In the information war, the most effective message is rarely the one a government delivers directly.

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An ancient but ever-effective technique

In the information war, the most effective message is rarely the one a government delivers directly. A ministerial statement is taken at face value – as the position of a vested party – and the reader weighs it accordingly. When the same argument comes from the mouth of a professor, a retired general, or a researcher at an institute with a reassuring name, its nature changes. It ceases to appear as someone’s position and begins to seem like a description of reality. It is this transformation – rather than the spread of fake news – that is the true subject of these pages: the use of experts as multipliers of credibility, and the selection of experts as a tool of power over public opinion.

It is worth clarifying right away what is not being argued. It is not being argued that experts are manipulators, nor that expertise is an invention of the elites: those who reason this way end up handing the debate over to whoever shouts the loudest, which is a worse outcome. The argument is more limited in scope and, I believe, more difficult to refute. The expert’s authority is a resource, and like any resource, it can be produced, acquired, concentrated, or denied to the opponent. Those involved in strategic communication have known this for a century. The public, for the most part, is unaware of it.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew who effectively invented the profession of public relations in the 1920s, theorized it candidly. In Propaganda, published in 1928, he explained that in a mass society, opinions are not formed through direct persuasion but through the groups and leaders whom people trust. This led to a method he would call the “third-party technique”: do not tell the public what you want, but have someone the public considers impartial say it. In his memoirs, he recounted a classic example. Hired by a bacon manufacturer, he did not buy advertising space; instead, he had a doctor opine on whether a hearty breakfast was healthier than a light one, gathered the endorsement of thousands of colleagues, and had it reported in the newspapers as news. The product was barely mentioned. The doctors were.

The tobacco industry brought this method to its full maturity. On January 4, 1954, as early research was linking smoking to lung cancer, the major American tobacco companies published a “frank statement to smokers” in hundreds of daily newspapers, announcing the creation of an independent research committee. For decades, that committee funded studies, conferences, and scientists whose primary function was not to prove that smoking was harmless, but to keep the controversy alive. Doubt was the product. And doubt, to be credible, needed white coats.

The Cold War transferred this technique to the geopolitical arena, and it did so on both sides. Beginning in 1950, the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom funded magazines, festivals, and conferences that offered European intellectuals a prestigious platform and an anti-communist orientation; in 1967, it was discovered that much of the money came from the CIA, via front organizations. Many of those intellectuals were unaware of the source of the funds, and this is the point: their sincerity was essential to the operation’s success. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the KGB put forward the theory in 1983 that the AIDS virus had been created in an American military laboratory. The story first appeared in an Indian newspaper, the Patriot, and remained a fringe claim until 1986, when a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, lent it scientific credibility with a report that the press in dozens of countries cited as expert opinion. The lie had been circulating for three years. It was a scientist’s signature that propelled it forward.

The Pentagon’s “democratic” model

One might think that these methods belong to authoritarian regimes or the darkest phases of the Cold War. The best-documented case of the past few decades, however, concerns the world’s most powerful democracy – and was brought to light by a newspaper from that very democracy.

On April 20, 2008, the New York Times published an investigative report by David Barstow, based on approximately 8,000 pages of internal documents obtained through a lawsuit. It detailed a program launched by the Pentagon in 2002, on the eve of the Iraq War: dozens of retired officers, who regularly appeared on television networks as military commentators, were summoned to confidential meetings, given talking points to promote, and taken on organized visits to Guantánamo and Iraq. In public, they appeared as independent analysts. According to the investigation, many of them had ties to defense contractors seeking contracts from the Pentagon itself – a connection that the television networks were largely unaware of and, in any case, did not disclose to viewers. A subsequent investigation, focusing on General Barry McCaffrey, revealed how a single commentator could simultaneously serve as a television pundit, a consultant to defense contractors, and a privileged interlocutor with the military leadership. Barstow’s work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

That case deserves attention for three reasons. The first is that none of the analysts needed to lie: all they had to do was repeat, with their own faces and their former uniforms, the narrative provided by the Department of Defense. The second is that the system relied on an information asymmetry, because the public knew those men were generals but did not know who they worked for the day after the broadcast. The third is the most important. Those who ran the program did not consider it a covert operation but rather a normal communications activity, and when the scandal broke, the television networks largely responded with silence. The expert as a tool of influence was not an anomaly in the system; it was part of it.

The market for opinions

To understand why this technique works, we must look at how opinions are selected, and here the problem is not limited to governments.

Take the monumental work of Philip Tetlock, who collected predictions from some 300 political and economic experts over nearly twenty years – tens of thousands of forecasts verified over time. The results, published in 2005, showed that, on the whole, experts performed only slightly better than simple statistical rules, and that those most frequently featured in the media tended to be more wrong than the others. Tetlock offered a convincing explanation: television rewards certainty, brevity, and soundbites – precisely the qualities that make an analyst less capable of correcting himself. The format selects a type of expert even before it selects a type of opinion. And it is a format that anyone wishing to influence the debate can study and exploit.

Alongside the format is money. In September 2014, another investigation by the New York Times revealed that dozens of foreign governments were funding Washington’s leading think tanks, often without the public’s knowledge when researchers from those institutions participated in the debate or testified before Congress; Qatar, to cite the most talked-about case, had contributed nearly fifteen million dollars to the Brookings Institution over four years. In June 2023, a study by the Quincy Institute – itself an institution with a specific foreign policy agenda – argued that in American media coverage of the war in Ukraine, think tanks funded by the defense industry were cited significantly more frequently than those without such ties. This finding should be interpreted with the caution due to any analysis produced by one side of the debate. But the phenomenon it describes is recognizable to anyone who follows the international press: those who speak out on the need for new arms supplies often work for an institute that receives funding from the very companies that produce those weapons, and this fact is rarely mentioned in the byline.

The most instructive European case is that of the Integrity Initiative, a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a small British organization founded to counter Russian disinformation. In November 2018, a group of hackers leaked internal documents describing a network of national “clusters” of journalists, academics, and officials in various European countries. The British government confirmed that it had funded the project with nearly two million pounds from the Foreign Office. The controversy centered on a few specific incidents: messages posted from the project’s account targeting Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and, according to the documents, a campaign by the Spanish group against the appointment of Colonel Pedro Baños as head of the Department of National Security – an appointment that ultimately did not go through. It is not necessary to accept the most conspiratorial interpretation that was offered, nor to forget that the source of the documents was itself opaque and, in all likelihood, hostile. The confirmed fact remains that a democratic government was funding a network of ostensibly independent experts with the aim of influencing public debate in other allied countries.

Four roles of the expert

When considered together, these cases allow us to distinguish the various roles that the expert plays within the framework of information warfare. Distinguishing them is useful because each requires a different defense on the part of the reader.

The first is validation. The expert takes a thesis originating from an interested party and lends it his or her apparent neutrality: this is the case with Segal regarding the KGB and with military analysts regarding the Pentagon. Russian military theory has a name for the ultimate effect of this type of operation: “reflexive control” – that is, the art of conveying to the adversary the premises from which the adversary will, believing himself to be acting freely, derive the desired decision. A credible expert is the ideal vehicle for those premises, because the recipient accepts them as knowledge rather than as a message.

The second function is the creation of doubt, pioneered by the tobacco industry. Here, the expert does not need to convince anyone; they need only make it seem plausible that a controversy exists, and that controversy alone is enough to paralyze decision-making.

The third function is the most subtle and, in democracies, the most widespread: the delineation of boundaries. The expert is not used to assert a thesis but to determine which theses are admissible. On October 19, 2020, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, fifty-one former intelligence officials signed an open letter in which they argued that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, revealed by the New York Post, exhibited “all the classic signs” of a Russian information operation. The letter clarified that the signatories had no evidence of Russian involvement. Nevertheless, it was enough to justify the caution – or silence – of many news outlets and platforms. In 2022, the New York Times and the Washington Post verified the authenticity of at least part of that material. In 2023, testifying before Congress, one of the letter’s initiators, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, stated that the initiative had been prompted by a contact from Joe Biden’s campaign – a circumstance that those involved interpreted in different ways. Whatever the correct account may be, the mechanism is clear: collective authority – which, by its own admission, lacked evidence – was used to place a news story outside the bounds of what could be discussed.

The same function can be exercised in reverse, by stripping authority from those who possess it. In 2014, John Mearsheimer published an essay in Foreign Affairs in which he attributed primary responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis to NATO expansion. This thesis is legitimately contested by many scholars, who offer serious arguments. In July 2022, however, the Center for Countering Disinformation of the Ukrainian National Security Council included Mearsheimer on a list of individuals accused of promoting Russian narratives, alongside American politicians and journalists such as Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Glenn Greenwald. An academic argument was thus transformed into evidence of belonging to the enemy camp. In Italy, a similar dynamic unfolded in June 2022, when the Corriere della Sera reported on the contents of a document regarding Russian disinformation attributed to the intelligence community, which cited, among others, regular talk show commentators; the government and intelligence agencies clarified that this was not a blacklist, but the public perception was that analytical dissent was being conflated with hostile influence operations. A few months earlier, RAI had terminated its contract with sociologist Alessandro Orsini due to his appearances on an in-depth analysis program.

This must be stated clearly, because symmetry is part of the analysis: the same Italian television ecosystem, during the same period, aired an interview in May 2022 with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov – which was criticized for the absence of effective cross-examination – and gave airtime to commentators whose expertise was far from well-documented. In Russia, meanwhile, prime-time talk shows regularly feature so-called “Western experts.” The difference in severity between these cases is enormous and should not be downplayed: in Russia, a non-aligned expert risks imprisonment; in Italy, he risks losing his contract. This logic – the selection of voices based on political stance rather than expertise – is, however, akin to the method of infowarfare that is typical of this historical phase of warfare.

Finally, the fourth function is the most recent: the fabricated expert.

The Chinese, for example, have long been familiar with an expression, jiè kǒu shuō huà, “borrowing a mouth to speak.” A surprisingly useful and low-cost tactic. In short, all it takes is to identify a subject who can be used as an actor – or, if necessary, to create one digitally.

No actor has a monopoly on this technique. In July 2020, a Reuters investigation revealed that “Oliver Taylor” – presented as a student at the University of Birmingham and the author of articles published by Israeli media outlets – did not exist: the face in his photo was generated by an algorithm, and his primary target was a Palestinian academic living in London. That same month, the Daily Beast revealed that a network of fake Middle Eastern analysts – with fabricated biographies and stolen or fabricated photos – had published commentary in dozens of conservative outlets, expressing views consistent with the United Arab Emirates’ stance and hostile toward Qatar and Turkey. The following month, Facebook and the analytics firm Graphika attributed a fake news outlet, Peace Data, to Russia’s Internet Research Agency; the outlet recruited real, mostly unsuspecting freelance journalists to write about topics related to the American left. The operation reversed the formula: real authors, fictitious publisher. In all cases, the goal was not to produce news but to create a byline.

These cases were uncovered because they were crude: a name with no real-world record, a computer-generated face, a biography with no traceable background. It is reasonable to assume that generative models will make fabrication much cheaper and harder to detect, and that verifying an expert’s existence will become a real problem for newsrooms that already lack the time to check their affiliations. This hypothesis concerns the future and should be treated as such. But if it were to come to pass, the most likely consequence would not be an influx of credible fake experts. It would be widespread distrust even toward the real ones – which, for those waging an information war, is an equally useful outcome.

An expert, yes, but an expert in what? And on whose behalf?

Lippmann, whom we’ve already mentioned – who had worked on American propaganda during World War I and knew its inner workings – placed his hope in 1922 precisely in experts: only bodies of independent specialists, he wrote, could provide citizens and governments with a reliable picture of a world too vast to be known firsthand. A century later, that hope has not proved unfounded, but it has revealed its hidden condition. The expert is useful to democracy only if his or her independence is verifiable. When it is not, the expert becomes the most effective channel through which a particular interest can present itself as neutral knowledge.

This does not imply a call for indiscriminate mistrust. Those who reject all experts end up relying on their own, chosen by even worse criteria, and recent history is full of people who have shifted from blind trust in official sources to blind trust in alternative sources without changing their approach. Rather, it suggests an exercise that every reader can undertake and that every serious newsroom should facilitate.

The first question concerns expertise: an expert in what? A general knows the logistics of a military campaign, but not necessarily the domestic politics of the enemy country; a virologist knows a great deal about viruses but little about the economic consequences of a lockdown. An expert’s authority is local, and its extension to related fields is one of the points where influence most easily creeps in. The second question concerns interests: who funds the institution for which they work, what other roles do they hold outside the television studio, who invited them, and why specifically them. An interest does not invalidate an argument, but it must be disclosed, and the fact that it is kept silent is already a piece of information. The third concerns absence: which competent voices were not invited, and for what reason. This is the most difficult question, because it requires noticing what is missing. Finally, the fourth question concerns the treatment of dissent. A well-founded consensus responds to objections with data and arguments; a manufactured consensus responds with labels. This criterion applies in all directions, and it holds true even if the dominant opinion turns out, in the end, to be the correct one.

In the information war, the target is not only what the public believes, but its ability to understand why it believes it. The expert used as a weapon strikes precisely there, because he replaces the question “Is it true?” with the question “Who says so?”, and then controls the answer to the second.

Restoring to citizens the ability to distinguish between a fact, an expert’s interpretation of it, the interests that interpretation may serve, and the voices that have been left out of the room is not a task that can be delegated to a verification authority – which would itself be an expert in need of verification. It is a habit. It develops slowly, and no one has any interest in teaching it.