Advanced Methods of Psychological Warfare: And Disinformation

Psychological warfare, often abbreviated PSYWAR, is the deliberate use of information, images, and behavior to influence the emotions, motives, and reasoning of a target audience in ways that serve a state's or organization's objectives. It is an umbrella term that covers truthful persuasion, selective emphasis, and outright deception, and it can be aimed at enemy soldiers, foreign publics, or a state's own citizens. Disinformation is narrower. It refers specifically to false or misleading information that is knowingly created and spread with intent to deceive, as distinct from misinformation, which is false information spread without any intent to mislead by people who simply believe it to be true. Every disinformation campaign is a form of psychological warfare, but not every psychological warfare campaign relies on disinformation; a truthful leaflet describing a besieged garrison's hopeless supply situation is psychological warfare without being disinformation, while a forged cable attributed to a foreign ministry is both. This distinction matters because it shapes how democratic states in particular try to regulate themselves. Truthful public diplomacy, however persuasive, is generally treated as a legitimate instrument of statecraft. Deliberate falsehood is treated, at least rhetorically, as a different and more troubling category, one that erodes not just a particular adversary's position but the broader information environment on which self-governance depends. Authoritarian states tend not to draw this line as sharply, and one of the recurring themes of this book is how differently the American, Chinese, Russian, and North Korean systems treat the boundary between persuasion and deception.