Getty Images In The Arena Russia’s Prepared to Interfere in 2020. Will the U.S. Be Ready? We’re losing the information war. Here’s how to change that.

Stanley McChrystal, a retired army general, is the founder of the McChrystal Group. David Eichenbaum is a Democratic media consultant. They both serve as board members of Main Street One, an organization fighting disinformation online.

“Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy,” special counsel Robert Mueller told a House committee on Wednesday. “The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious.”

Mr. Mueller is right: Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign was real, it deserves the attention of every American, and it is ongoing.


So why is it that now, three years removed from the last presidential election—and with the 2020 campaign already in motion—America still finds itself so dangerously ill-equipped to protect itself?

Our military is accustomed to waging and winning conventional wars with tanks, troops and planes. But today’s digital battlefield presents an entirely new landscape—one where state and non-state actors participate in a raging asynchronous information war that poses a serious threat to our democracy.

It’s a war America is losing—badly.

With the 2020 elections approaching, America is totally unprepared for what is coming because it will be like nothing we’ve seen before. Everyone is vulnerable, and everyone will be affected.

Our opponents are decentralized—a mix of hostile foreign powers, non-state actors and individuals, ranging from Russia and China to domestic threats like the white nationalist movement—and have found new ways to weaponize the internet and warp our collective understanding of reality. In some cases, they have even used online platforms to achieve objectives heretofore reserved only for open war.

ISIL created a new grassroots propaganda machine to effectively radicalize and recruit young people to jihad from around the world. Then Russia professionalized this digital warfare to attack our democratic institutions. We were unprepared in 2016, and we’re unprepared heading into 2020.

Extremists understand that stories move voters, and technology is just a vehicle for those stories. You don’t even need to look to Russia for evidence of this: The anti-vaccination movement is rife with narratives from moms and dads based on scientifically false information. These stories impact both the right and the left because they prey on pre-existing fears through emotion. An MIT study even showed how false stories travel faster than true news.

Narratives are harder to combat and require counter-narratives at greater speed and scale than ever before. And social media has provided the perfect platform for distributing these false narratives—via memes and misinformation distributed with the intention of corroding civil society and dividing Americans to such a degree that we lose trust in our democratic institutions and each other.

What can we do about it?

At this moment, we cannot expect the federal government or the big technology platforms to address disinformation head-on. In their absence, we need a nonpartisan, non-governmental Fair Digital Election Commission to protect the integrity of our elections by detecting, exposing, evaluating and remediating the impact of disinformation.

The commission—which could be housed at a non-governmental organization or could be an independent consortium of different NGOs—would serve as a clearinghouse for research and technologies with the goal of protecting American elections from disinformation.

The commission would start by organizing experts and initiatives from across the country to mine intelligence and build a toolkit that would include digital forensics, detection of falsified media, discourse analysis and other techniques for the early detection of disinformation. The next step, though, is key: While there are threat-detection tools in circulation now, there are no tools working to actually reduce the impact of disinformation, which must be the ultimate goal. So, the commission must demonstrate how false narratives—especially those propagated by foreign powers such as Russia—are impacting Americans’ lives and influencing the outcomes of our elections. (This is one reason why this effort cannot be governmental: Politicians who win elections on the basis of false narratives promoted by malicious actors will never have an incentive to expose the origins of that misinformation.)

It is difficult to maintain a healthy society if the largest producers of narrative content are tilting the discourse toward extremism. Those who represent the moderate majority must proportionally create and direct a counter-narrative that builds resiliency in the discourse and offsets the impact of disinformation. The commission’s technology platform will algorithmically determine the language most likely to impact disinformation campaigns. This always-on analysis can then be translated into narratives and promoted at speed and scale. The idea is to identify opportunities and risks, and then program against them through real people—after all, there are more of us than there are of them, provided we can act in greater unison around the same themes and moments.

The Fair Digital Election Commission would also create playbooks for candidates to conduct basic remediation, including on-demand or on-site support from experts. New search tools are emerging in the market to allow campaigns to detect disinformation and mold their campaign messages in response. There are also lower-cost ways to create and distribute narrative content with only basic training. Academic institutions, organized by the commission, are also available to lend their smartest minds to support free elections.

In setting all this up, the commission wouldn’t have to start from scratch; it could draw on the expertise of existing groups that have arisen to combat disinformation, such as the AI Foundation and our own group, Main Street One.

Today, the internet enables information to be disseminated at a scale that literally overwhelms the efforts of organizations or institutions to counter them. Absent an operational counter to this phenomenon, we will continue to be influenced in ways that threaten our democracy and our humanity.

Abraham Lincoln, long before he was president, said that as a nation of free men, the United States will either live forever or die by suicide. That is what is at stake today. Lies move quickly. Divisions sown in society can irreparably divide us and cause individuals to turn against their neighbors, their communities and their country. We see it happening every day. Combating misinformation is not just about politics—it is about the survival of truth and the survival of our nation. Our ability to accurately and honestly perceive the world—and to make values-based decisions based on this perception—is something that we cannot afford to lose.

The time to start this effort was yesterday, so we must begin now. Facts would be a terrible thing to lose, especially if we simply watch them disappear.