Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

By Richard Stengel

During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of the new global information war. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the grievances of Americans who felt overlooked. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three players had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we all know about Trump.

In a narrative that is by turns dramatic and eye-opening, Information Wars walks readers through of this often frustrating battle. 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 became the model for their interference with the 2016 presidential election. An urgent book for our times, Information Wars stresses that we must find a way to combat this ever growing threat to democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Release date: Oct 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611859027

Reviews for Information Wars

[mrdickie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Author, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time magazine was Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2013 to 2016 during the Obama administration while John Kerry was Secretary of State.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 If you are one, like myself, who wonders why our government is slow to act, seemingly taking forever to get anything done, this is the book to read. Chronicling his time in the state department, he shows the many divisions, turf wars, constant meetings where little is accomplished, he shows how hard it is to put any new programs into place. He also shows how disinformation is put in place, ads targeted to specific audiences, who spread these false beliefs. He talks of the dark web and its influence and how difficult it is to stop it's influence. One site shut down another quickly opened, taking its place. Exactly how the Trump campaign used social media to great effect, and how Russia spread it's propaganda.He offers solutions at books end, but explains how difficult it is to get people to not believe everything they read and see, especially when the message aligns with their own beliefs. "Disinformation will always be with us. And that is because the problem is not with the facts, or the lack of them, or misleading stories filled with conjecture, the problem is us. There are all kinds of fancy cognitive biases and psychological states, but the plain truth is people are going to believe what they want to believe."The responsible thing to do is to check sources, where are these coming from, whether we agree or not, whether they fit our opinions. This book was informative, but also scary in a way. This is a world now where anything in social media can be taken as truth. ARC from Edelweiss