Propaganda
Propagandists are official state actors who spread a coordinated partisan message meant to propagate a point of view. North Korea, Iraq, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Hungary, and Russia would be the most easily identifiable propagandists, with a secure hold on major media outlets and a sophisticated system of news and media that supports the goals of their regimes. The Russian government most infamously interfered with the 2016 election. As the Mueller report (the U.S. Justice Department document officially titled Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election) concluded, the Russian government used what it called an “information warfare” propaganda campaign, which “evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton.”19
Information Anarchy
Information anarchists are actors who want to stir the pot, make people angry with outrageous statements and allegations, and create doubt and mistrust (sometimes called “gaslighting”) in order to undermine the legitimacy of genuine news itself and create the perception that the truth might never be determined. Internet trollsare information anarchists, and they use various platforms, such as social media, to do their work.
Most information anarchists tend to remain anonymous, but some, like American radio host Alex Jones, built a communication empire with Infowars—his conspiracy theory website—and his radio show, The Alex Jones Show. Jones’s show often includes shocking allegations. He falsely claimed, for example, that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, were a government operation meant to increase support for gun control. In 2018, a number of platforms, including Apple, Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and PayPal, removed Jones’s Infowars app from their sites for violating their policies, including those on hate speech.
The unprecedented record of false and misleading claims made by President Trump can also be categorized as information anarchy. The Washington Post counted 16,241 of these claims by January 20, 2020, three full years into his presidency, with a rate of more than twenty-two false or misleading claims per day by 2019. These included claims that the U.S. economy is the best in history (economic growth was actually better under Presidents Reagan and Clinton), that the border wall is being built (some replacement fencing was going up, not the 1,000-mile concrete barrier promised in 2016), and that he passed the largest tax cut in history (when it was only the eighth largest since the 1980s).20 President Trump has also used information anarchy to cast doubt on other verifiable facts, such as his longtime “birther” campaign that questioned President Obama’s U.S. citizenship, and his persistent labeling of mainstream news organizations and some of their reports as “fake news.”Trump’s approach is to use sheer repetition of his claims to promote his narrative of the events occurring across the nation and in his administration.
19Mueller, Report on the Investigation, 4.
20See Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Made 16,241 False or Misleading Claims in His First Three Years,” Washington Post, February 4, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/20/president-trump-made-16241-false-or-misleading-claims-his-first-three-years/; Heather Long, “Trump Touts His Economy as ‘the Best It Has Ever Been.’ The Data Doesn’t Show That,” Washington Post, February 4, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/04/trump-touts-his-economy-best-ever-data-is-more-mixed; Elyse Samuels, “Fact-Checking Trump’s Misleading Border ‘Wall’ Spin,” Washington Post, October 11, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/11/fact-checking-trumps-misleading-border-wall-spin; Glenn Kessler, “Fact Check: Biggest Tax Cut in U.S. History?” Washington Post, January 30, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/live-updates/trump-white-house/fact-checking-and-analysis-of-trumps-state-of-the-union-2018-address/fact-check-biggest-tax-cut-in-u-s-history.