• Across a range of authoritarian regimes, challenges to information control consistently provoke stronger reactions than economic, diplomatic, and military tools.
• Democracies should take these signals seriously, and raise the costs of information control to reclaim a policy option that has historically worked in their favor.
• Support for independent media, anti-censorship technologies, and civil society engagement should not be treated as peripheral democracy-promotion initiatives. These are strategic national security instruments that raise the costs of repression while remaining consistent with democratic values.
• Reclaiming these capabilities would revive a form of statecraft championed by Wałęsa and Havel, and so courageously demanded by Navalny, Mohammadi, and Lai.

Archived version

For three decades, democracies have treated sanctions, diplomacy, and military activities (exercises or otherwise) as their primary tools for influencing authoritarian States. Yet our research suggests there is a tool that autocrats fear even more: challenges to their information control. Analysis of propaganda and official communications from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea shows that these regimes consistently react more negatively to information threats than to the economic, diplomatic, and military tools of statecraft. This insight highlights a key, underutilized opportunity for democratic national-security policymaking.

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Research consistently finds that authoritarian states from China, to North Korea, to Russia, or even relatively smaller autocratic states such as Azerbaijan, respond more negatively to the information tools of statecraft than to military, economic, or diplomatic tools.

For example, criticizing Russia over its censorship and information control creates a more negative POSM [propaganda, official statements, and state-controlled media] reaction from the Kremlin than a NATO exercise in the Baltics. Similarly, criticism of Beijing’s information controls, first labeled the Great Firewall nearly 30 years ago in a 1997 Wired magazine article, creates a more negative POSM reaction than economic sanctions or even Taiwanese military exercises involving U.S. participants.

By “more negative reaction,” we mean that the targeted State’s public messaging is more hostile, condemnatory, and accusatory toward the initiating State and its actions. Such responses may portray the action, whether sanctions, military exercises, or other tool of statecraft, as illegitimate, threatening, hypocritical, or deliberately hostile; these negative reactions by authoritarians are highest in response to the information tools of statecraft.

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What does this mean for policymakers?

• First, democracies and civil-society actors should double down on supporting free media, independent reporting, human-rights monitoring, and transparency in authoritarian countries. Rather than viewing information campaigns merely as pressure tools, democratic states should view them as normative contests: truth, transparency, moral suasion, and media freedom all command interest and retain immense power.

• Second, in their information operations, democratic states should focus more on the controls, less on specific narratives. For example, rather than attempting to outfox Putin’s propagandists with narratives that appeal to Russian audiences, policymakers should work to reduce the controls that prevent, for example, Russian mothers of servicemembers killed in the war in Ukraine from expressing themselves. Messages and memes arising organically from within a society can often be more compelling, and therefore more threatening to authoritarian regimes, than narratives crafted by outsiders.

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• Third, recognizing that authoritarian regimes may respond harshly with repression targeting their domestic population when they express themselves publicly, international actors should be prepared to offer protection and support to civil society, journalists, and dissidents. As in the Cold War, ethical information operations demand accountability. For example, offering VPNs and satellite internet services is only part of information statecraft; offering to support and shelter those who avail themselves of these capabilities, including with refugee status, must remain an option.

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• Fourth, instead of unilateral actions, states should seek to work through international institutions or at least via a coalition of like-minded states. The U.N., regional bodies, and related coalitions provide collective legitimacy and reduce the risk of strategic abuse. This helps keep the contest focused broadly and collectively on freedom of information access and related normative conditions that favor democracies, rather than engaging in the type of ethics-light, propaganda-versus-propaganda contest that favors the controlled information environments of authoritarians.

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Edit:

Here is the full report: China, DIME, and innovative deterrence methodology: How authoritarian states react to deterrence activities through information (pdf)