How to Lose the Information War

Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it?Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading.How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments’ responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.

A persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy., How to Lose the Information War is required reading to understand the shape of the 2020s. It’s a window into a reality we all kind of sensed, but lacked words or understanding to really process., [Nina Jankowicz's] suggested tactics to help win the information war are thought provoking; it’s a complex and difficult path forward but one vital to preserve democracy and truth itself., [How to Lose the Information War] offers an excellent guide on the [information warfare] lessons that should have been learned from our European partners provides a pathway forward., If there is just one point to glean from Nina Jankowicz’s How to Lose the Information War, it is this: The threats that disinformation campaigns present democracies do not occur in a vacuum. The intentionally false or distorted information flowing out of places like Russia and China, and aimed at nations from North America to Africa to Europe, is part of a larger effort to prey upon divisions, especially within democratic societies. For that reason, whatever strategy a nation employs to counter bots, trolls, and outright lies must go together with a robust civic renewal effort. Otherwise, the Woodrow Wilson Center scholar writes, democracies will play a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Nina Jankowicz is a Washington DC-based writer and analyst with a focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is currently a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Kennan Institute. Previously, she served as a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow, a role in which she provided strategic communications guidance to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Foreign Policy and others.