Resisting Information Warfare

Constructive Conflict Resource Guide

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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June 26, 2026

Democracies depend on a shared information environment that is good enough to support collective decision making. Citizens do not have to agree about values, priorities, or policies. They do, however, need some ability to distinguish evidence from fabrication, criticism from demonization, and honest persuasion from deliberate manipulation. Information warfare attacks that capacity. It uses propaganda, deception, targeted messaging, bots, trolls, deepfakes, hacked materials, and algorithmic amplification to confuse the public, inflame tensions, and weaken trust in democratic institutions.

Information warfare can come from foreign governments, domestic political movements, commercial actors, extremist networks, or opportunistic individuals. Sometimes the goal is to persuade people of a particular claim. Often, however, the goal is more corrosive: to make citizens believe that no one can be trusted, no facts can be known, and no democratic process is legitimate. The RAND Corporation’s discussion of the “firehose of falsehood” describes a propaganda model that is rapid, repetitive, high-volume, and unconcerned with consistency. This kind of information attack does not need to win a reasoned argument. It can succeed by exhausting people and making reality itself seem hopelessly contested.

Opposing information warfare is therefore not the same as suppressing dissent or policing every mistaken statement. Democratic societies must protect free speech, open debate, and the right to criticize those in power. The challenge is to resist organized deception without giving government or private platforms unchecked power to silence legitimate disagreement. Effective responses include media and information literacy, independent journalism, transparent platform policies, rapid fact-checking, public attribution of foreign influence operations, and civic norms that discourage people from sharing claims they have not tried to verify. UNESCO’s work on media and information literacy emphasizes the need to help people navigate digital information critically rather than passively consuming what is pushed toward them.

This overview introduces a set of more specific defenses. Resisting propaganda requires understanding how emotional narratives and enemy images are constructed. Responding to the firehose of falsehood requires strategies that do not simply repeat and amplify the lies. Countering targeted deception requires attention to how different groups are manipulated in different ways. Unspinning deceptive spin requires careful attention to framing, omissions, and misleading emphasis. These tasks are difficult, especially as artificial intelligence and other technologies make manipulation faster and cheaper. But they are essential. A democracy that cannot defend its information system cannot reliably defend its elections, its rule of law, or its capacity for constructive conflict.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.