Iran, China, and Russia Are Winning the Global Propaganda War | Opinion

Newsweek -Jan 9th2023

Over the past three months, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian bots have flooded the internet with anti-Zionist, antisemitic and anti-American content, aggravating dangerous and widening political rifts in the United States.

It’s already an old story: for years, America’s foreign adversaries have been weaponizing the media and social networks to interfere in our domestic politics and push their narratives overseas.

But China, Russia, and Iran are well aware that they cannot challenge the U.S. in a traditional military conflict, so they resort to irregular means such as funding proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah and engaging in cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns.

As a result, Russian and Chinese budgets for government-funded media and propaganda dwarf the budget set by the U.S. Congress.

The inequality was not inevitable. After the Cold War, U.S. policy slowly abandoned the information sphere. In 1988, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) budget was $219 million or $586 million when adjusted for inflation. Today, its budget is $123 million. RFE/RL, which was set up during the Cold War to broadcast anti-communist and pro-democratic messaging behind the Iron Curtain, played a major role in combatting Soviet narratives. By 1990, RFE/RL was the most listened-to Western radio station in the Soviet Union and played key roles in the Czechoslovak and Romanian revolutions.

RFE/RL falls under the U.S. Agency for Global Media umbrella that includes Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Open Technology Fund. Last March, President Joe Biden requested an increase in the total USAGM budget of 11 percent to $944 million in response to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian campaigns to undermine U.S. values and influence. It has yet to be approved.

Russia, on the other hand, spent $1.9 billion on media propaganda last year. And China’s budget for cyber-propaganda and global disinformation is in the billions, according to a recent U.S. State Department report. Even economic sanctions have not deterred Iran from coughing up $200 million for state broadcasting alone.

Often Russia, China, and Iran work together, especially when the goal is to thwart U.S. influence. For example, besides using disinformation to prop up its own geopolitical interests and squash domestic criticism, Beijing has also used its information apparatus to support Kremlin narratives on the war in Ukraine, including Moscow’s false claims that Ukraine has operated secret biological warfare laboratories and that NATO encroachment caused Russia’s invasion.

In the West, Russian and Chinese strategy has exploited existing societal divides. Both Beijing and Moscow have formed relationships with far right and far left extremists, widening division and sewing instability. Their topics of choice include racism, immigration, and the culture wars.

The U.S. should not play such a dirty game. But Washington must understand that disinformation is having massive effects at home and abroad. The Biden administration must increase efforts to counter such disinformation as well as bring the fight to the regimes spreading it. This can be done through increased funding to the USAGM as well as support for independent media outlets banned by these dictatorships, such as the Nobel Prize Winning Russian independent newspaper now in exile in Latvia, Novaya Gazeta, and the London-based Persian-language news television station, Iran International.

Additionally, the U.S. should establish programs to train Chinese, Russian and Iranian expat journalists in investigations and intelligence to disprove false narratives and expose the rampant corruption, human rights abuses, and aggression in their home countries. These investigations could be done from abroad, relying on local sources and open-source information as is done by Bellingcat, a Dutch-based investigative journalism group that has been referred to as “Russia’s biggest nightmare.”

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