine, elections, and international conflicts: Of the 10 claims presented, 78 percent of respondents believed at least one claim, and less than 1 percent of respondents correctly identified all 10 claims as false.

78 percent? Yeah, that speaks both to how gullible we are as a country and how advanced Russia is at spreading misinformation. Given that Russia was the only major country not included in the President’s tariff plan, we have to wonder to what degree the White House has already been taken in by false narratives that Russia continues to push.

Let’s consider a few examples. Play along and be honest about how you score.

 “Between 30-50% of U.S. aid money provided to Ukraine has been stolen by Ukrainian officials for personal use.” Believe it? One in four respondents believed the claim, which originated in an article by the Russian state media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) and was spread by other state-controlled sources, to be true. The claim has been thoroughly debunked by independent media.

Let’s try another. “Ukraine President Zelensky’s approval rating is down to 4%.” Nearly one in five Americans believe this bullshit. The truth is that Zelensky’s approval ratings have stayed high, between 57 and 63 percent. The vast majority of Ukrainians trust him and how he is handling the war with Russia. What’s more likely is that the US President’s popularity is so low, perhaps the White House conspired with the Russians on this one.

One more: “Ukraine sold Hamas weapons that were donated to Ukraine by the United States.” This one had some legs to it. The claim was widely reported on Russian state media outlets, including Sputnik Africa, Sputnik India, RT, and Ukraina.ru, as well as pro-Kremlin site TopWar.ru and some U.S.-based sites. This one had so much bias that both anti-Ukraine and anti-Gaza supporters were caught repeating this one. Once again, there is zero validity to this claim. It’s all bullshit coming straight from Russia.

NewsGuard’s analysts have cataloged nearly 300 false claims spread by the Kremlin about the war in Ukraine, and recently uncovered how a Russian-operated network of websites has infected American AI tools, including the most commonly used chatbots, with Kremlin propaganda claims. And we’re gullible enough that we lap them up and share them around as fast as we possibly can.

The fact is that Americans are too stupid not to have R/FIMI watching out for us. If conservatives think that the agency is picking on them, perhaps that is because conservatives are more likely to share the misinformation. How stupid are we? No, we’re not setting up a Late Night joke.

Consider this: fewer than half of respondents correctly identified as false the claim that COVID-19 vaccines have killed between 7.3 and 15 million people worldwide, while one in five respondents believed the claim to be true. Only 13 percent of respondents were able to correctly identify as false the claim that Project 2025, a plan written by a conservative think tank that became a flashpoint during the election, explicitly calls for cuts in Social Security. Sure, we know that’s a GOP hot point, but Social Security is not directly mentioned in the Project 2025 document.

Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents could not correctly identify as false the claim that Starlink, an internet company owned by Elon Musk, was used to rig the 2024 election for Donald Trump. A similar proportion (45 percent) could not identify as false the claim that Haitian immigrants stole, killed, and ate pets in Springfield, Ohio.

This gets uglier the deeper one goes into the survey. The challenges cut across party lines and, quite honestly, make it embarrassing to claim any connection to Americans at all. It seems like roughly 45 percent of us will believe anything that Russian agents tell us, as long as they don’t say that they’re Russian agents.

The truth is that even when supporting documentation is included in an alleged news story, fewer than two percent of readers click through to confirm the claim. There are too many of us who think that we can support news sites all the time, and that simply isn’t the case. Even venerable agencies such as AP and Reuters sometimes fall victim to the ruse. If a member of Congress or a White House staff member happens to repeat a lie, many news agencies will accept it as true without checking any further.

With the dissolution of R/FIMI, Americans are on their own now in determining what’s true and what isn’t. The responsibility is on your shoulders and no one else’s. We can’t even trust government sources at this point. Treat everything as false until proven otherwise.

Got it?

Good.