www.eurasiareview.com /19072025-how-disinformation-is-driving-america-further-apart-book-review/

How Disinformation Is Driving America Further Apart – Book Review

Jan Servaes 13-17 minutes 7/18/2025

“I wrote this book with the hope of sparking a national conversation about the dangers of disinformation and how to combat it. Throughout history, authoritarians have used disinformation to usurp people’s power. As a former national security prosecutor, I see self-serving forces sabotaging our country. … Disinformation is designed to stir up a powerful emotional response, to push us toward more extreme positions. … The conversation I propose is not a debate about Democratic and Republican politics. It is about the essential need for truth in self-government,” Barbara McQuade writes on page 13 of her New York Times Bestseller, ‘Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America’. According to her, American society is more polarized than ever before. “We are being strategically divided by disinformation—the deliberate spread of lies disguised as truth.”

Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches criminal law and national security law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. From 2010 to 2017, she was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, the first woman to hold the position, appointed by President Barack Obama. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chair of the Subcommittee on Terrorism and National Security. Before her appointment as U.S. Attorney, McQuade served for 12 years as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit, including as deputy chief of the National Security Unit. In that role, she handled cases involving terrorist financing, foreign agents, threats, and export violations. McQuade serves on several nonprofit boards and was a member of the Biden-Harris Transition Team from 2020 to 2021.

Distrust of the News Media

In a climate where public trust in news reporters is at an all-time low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and distribute fake photos, videos, and stories, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to influence voters, distort perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates.

According to the authoritative Brookings Institute, there are quite a few reasons for Donald Trump and the Republicans’ election victory: fears of inflation, concerns about border security, concerns about cultural issues related to race, gender, and sexuality, and a sense that President Joe Biden and the country as a whole were headed in the wrong direction. When it came to inflation and the overall economy, the average American was more negative in 2024 than the actual inflation, unemployment, and GDP figures indicated.

One must also look at how misinformation and disinformation shaped opinions about the candidates. As Elaine Kamarck and Darrell M. West argue in another Brookings Press book, ‘Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation’, there have been systematic and organized efforts to influence public opinion in many areas, from public health and climate change to race relations.

Fact-checking immigration data

Take the case of immigration and border security. According to candidate Trump, hordes of migrants were flooding the country’s southern border, monopolizing scarce public resources and endangering public safety through dangerous crime waves.

Actual border statistics consistently showed weak support for those claims, but that wasn’t enough to dispel the unfavorable opinion of Vice President Harris on border security. The idea that 10 million migrants had crossed the border and that many had been released after their arrest was false, according to independent fact-checkers. The number of arrests and releases declined during the Biden administration and was similar to the numbers during the first Trump administration.

In addition, crime statistics showed that American-born Americans were three times more likely to commit crimes than immigrants. According to the National Institute for Justice, American-born Americans committed about 1,100 crimes per 100,000 residents, compared to 800 for legal immigrants and 400 for undocumented immigrants. But Trump’s false claims on this issue made Harris seem ineffective on crime and immigration.

How Democracies Die

McQuade’s text refers at various points to the book by Harvard professors Levitsky & Ziblatt, ‘How Democracies Die’ (reviewed here and here). They describe how some democracies collapsed through violent coups or governments taking power by military force. But other democracies faltered through the abuse of democratic norms in ‘silent coups’. “America is undergoing a similar attack from within, and disinformation is the weapon of choice… Disinformation campaigns turn us against ourselves. The result is that we become first angry and fearful, then cynical, and finally numb and apathetic. It is no exaggeration to say that disinformation threatens to destroy the United States as we know it” (p. 17).

AI

The risks of disinformation have been exacerbated in recent months by new technological tools such as generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are easy-to-use tools that can create fake images, videos, audio, and stories. People no longer need a technical background to use AI tools, but can submit requests via ChatGPT prompts and templates and become master propagandists.

Foreign disinformation also plays a role. The official Government Accountability Office (GOA) recently summarized the research work of the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Defense on defining and detecting foreign disinformation. It found that Russia, China, and Iran are the top foreign governments spreading disinformation. These foreign governments spread disinformation in a variety of ways, including state-run or sponsored propaganda, social media, and artificial intelligence—such as deepfakes.

McQuade therefore identifies three main causes for the current malaise.

First, the mechanism for disinformation distribution has changed. For centuries, the deceiver had to rely on word of mouth, pamphlets, or spreading a false story, say in a foreign newspaper, hoping someone would pick it up and pass it on. Now, with the push of a button, someone can spread a lie.

Many social media “are completely irresponsible … we have given all our social media power to a handful of young, wealthy billionaires, whose interests are of course in their own interests, not in the public interest.”

Second, we are experiencing the worst political division in America since the Civil War of 1861-1865. McQuade believes it began with Republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s,  and has grown as parties focus on winning over their bases rather than finding common ground. With elections presented as an existential battle between good and evil, voters are demanding political purity.

Third, there is fear of a changing world: the climate crisis, refugees and border security, economic shifts with potential job losses. It’s fertile ground for demagogues who promise that only they can fix it.

It’s a combination of these three considerations that McQuade says Donald Trump has exploited. “I don’t think that he’s necessarily a political genius, but I do think he’s a conman and a marketing genius who knows how to sell things. He’s a huckster and he has taken advantage of this moment for personal and political gain”.

His rise almost a decade ago took the media by surprise. “The old and laudable rules of balance, impartiality and not editorializing no longer seemed to work when one candidate was so blatantly mendacious”. 

Old vs. ‘New’ Media

People are more likely to share disinformation when it aligns with their personal identity or social norms, when it is new, and when it arouses strong emotions.

Disinformation spreads differently on social media than it does on traditional media such as television, radio, and newspapers. Mainstream news media typically have robust measures to prevent and correct false claims, but several unique features of social media encourage viral content with little oversight. Rapid publishing and peer-to-peer sharing allow ordinary users to quickly spread information to large audiences, leaving disinformation to be vetted after the fact (if at all).

‘Echo chambers’ confine and isolate online communities of similar views, fueling the spread of falsehoods and hindering the dissemination of factual corrections. This problem disproportionately affects people who consume messages from conservative political sources.

Algorithms that track user engagement to determine what to show often favor content that arouses negative emotions such as anger and outrage. In general, most online disinformation comes from a small minority of ‘super-spreaders,’ but social media is amplifying their reach and influence.

Many Americans share fake news on social media simply because they don’t pay attention to whether the content is accurate—not necessarily because they can’t distinguish between real and made-up news, a new study in Nature suggests. Lack of attention was the driving force behind 51.2% of disinformation, according to those who participated in an experiment conducted by a group of researchers from MIT, the University of Regina in Canada, the University of Exeter Business School in the United Kingdom, and the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico. Results from a second, related experiment suggest that a simple intervention—encouraging social media users to think about the accuracy of news before posting and interacting with it—could help limit the spread of online disinformation.

Democrats vs. Republicans

What’s more, according to an in-depth article in Communications Psychology in 2023, Democrats are better at distinguishing between true and false news than Republicans. Aside from differences apparently related to political affiliation, the study found that men (as opposed to women) and highly educated participants were better at identifying fake news.

“This is consistent with the general literature. Most [studies] find that highly educated participants are more likely to distinguish between true and false news, and that men generally outperform women,” said Deni Mazrekaj, a sociologist at Utrecht University who was not involved in the study.

Mazrekaj also noted that psychological studies explain why far-right people are more likely to believe fake news than people with other political persuasions.

“Populist supporters prefer strong, autocratic leaders who value discipline and conformity over personal autonomy and individual freedoms.”

What to do?

We don’t have to sit back and accept widespread misconceptions as the new reality. There are several things people and organizations can do to protect themselves from what is an ongoing wave of misinformation, disinformation, and false narratives. McQuade offers solutions to combat disinformation and uphold the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalizing doxxing (revealing identifying information about someone online), and considering banning anonymous online accounts.

Social media platforms need to provide meaningful content moderation. Currently, many leading online platforms are breeding grounds for rumors, false information, and outright lies. They are widely disseminated and seen by millions of people. If this continues, it will become increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Companies like those owned by the tech billionaires who support Trump also need to take fact-checking much more seriously.

We need digital literacy programs that train people to evaluate online information and recognize fake news and hoaxes. We need to understand how changes in today’s political climate are making people more likely to believe negative information about the opposition. In a highly polarized world, where people are divided into competing political “tribes,” millions of Americans admit that they themselves have deliberately spread information that they know is false.

Moreover, many individuals/influencers and organizations have financial incentives to spread blatant lies. They earn money from subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales through websites, newsletters, and digital platforms. As long as spreading lies is lucrative, it will be difficult to control the flood of disinformation that plagues our current system.

That is why Human Rights Watch states that “elected officials, media, and civil society groups must work together to provide accurate, reliable, and accessible sources of information to everyone, especially communities that have long distrusted the political process. Online platforms have a responsibility to respect human rights, including the right to vote. These safeguards are necessary to ensure free and fair elections, which are at the heart of the American democratic system.”

Finally, McQuade also advocates increasing media literacy in schools and reviving civic education instead of focusing on multiple-choice test scores. “Citizenship education is important for all of us because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”

“Our democracy is too precious to simply surrender to authoritarians, fascists, foreign influence operations, and con artists. But all the laws in the world cannot stamp out disinformation unless the people want to defeat it. We must pass legislation that requires our public officials—even the president and the commander in chief—to stick to facts, not deceit. We must demand the truth from those who represent us, rather than accepting what we want to believe as truth. This is a fight for democracy that requires us to assert our non-negotiable sovereignty and our powers to self-govern.”

Because, otherwise …

𝗜𝗹 𝘆 𝗮 𝗽𝗲𝘂 𝗱𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗾𝘂’𝗼𝗻
𝗗𝗲́𝘁𝗿𝗼̂𝗻𝗲 𝗹𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝗶 𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀.

(There is little chance that we will dethrone the king of fools.)

The reason is: there are too many fools.

Dixit Georges Brassens