Disinformation/Info OpsStrat

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor

This course focuses on disinformation as it impacts security, using historic and contemporary case studies to unpack the complex factors that cause people to hold and act on popularly-held beliefs, particularly when those beliefs are counter to scientific and historic truths, and how those beliefs are manipulated by state and non-state information operations. Case studies will be diverse, and include a variety of security contexts, both historic and contemporary. Factors for analysis include how disinformation manipulates beliefs held by people or folk (bottom up) or how it is used by elites in power (top down), its forms of circulation and their impact in establishing credibility within each specific cultural context, the flexible boundaries between reality, rumor, truth, conspiracy and fact, how emic and etic definitions of truth and authority impact social action, and how all these factors impact security. The course will also consider disinformation as a security strategy, information operations in context and how they impact governance and social action. The first part of the course will consider disinformation that originates from the bottom up, or folk news. Working from items as diverse as the circulation of conspiracy theories about covert powers that control governments, to rumors about state activity designed to undermine various groups, to beliefs about cataclysmic end times and the impact these have in specific geo-political contexts, students in this course will engage in analytic and research approaches to popularly-held belief. Rather than debate or debunk these narratives, course participants will consider contemporary legends and popular myths as a communal fact-finding process and examine popular belief systems as sites of alternate epistemologies and resistance that may or may not undermine dominant systems of power and security. The second part of the course will consider disinformation that originates from the top down, or fake news. This portion of the course will consider information/disinformation efforts that involve government, entertainment, and media elites. Working from a variety of historic and contemporary examples, participants will consider the various tools available to those in power to further disinformation, with a particular emphasis on how the evolving social media context enhances information operations. Students will consider the erosion of elite credibility and mainstream journalism, phantoms/bogeymen and their use in electoral processes, ideological warfare disguised as information, and how propaganda and disinformation operations support or undermine existing power and security systems.