Understanding America’s disinformation capitulation

American federal agencies and private companies are now allowing weaponized foreign disinformation to spread and grow. Here’s why.

President Donald Trump is forcing ByteDance to spin-off its American presence to US control.

Most TikTok shares will be sold to American owners due to a presidential Executive Order.

The sale would follow a law passed last year by Congress forcing ByteDance, the social networks’ owners, to divest or face a blanket ban of the app in the United States.

TikTok’s US presence should be American by Christmas, owned by private equity, media companies, and investors, including tech leaders Larry Ellison and Michael Dell and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Outside the US, TikTok will still be owned by ByteDance.

One telling dimension of this story is that the Chinese government hasn’t opposed the move and has barely criticized it. Trump said Chinese President Xi personally approved the plan.

Does anyone else find this strange?

TikTok is a key propaganda tool for Beijing, shaping global perceptions, controlling narratives, and suppressing topics worldwide.

The reason is obvious: China no longer needs control of the company that tweaks the algorithms determining what 170 million Americans pay attention to. The US has already surrendered in the war on disinformation.

The US government’s unconditional surrender

Since January, the Trump administration has been rapidly dismantling policies and programs designed to protect Americans from the growing flood of foreign disinformation aimed at dividing our society and altering election outcomes to benefit foreign authoritarian regimes.

The administration shut down the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, laid off 40 employees and 80 contractors fighting foreign disinformation, shut down the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, suspended the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, cut funding for foreign disinformation programs and research, and withdrew from international cooperation agreements with European countries to fight foreign disinformation.

The stated policy goal is to reduce censorship and enhance free speech. But the real reason is disinformation from Russia, China, and Iran aims to undermine the American public’s trust in elections, democracy and democratic institutions, which is always a primary goal of every emerging authoritarian regime that rises out of a democracy, because the weaker the institutions are, the more everything is determined by the interests and whims of the autocrat.

The social networks’ sycophantic surrender

Twitter was the first to surrender. Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion and dramatically changed it with layoffs and policy changes.

After those changes, the Stanford Internet Observatory and the European Union documented a rise in foreign disinformation campaigns on X.

By mid-2023, NewsGuard and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue pointed out that pro-Russian and pro-Chinese disinformation networks gained wider reach and visibility, partly because of Musk’s policy to stop labeling state-affiliated media accounts and remove legacy verification badges. Hundreds of accounts spreading disinformation are now “verified” on Twitter.

The EU is intensifying its investigation into X for failing to meet Digital Services Act requirements for content moderation, transparency, and algorithmic accountability. Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns on X have become more sophisticated, exploiting paid verifications and generative AI to influence elections and global events at scale.

In January, Meta killed third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, replacing it with a user-generated “community notes” system.

The change increased foreign disinformation on the platform, according to reports by The New York Times, BBC, and digital policy researchers.

Before switching to community notes, Meta disrupted about 20 covert foreign influence operations worldwide, mainly from Russia, Iran, and China. Since 2017, Meta has taken down 39 Russian, 31 Iranian, and 11 Chinese disinformation networks, including the ongoing Doppelganger campaign with over 6,000 fake domains. In 2023, Meta removed 4,789 fake Facebook accounts from China, while reporting that most foreign disinformation networks continue to spread across multiple platforms even after takedowns.

The likely purpose of killing fact-checking is to curry favor with the Trump administration, and in fact Trump praised the move.

In December, YouTube tweaked content policies to raise the threshold for removing prohibited content deemed in the “public interest.” Earlier this month, YouTube started reinstating accounts previously banned for election disinformation and COVID-related matters. These changes increased the availability of foreign disinformation on the platform.

The AI chatbots’ selfish surrender

NewsGuard earlier this month published a report that found major AI chatbots spread falsehoods in the news 35% of the time, nearly double the percentage published a year ago.

One of the reasons for these falsehoods is that foreign disinformation groups, especially Russian ones, target chatbots’ training data.

A network of disinformation websites called the Pravda network or “Portal Kombat” engages in something called “LLM grooming” on a massive scale. They post huge numbers of AI-generated articles containing disinformation and pro-Russian perspectives online so that the LLM chatbots’ web crawlers find them and add them to the LLM’s training data.

Disinformation appears when users ask about hot-button topics like the war in Ukraine.

While all major chatbot companies have taken steps to reduce the influence of LLM grooming campaigns, critics say they’re not doing enough and that their financial incentives drive them to prioritize user engagement over blocking disinformation.

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