This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

The CIA remained a fixture at the heart of Indian civil debate throughout the 1980s. To the very end of the Cold War, the political fortunes of Indira Gandhi, and her son, and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, were intertwined with a series of espionage scandals in which, almost inevitably, the CIA figured prominently. This chapter examines the Reagan administration’s reliance of the CIA as a cold war foreign policy tool and its difficulties in securing Indian support to counter what officials in Washington perceived to be an alarming and unacceptable expansion in Soviet disinformation activity in the subcontinent. It explores the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and how these two tragic events came to be connected by South Asians with the Agency and its earlier CIA involvement in subversion and political assassination in the Global South. As the Cold War approached its end, and Hindu nationalism, rampant corruption, and political violence gripped India, the chapter considers why national powerbrokers in the subcontinent were once again unable to resist urging citizens to ‘look the other way’ and attribute the country’s troubles to a ubiquitous foreign hand?

This chapter traces the development of the Donbas media landscape after the emergence of the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR and LNR) in 2014. It focuses on the DNR/LNR authorities’ efforts to first break down and then rebuild local media. These efforts consisted of two phases: one of destruction and one of reconstruction. The destruction phase involved tearing down the existing media structure and pressuring journalists into either leaving Donbas or cooperating with the new authorities. The reconstruction phase involved setting up new media channels or repurposing existing ones, as well as implementing new legislation to impose censorship and promote certain desired narratives. The ministries of information of the two ‘Republics’ promoted local media production and set limits to what was allowed to be published by implementing accreditation procedures and keeping track of journalists working in the region. This formalisation occurred through a system of laws, decrees, edicts, and other regulations.

Most people who regularly use the Internet will be familiar with words like “misinformation,” “fake news,” “disinformation,” and maybe even “malinformation.” It can appear as though these terms are used interchangeably, and they often are. However, they don’t always refer to the same types of content, and just because a news story or social media post is false doesn’t always mean it’s problematic. To add to the confusion, not all misinformation researchers agree on the definition of the problem, or employ a unified terminology. This chapter discusses the terminology around misinformation, guided by illustrative examples of problematic news content. It also looks at what misinformation isn’t: what makes a piece of information “real” or “true”? Finally, we explore how researchers have defined misinformation and how these definitions can be categorized, before presenting the working definition that is used throughout this book.

Put simply–although nothing about it is simple–public diplomacy is diplomacy carried out in public, as opposed to most of diplomacy, which is done in private. It is a set of activities that inform, engage and influence international public opinion to support policy objectives or create goodwill for the home country. It is important to understand what public diplomacy is not. It is not an advertising campaign to get foreigners to like your country–even if they dislike it, they can still support, or at least accept, a particular policy or action. It is not a propaganda effort to mislead or lie to audiences for tactical or other advantage. It is a sustained endeavor that advances your country’s policies and reflects a solid understanding of the host-country’s language, culture, history and traditions. Both public diplomacy and propaganda are means to project power.

Ideally, we want to resist mis/disinformation but not evidence. If this is so, we need accounts of misinformation and disinformation to match the epistemic normative picture developed so far. This chapter develops a full account of the nature of disinformation. The view, if correct, carries high-stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically. First, it challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions about disinformation – such as that it is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, or essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. Second, it shows that the challenges faced by disinformation tracking in practice go well beyond mere fact checking. I begin with an interdisciplinary scoping of the literature in information science, communication studies, computer science, and philosophy of information to identify several claims constituting disinformation orthodoxy. I then present counterexamples to these claims and motivate my alternative account. Finally, I put forth and develop my account: disinformation as ignorance-generating content.

This chapter discusses the interaction between QAnon and the media. As the group turned from fringe to mainstream, it swamped social media. Eventually, social media companies had to take measures to stop the spread of disinformation associated with QAnon. Groups such as QAnon might use media to manipulate news frames and set agendas, which propels conspiracy-laden topics to mainstream media sources, and creates a platform for spreading disinformation. This chapter also examines how social media use relates to belief in conspiracy theories, and the potential consequences of exposure to conspiracy theories on social media platforms. This relationship between conspiracies, media, and disinformation is explored and applied to QAnon. A brief discussion of how QAnon is similar or different from other groups in their use of social media is offered, along with some research questions for future study about the QAnon movement.

Researchers have investigated how disinformation and fake news spreads through social networks. Understanding how disinformation flows on social networks can help identify interventions to reduce the impact of such falsehoods and prevent negative consequences that can result from following conspiracy theories. This chapter will provide an overview of how researchers can use the tool NodeXL to rapidly analyse social media data related to QAnon by drawing upon social network analysis. NodeXL can be used to identify the shape of the network, key opinion leaders, and content related to discussions around QAnon. NodeXL was recently utilised to study disinformation networks surrounding COVID-19, such as the 5G and COVID-19 conspiracy and the ‘Film Your Hospital’ conspiracy. The chapter will also examine how the QAnon Twitter network compares to other Twitter networks. The chapter will then provide an insight into future potential research avenues that could be pursued by scholars working in this area.

The introduction provides an overarching discussion of the main contributions of the book. It reviews the main argument of the book, that the meaning of social construction theory varies dramatically depending on the sociopolitical context within which one engages, as related to partisanship, media consumption, socialization, and other factors. The book consists of two parts, the first exploring what fake news means to different groups of Americans, as related to Donald Trump’s rhetoric, media coverage and discourses on fake news, and public opinion of fake news. The second part of the book includes case studies of how fake news is discussed and understood in various contexts, related to US foreign policy, climate change, and conspiracy theories.

Chapter 1 reviews the meaning of fake news, post-truth, propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. It engages with theoretical questions related to social construction theory and propaganda. The chapter situates the book within a larger sociohistorical framework recognizing the history of American war propaganda pertaining to US official rhetoric, the news media, and public opinion, and how propaganda has been used to manipulate the public into supporting US foreign conflicts. It also examines the conditions under which people question war propaganda. The chapter reviews scholarly works covering post-truth, fake news, disinformation, and misinformation. It also discusses the rise of “new media” – particularly social media and the impact they have on rising public misinformation in American politics. A review of competing works discusses the potential of social media to empower and disempower the public. Social media are used to connect people to politics and each other and to help organize social movements. But they have also fueled a political culture of paranoia, conspiracies, and anti-intellectualism, which are perpetuated by rising disinformation embraced by both political parties – but primarily on the American right.

The chapter seeks to lay out the conceptual and practical foundations of information warfare in the twenty-first century. Different concepts are identified and defined, together with how they affect and influence the information and cognitive realms of global audiences. The evolution and development of information warfare is identified and analysed. In addition to establishing why the problem of information warfare exists, and at this point in time, some proposals are explored as to how to set about addressing the problem.

There are different generations of information warfare that evolve with technological, (geo)political and economic changes occuring in society. They are a ’convenient’ means of covert and indirect engagement with another actor in international relations while exposing oneself to the minimum of risk and accountability. It is linked to the popularized international relations concept of hybrid warfare.