Understanding the Information War

Governments do not only fight with armies and tariffs. They also fight over what their own citizens, and foreign audiences, believe is true. This explainer looks at three linked questions: why state officials sometimes say things in public that turn out to be false, how those statements become a national story, and how competing stories divide a society into camps that argue past each other. It draws on declassified records, official inquiries, court findings and peer-reviewed research, and it labels analysis as analysis.

A note on language: “lie” means a knowingly false statement. Official records rarely prove what an official knew at the moment of speaking, so this article separates documented findings from interpretation. Many public falsehoods are better described as concealment, unjustified certainty or delayed disclosure, and the cases below say which is which.

Why officials say false things: four documented motives

Historians and official inquiries point to recurring reasons governments mislead the public. These are categories of motive found in the record, not claims about any one leader’s private thoughts.

1. Strategic deception and wartime secrecy. States hide plans, losses and capabilities from adversaries, and the public is often misled as a side effect.

2. Regime or institutional survival. Bad news can threaten a government’s legitimacy, so it is delayed, minimized or blamed on others.

3. Face-saving. Once an official position is public, reversing it carries a political cost, which creates pressure to defend it after the evidence shifts.

4. Mobilization. Wars, sanctions and emergency powers need public support, and a simple, alarming story builds support faster than a hedged one.

Case studies across countries

United States, Gulf of Tonkin (1964). The State Department’s Office of the Historian records that the Johnson administration reported a North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox on August 2 and a second attack on August 4, and that doubts later emerged about the second. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution days later, with only two opposing votes in the Senate, and it became the legal basis for escalating the Vietnam War. An internal National Security Agency history by historian Robert Hanyok, declassified in 2005, concluded that no attack took place on August 4. The motive category here is mobilization: an incident that did not happen helped authorize a war.

United States, the Pentagon Papers (1971). The National Archives describes the papers as a secret study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967. When they were published in June 1971, they showed that successive administrations had given the public a narrower account of the war than the government’s own records described. The Supreme Court allowed newspapers to keep publishing them.

Soviet Union, Chernobyl (1986). The reactor exploded on April 26, 1986. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reports that about 30 workers died within weeks and roughly 115,000 people were evacuated that year. Soviet state media issued its first short statement on April 28, after a nuclear plant in Sweden detected radiation from the fallout. This is a textbook case of the survival motive: the first public account came only after the evidence had crossed a border.

United States and United Kingdom, Iraq WMD (2002–2003). The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in July 2004 that most of the major judgments in the October 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq’s weapons were overstated or not supported by the underlying intelligence. Britain’s Iraq Inquiry, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, said in 2016 that judgments about the threat “were presented with a certainty that was not justified.” Both inquiries described failures of evidence and presentation. Neither made a finding that leaders knowingly lied, and this article does not claim one.

Russia, MH17 (2014). Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board. The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team found the Buk missile system came from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade. A Dutch court convicted three men of murder in absentia in November 2022, and in February 2023 the JIT reported “strong indications” that the decision to supply the system was made at the level of Russia’s president. Moscow denies involvement and has publicly put forward alternative explanations that investigators rejected. This fits the face-saving pattern: once a denial is official, it tends to be repeated rather than revised.

China, early COVID-19 (December 2019–January 2020). The World Health Organization’s timeline records that the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a cluster of pneumonia cases on December 31, 2019. On January 3, 2020, Wuhan police reprimanded Dr. Li Wenliang for “spreading rumors” after he warned colleagues. Wuhan officials said for weeks that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, until a government expert team confirmed it on January 20. Li died of the virus in February, and a national investigation later found the reprimand improper. Analysis: the case shows how a system that punishes early warnings can turn a local problem into a global one.

How a false or one-sided statement becomes a national narrative

A single statement fades. A narrative lasts because it is repeated, framed and amplified. Communication research names several mechanisms:

• Agenda setting. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw’s 1968 Chapel Hill study found that the issues the media covered most were the issues voters ranked most important. Officials who control the news agenda influence what the public thinks about.
• Framing. Political scientist Robert Entman described framing as selecting some aspects of reality and making them more salient. “Defensive operation” and “invasion” can describe the same event.
• Repetition and the illusory truth effect. Since a 1977 study by Lynn Hasher and colleagues, experiments have shown that repeated statements feel more true. A 2015 study led by Lisa Fazio found the effect works even when people know the correct answer.
• State media and controlled platforms. Where the government owns broadcasters or can censor platforms, repetition can be near total and contrary evidence can be removed, as the Chernobyl and Wuhan cases show.
• Speed of falsehood online. A 2018 MIT study in Science of about 126,000 Twitter rumor cascades found that false news spread farther and faster than true news, and that people, not bots, drove most of the difference.

The diagram below shows how these steps connect into a cycle.

How narratives divide people by belief

Once a story becomes part of national identity, disagreement about facts starts to feel like disagreement about loyalty. Research explains why.

Motivated reasoning. Psychologist Ziva Kunda’s 1990 review showed that people judge evidence more favorably when it supports a conclusion they want. Facts that threaten a group story are scrutinized harder than facts that confirm it.

Identity. Social identity research, going back to Henri Tajfel, finds that people take part of their self-image from their groups. A challenge to the group’s story can feel like a personal attack.

Affective polarization. Political scientists Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes described growing dislike of the other side, not just disagreement with it. The Pew Research Center’s 2014 study of 10,013 U.S. adults found that the share of Republicans and Democrats with very unfavorable views of the other party had more than doubled since 1994, and that 63% of consistent conservatives and 49% of consistent liberals said most of their close friends shared their views.

Echo chambers, and why simple fixes fail. Exposure to the other side is not a cure on its own. In a 2018 PNAS field experiment, sociologist Christopher Bail’s team paid Twitter users to follow accounts from the opposite camp for a month. Republicans became more conservative, and Democrats shifted slightly more liberal, though that change was not statistically significant.

Foreign actors exploit the divide. Adversaries rarely invent a society’s quarrels; they amplify existing ones. The U.S. Special Counsel’s report found that Russia interfered in the 2016 election “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” including through social media accounts posing as American activists on opposite sides of issues such as immigration and race. The EU’s diplomatic service based its second threat report on 750 investigated foreign information manipulation incidents between December 2022 and November 2023, with Russia and China as the main actors named.

The consequences

Analysis: when each camp trusts only its own sources, a society loses a shared set of facts to argue from. Arguments then become contests of identity, compromise looks like betrayal, and public trust in institutions declines on both sides, including trust in the officials who started the cycle. A divided public is also easier for outside powers to manipulate, which turns a domestic credibility problem into a national security one.

How to defend yourself

The habits that work are simple and are taught by researchers who study how professional fact-checkers read:

• Read laterally. Before reading a claim closely, open new tabs and check who is behind the source and what others say about it. Stanford’s Civic Online Reasoning program found that fact-checkers do this and students mostly do not.
• Go to the primary record. Look for the court filing, inquiry report, official data or full transcript, not the summary.
• Ask what is missing. Who benefits from this framing, and what would the other side’s strongest evidence be?
• Watch for repetition. Feeling that something is true because you have heard it many times is the illusory truth effect at work.
• Slow down on outrage. Content designed to make you angry at the other camp is the content most likely to be shared before it is checked.
• Check whether a claim has been corrected. Many of the cases above were corrected by later inquiries, years after the original statements spread.

For daily tracking of these tactics, see the Information War News Hub and the latest Information War report. The agencies behind many of these operations are profiled in World Intelligence Agencies Explained, and information control is part of Lens 6, Domestic Politics and Information, in the Seven Lenses of Geopolitical Power.

Sources

• U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 1964
• UK Government: The Report of the Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot)
• Netherlands Public Prosecution Service: JIT MH17 findings, Feb. 8, 2023
• U.S. Department of Justice: Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference (Mueller report)

Related coverage

• Information War News Hub
• World Intelligence Agencies Explained
• The Seven Lenses of Geopolitical Power