The Global Public Square Is the Real Threat to American Confidence

Eliana Aiken’s essay “Anti-Semitism as Information Warfare” identifies the real and important problem of hostile states actively attempting to influence American public opinion through social media. But in many ways, the disinformation narrative misses a much deeper problem of which the phenomena Aiken points to are only a part.

The propaganda machines of countries like Russia and Iran pose undeniable threats, but at the end of the day are just advocacy campaigns, not entirely different from those conducted by domestic politicians or pressure groups. For all of our fears about enemy propaganda, such campaigns may not be very effective. Studies in both the disinformation field and the U.S. political field find that changing hearts and minds on high-salience issues en masse is quite difficult, and that coordinated attempts at mass persuasion rarely achieve their goals.

The true problem is in fact far more daunting than coordinated information-warfare campaigns waged by adversarial states. The rise of online anti-Semitism in an American context and the associated drop in faith in American values are two particularly visible consequences of the emergence of a new cultural landscape—borderless, frictionless, and extremely democratic—built on the individual opinions and motivations of billions of people interacting in online public squares.