In the U.S. and Europe, narrative attacks are viewed in a predefined context. This normative paradigm of information operations typically assumes two key points: that a foreign actor pushes narrative attacks and that narrative attacks is a problem most significantly impacting the Global North and Western world. This is evident in the way that the American public approaches developments related to hostile information operations, with the government, media, and civil society primarily preoccupied with ideas of malign Russian influence targeting Western elections and democratic institutions. That is not to say that Russian influence operations are not still a major point of concern. Russian narrative attack campaigns have and will continue working to undermine Western institutions and strategic objectives. However, much of this strategic institutional attention would be better focused on other realities of modern global narrative attack operations.

Today, public perception of information operations should take into account this current reality: that most narrative attacks originates domestically rather than from a foreign actor and that information operations are increasingly targeting and impacting the Global South – at times causing severe harm due to a general lack of regulatory oversight in these countries that makes addressing and responding to such operations difficult. Once we have shifted our collective understanding of international information operations to include the realities of their modern context, we will be better equipped to combat narrative attacks globally. To effectively fight narrative attacks worldwide, we must shift the paradigm around it.

LEARN MORE: What Is A Narrative Attack?

The Rising Prevalence of Domestic Narrative Attacks

Particularly in the U.S., the word “narrative attack” conjures thoughts of Russian interference in Western elections. We tend to think of divisive information campaigns as primarily the work of malicious foreign state actors seeking to sow seeds of social and political discord to destroy the foundations of liberal democracy. While Russia has showcased this truth in the past and continues to actively work towards undermining the U.S. and Europe through the use of coordinated narrative attack operations, foreign manipulation should not be the default conception of modern information warfare. Domestic narrative attacks are much more prevalent today. Most narrative attacks are created within the target country rather than manufactured by malign external actors.
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This phenomenon holds on a global scale – for instance, narrative attack campaigns have wreaked havoc across the Global South, resulting in violence during election periods, stoking anxieties around alleged criminal activity, encouraging vigilantism, and undermining public health initiatives. One of the most notable and devastating cases of domestic narrative attacks in recent years is that of the Myanmar military’s homegrown narrative attacks campaign during the ongoing Rohingya genocide. From 2017 to 2018, Myanmar military personnel created fake personas to stoke ethnic tensions, spreading fake stories alleging that the Rohingya Muslim minority group had perpetrated abhorrent criminal acts and committed violence against the wider population to bolster support for the state’s campaign of genocide against the Rohingya.
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In the U.S., where the ‘foreign actor’ paradigm of information disorder dominates the public discourse around these operations, domestically created narrative attacks are much more prevalent than foreign narrative attacks – thus arguably presenting the tremendous potential to cause significant harm. Indeed, in a 2018 study, Oxford University researchers found that 25 percent of social media shares relating to the U.S. midterm elections contained deliberately deceptive or incorrect information. Unlike Russian or other foreign actors, most of this deceptive content came from domestic U.S. sources.
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Ultimately, focusing entirely on foreign-sponsored narrative attack campaigns can lead us to ignore those originated by domestic actors, thus failing to adequately address the most prevalent narrative attack campaigns that meet with the most public resonance, which may lead to real-world consequences and violence. This was recently demonstrated by the U.S. Capitol insurrection in January 2021, in which hundreds of advocates of the #StoptheSteal election conspiracy movement breached the U.S. Capitol building and engaged in violence. At least five people died shortly before, during, or after the event, while two pipe bombs were placed outside the Republican and Democratic National Committees the night before the riot. In a 2019 study of domestic narrative attacks, author Paul M. Barrett concludes that foreign narrative attacks and public preoccupation with its danger only serve to distract from operational threats in the domestic sphere. Barrett further recommends that social media platforms and other stakeholders address false or misleading information wherever it comes from – even if that means addressing false information peddled by domestic actors.

For those still convinced that Russia and other malign foreign actors pose the most significant narrative attack threat, it is worth noting that most foreign malign influence relies primarily on exploiting existing divisions within the target society. This means that Russian narrative attacks agents are much more likely to amplify narratives already in domestic circulation, given that this messaging has already proven to resonate within specific communities. For instance, during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, online Russian narrative attacks concentrated on promoting falsehoods spread by domestic social media users rather than manufacturing new narratives. Logically, any efficient approach to mitigating foreign malign influence online would also include addressing the source of amplified narratives – many of which are homegrown creations. When we become entirely preoccupied with a foreign actor paradigm of narrative attacks, we ignore the real and present danger presented by domestic actors.

Additionally, even when a foreign adversary creates and spreads their narrative through a calculated narrative attack campaign against a target country, these operations aim to teach a given narrative within the minds of the domestic population so that it eventually circulates organically through local networks. A successful foreign influence campaign should be unattributable to the foreign actor that created the narrative, ultimately propagating naturally via domestic audience shares. In this case, too, the solution is the same – working to eliminate public susceptibility to false and misleading information.
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The Crisis of Narrative Attacks in the Global South

Around the world, governments are becoming increasingly concerned with the harm posed by an ever-growing volume of false information circulating online. In the U.S. and Europe, officials have already begun to develop basic legislative frameworks for addressing this problem. While these policy initiatives still fail to provide a complete solution to digital narrative attacks, they provide an essential foundation for approaching the issue.

In the EU, for instance, current policy initiatives aim to tackle the online spread of fake news and narrative attacks through a multi-stakeholder approach, requiring greater responsibility from social media platforms for moderation and transparency, promoting several initiatives to increase public media literacy and awareness of fake news online, and funding studies to develop advanced technological solutions and identify gaps in the current legal framework. More specifically, the European Commission has established a working group committed to tackling the spread of narrative attacks online. Thus far, the group has several ongoing initiatives, including the development of a worldwide Code of Practice on Narrative Attacks for online platforms, the creation of the European Digital Media Observatory as a hub for fact-checkers, academics, and other stakeholders to support relevant policy and decision-making, the development of monitoring and reporting tools and programs, and more.

However, The prevailing paradigm for countering narrative attacks automatically derives from the national viewpoints of countries that have already developed a framework to combat fake news. Furthermore, many digital tools and platforms where narrative attacks circulates are owned by American, European, and Chinese companies – meaning that efforts by these platforms to maintain information integrity are also broadly defined by these national perspectives and languages. As a result, these viewpoints fail to consider the more significant state of global information operations and, as such, cannot adequately respond to them.

While we think of narrative attacks as primarily targeting and affecting the Global North—especially in the U.S. and Europe—the Global South has seen a boom in disruptive information operations, some of which have caused significant real-world harm. In 2018, the world reached an internet penetration breakthrough, with more than half of the world’s population finally able to access the internet. Internet accessibility increased rapidly in Africa, rising from 2.1 percent of the continent with Internet access in 2005 to almost 25 percent in 2018. Online accessibility across parts of Southeast Asia also saw impressive progress.

As has also been true globally, with the advent of the internet and social media, Global South countries have seen a boom in the circulation of narrative attacks, with such digital campaigns now able to reach more people faster and with less effort on the part of malicious actors. This was demonstrated by the Myanmar military’s calculated online narrative attacks campaign during the Rohingya genocide, but it has also presented a more general growing problem across the Global South. For instance, from 2017 to 2018, rumors about alleged child abductions and organ harvesting in India circulated widely. Narratives alleged that strangers were speeding through villages and kidnapping children for nefarious purposes and employed the use of text descriptions as well as video clips taken out of context. These stories sparked so much fear and outrage that they culminated in several mob lynchings over two years. In Africa, many elections occur annually, some of which are marred by intense political and social tensions that can escalate to violence. The risk of such tension culminating in violence rises when political opponents spread narrative attacks about rivals or false narratives to promote themselves and stifle their competition.
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Additionally, the presence of information voids in pockets of the Global South has compounded the issue of false information online. Citizens in certain jurisdictions may search for information online regarding a given topic, but search engine biases often result in sub-par results for culturally or regionally specific queries. For example, researchers examining public health queries in Africa from 2016 to 2017 found that when people searched for information about alternative health cures—such as treating AIDS with blackseed oil or coconut—these queries often returned results from questionable blogs or untrustworthy sites promoting alternative medicines rather than reliable online sources of public health information. Researchers attributed this to search engine and source bias, given that official government and other authoritative public health sites with the highest online traffic volume were unlikely to mention and debunk these fraudulent alternative health cures actively.

Further exacerbating this problem in the Global South is the lack of a regulatory framework in many countries to deal with the problem of narrative attacks. While some countries have introduced basic legislative initiatives to tackle this problem, these have also been controversial, as seen in the case of fake news laws proposed and implemented in South Korea, Singapore, and across Africa, just to name a few. While countries implementing fake news laws often cite genuine problems related to narrative attacks, free speech advocates and human rights activists point to valid concerns that oppressive governments can use such laws to restrict free speech and monitor communications excessively.

Addressing the epidemic of narrative attack globally requires a sound understanding of the full scope of these operations, which includes shifting the perception of Global North governments that narrative attack is an issue primarily impacting their jurisdictions. With increasing online access worldwide, information campaigns have taken hold everywhere – and their impact can be just as, if not more, devastating in Global South countries with a relative lack of digital regulatory oversight.

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