Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it.
During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest.
In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy.
"[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing." —Kirkus Reviews
"This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired." —Library Journal
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Richard Stengel. (2019). Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It. Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Richard Stengel. 2019. Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It. Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It. Grove Atlantic, 2019.
MLA Citation (style guide)Richard Stengel. Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It. Grove Atlantic, 2019.
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- bioText: Richard Stengel was the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2013-2016. Before working at the State Department, he was the Editor of TIME for seven years, from 2006-2013. From 1992 to 1994, he collaborated with Nelson Mandela on the South African leader's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Stengel later wrote Mandela's Way, a New York Times best-seller, on his experience working with Mandela. He is the author of several other books, including January Sun, a book about life in a small South African town as well as You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery. He is an NBC/MSNBC analyst and lives in New York.
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- A "well-told" insider account of the State Department's twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post).
Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it.
During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest.
In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy.
"[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing." —Kirkus Reviews
"This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired." —Library Journal - reviews
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July 15, 2019
In this somewhat choppy memoir, Stengel, the former editor of Time, recounts his three years as a political appointee in President Obama’s State Department focusing on the weaponization of information. He describes the department’s sometimes but not always successful responses to ISIS’s videos of journalist beheadings, Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping of girls in Nigeria, and the growth of Russian disinformation through state-led infotainment networks such as RT. He also chronicles the department’s efforts to track anti-American disinformation across social media platforms—and social media platforms’ slow responses—and eventually creating the Global Engagement Center to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts. A running thread is Stengel’s unfavorable comparisons of the State Department, where he was frequently stymied by slow-moving bureaucracy, to his previous life in the private sector, despite the snafus he regularly created at the State Department when he acted on his impulses. The final, strongest section of the book introduces ways to reduce the impact of disinformation and propaganda, including real-time disclosure of who’s paying for political ads and more transparent sourcing in news reporting. Readers interested in how disinformation fits into today’s foreign affairs landscape will want to give this a look. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency.
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September 1, 2019
Former Time editor Stengel (Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage, 2010, etc.) offers a gloomy view of America's efforts in the "battle of ideas" with Russia, the Islamic State group, and other entities. We "still don't know how to fight" disinformation, writes the author, who served as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2013 to 2016. "The truth is, it's impossible to stop people from creating falsehoods and other people from believing them." In this refreshingly frank account, Stengel describes his stint in the byzantine State Department, where he focused on countering IS messaging and Russian disinformation in the last years of the Obama administration. With great clarity, he recounts the hurdles he encountered: bureaucratic procedures, acronyms and government-speak, endless vetting and turf battles, all of which slowed efforts to bring his print-oriented office into the era of social media. Foreign-service officers with no media experience insisted it was "easy" to create content. He was also greatly hampered by the very openness of American society, which info-savvy IS and Putin used to their advantage. Most of his book details the creation of a messaging coalition with Arab nations to thwart incessant "out-tweeting" by "digital jihadis" bent on undermining the U.S. with messages and videos on kidnappings and beheadings of Americans. "Not everyone can afford an F-35," writes Stengel, "but anyone can launch a tweet." Even so, few in government were tweeting. One exception, social media guru and Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt, warned, "we are being out-messaged by the Russians....They don't feel the need to be truthful." Stengel relates the thinking of participants in the information war in ways that bring the dangers of this global messaging onslaught home. He notes how IS migrated to the dark web as a result of U.S. counterefforts, and he argues that artificial intelligence has great potential to detect and delete false information. A revealing look at America's difficult struggle to combat false, misleading narratives.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 15, 2019
It was during Stengel's tenure as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs for President Obama in his second term that the public witnessed the emergence of fake news and its repercussions on national and global levels. In this astute account, Stengel, former editor of Time, plots the mechanics and layout of a labyrinthine governmental organization as he implements measures to counteract the dissemination of disinformation that threatens the U.S. and other democracies around the world. As a Washington insider and former journalist, Stengel writes from a rare and illuminating double perspective. It is this duality that led to his initiating prescient actions which combated the onslaught of junk news perpetuated by ISIS and Russia on social media, hence the apt title of this fascinating book. Stengel's recounting of the events and individuals, including Putin and Trump, involved in the surge in and fight against propaganda and misinformation is jarring yet hopeful as he concludes with a blueprint for remedy and change.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
- premium: True
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August 9, 2019
In a time when we are awash in information, some of it manipulated and untrue, Rhodes scholar Stengel (former U.S. undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs; editor, Time) shares his experiences in public service, navigating the challenge of coping with the spread of misinformation through an open democratic society. Appointed undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in 2013, the author served through the end of President Obama's administration. Here he thoughtfully details his time working within the State Department to promote American ideals in the face of an array of disinformation generated by Russia and others during and before the 2016 U.S. election. VERDICT This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired. Recommended for general political science and current affairs collections.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it.
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