Your browser doesn’t support HTML5
Promoting Free Speech While Exposing Manipulation of Facts
The United States has been in an undeclared information war with authoritarian governments for more than a decade, said James Rubin, Special Envoy and Coordinator of the Global Engagement Center.
The recent report on How the People’s Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment brings to light the techniques and the tactics that China pursues in this conflict.
Beijing employs five main categories of deceptive and coercive methods as it attempts to distort the global information space, said Special Envoy Rubin:
“[T]hey are: leveraging propaganda and censorship; promoting digital authoritarianism; exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships; putting together cooptation of individual actors with coercion of those who speak against or in contradiction to what the Chinese want; and finally, exercising control over Chinese-language media.”
There’s a fundamental asymmetry with these authoritarian regimes – the PRC, the Kremlin, the Iranian Government – where they block access to their information space, noted Special Envoy Rubin:
“The asymmetry is that they are free to operate, to manipulate, to use whatever means they can in the rest of the world’s information space. That asymmetry is something that we should keep in mind in thinking about this and any attempt to draw false equivalence between what the United States does and what these authoritarian regimes do.”
In contrast, the United States “is spending money to build a free information space, to train journalists, to build an information environment in which journalists can hold the government to account,” said Special Envoy Rubin:
“That’s very different than trying to dominate the space by suppressing narratives they don’t like and pumping up, falsely, narratives that they prefer.”
Special Envoy Rubin stressed the importance of making sure that freedom of information is promoted and “that you don’t cross the line into seeking to censor opinions you don’t like; but that you do identify when China, Russia, Iran, and others are seeking to manipulate the information space either through false narratives, through flooding the market, through echo chambers.”
“That’s the difference between what they’re trying to do and what we’re trying to do,” noted Special Envoy Rubin, “which is to build an information space in which our different opinions are welcome.”