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Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War Illustrations by Tyler ComrieOn June 4, 1989, the Polish Communist Party held partially free elections, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately removed the Communists from power. Not long afterward, street protests calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy brought about the end of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would no longer exist.Also on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the military to remove thousands of students from Tiananmen Square. The students were calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy. Soldiers arrested and killed demonstrators in Beijing and around the country. Later, they systematically tracked down the leaders of the protest movement and forced them to confess and recant. Some spent years in jail. Others managed to elude their pursuers and flee the country forever.In the aftermath of these events, the Chinese concluded that the physical elimination of dissenters was insufficient. To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Central Europe from reaching East Asia, the Chinese Communist Party eventually set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests. In the years to come, this would require policing what the Chinese people could see online.Nobody believed that this would work. In 2000, President Bill Clinton told an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that it was impossible. “In the knowledge economy,” he said, “economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.” The transcript records the audience reactions:“Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.” (Chuckles.) “Good luck!” (Laughter.) “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” (Laughter.)While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China. That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. Among them, famously, are Tiananmen, 1989, and June 4, but there are many more. In 2000, a directive called “Measures for Managing Internet Information Services” prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities didn’t like.[From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order]The Chinese regime also combined online tracking methods with other tools of repression, including security cameras, police inspections, and arrests. In Xinjiang province, where China’s Uyghur Muslim population is concentrated, the state has forced people to install “nanny apps” that can scan phones for forbidden phrases and pick up unusual behavior: Anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays offline altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uyghurs walk, drive, and shop. With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China has gotten closer to its holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words democracy and Tiananmen from the internet, but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.But along the way, the Chinese regime discovered a deeper problem: Surveillance, regardless of sophistication, provides no guarantees. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese government imposed controls more severe than most of its citizens had ever experienced. Millions of people were locked into their homes. Untold numbers entered government quarantine camps. Yet the lockdown also produced the angriest and most energetic Chinese protests in many years. Young people who had never attended a demonstration and had no memory of Tiananmen gathered in the streets of Beijing and Shanghai in the autumn of 2022 to talk about freedom. In Xinjiang, where lockdowns were the longest and harshest, and where repression is most complete, people came out in public and sang the Chinese national anthem, emphasizing one line: “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!” Clips of their performance circulated widely, presumably because the spyware and filters didn’t identify the national anthem as dissent.Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.Like the demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia that began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the 2022 protests in China help explain something else: why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.On February 24, 2022, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fantastical tales of biological warfare began surging across the internet. Russian officials solemnly declared that secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine had been conducting experiments with bat viruses and claimed that U.S. officials had confessed to manipulating “dangerous pathogens.” The story was unfounded, not to say ridiculous, and was repeatedly debunked.Nevertheless, an American Twitter account with links to the QAnon conspiracy network—@WarClandestine—began tweeting about the nonexistent biolabs, racking up thousands of retweets and views. The hashtag #biolab started trending on Twitter and reached more than 9 million views. Even after the account—later revealed to belong to a veteran of the Army National Guard—was suspended, people continued to post screenshots. A version of the story appeared on the Infowars website created by Alex Jones, best known for promoting conspiracy theories about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and harassing families of the victims. Tucker Carlson, then still hosting a show on Fox News, played clips of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesperson repeating the biolab fantasy and demanded that the Biden administration “stop lying and [tell] us what’s going on here.”Chinese state media also leaned hard into the story. A foreign-ministry spokesperson declared that the U.S. controlled 26 biolabs in Ukraine: “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans.” Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, ran multiple headlines: “U.S.-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond,” “Russia Urges U.S. to Explain Purpose of Biological Labs in Ukraine,” and so on. U.S. diplomats publicly refuted these fabrications. Nevertheless, the Chinese continued to spread them. So did the scores of Asian, African, and Latin American media outlets that have content-sharing agreements with Chinese state media. So did Telesur, the Venezuelan network; Press TV, the Iranian network; and Russia Today, in Spanish and Arabic, as well as on many Russia Today–linked websites around the world.This joint propaganda effort worked. Globally, it helped undermine the U.S.-led effort to create solidarity with Ukraine and enforce sanctions against Russia. Inside the U.S., it helped undermine the Biden administration’s effort to consolidate American public opinion in support of providing aid to Ukraine. According to one poll, a quarter of Americans believed the biolabs conspiracy theory to be true. After the invasion, Russia and China—with, again, help from Venezuela, Iran, and far-right Europeans and Americans—successfully created an international echo chamber. Anyone inside this echo chamber heard the biolab conspiracy theory many times, from different sources, each one repeating and building on the others to create the impression of veracity. They also heard false descriptions of Ukrainians as Nazis, along with claims that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA, and that NATO started the war.Outside this echo chamber, few even know it exists. At a dinner in Munich in February 2023, I found myself seated across from a European diplomat who had just returned from Africa. He had met with some students there and had been shocked to discover how little they knew about the war in Ukraine, and how much of what they did know was wrong. They had repeated the Russian claims that the Ukrainians are Nazis, blamed NATO for the invasion, and generally used the same kind of language that can be heard every night on the Russian evening news. The diplomat was mystified. He grasped for explanations: Maybe the legacy of colonialism explained the spread of these conspiracy theories, or Western neglect of the global South, or the long shadow of the Cold War. Tyler Comrie But the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language.To be fair to the European diplomat, the convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes. Their own rhetoric makes this clear. In 2013, as Chinese President Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo, known enigmatically as Document No. 9—or, more formally, as the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere—listed “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party. “Western constitutional democracy” led the list, followed by “universal human rights,” “media independence,” “judicial independence,” and “civic participation.” The document concluded that “Western forces hostile to China,” together with dissidents inside the country, “are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” and instructed party leaders to push back against these ideas wherever they found them, especially online, inside China and around the world.[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]Since at least 2004, the Russians have been focused on the same convergence of internal and external ideological threats. That was the year Ukrainians staged a popular revolt, known as the Orange Revolution—the name came from the orange T-shirts and flags of the protesters—against a clumsy attempt to steal a presidential election. The angry intervention of the Ukrainian public into what was meant to have been a carefully orchestrated victory for Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate directly supported by Putin himself, profoundly unnerved the Russians. This was especially the case because a similarly unruly protest movement in Georgia had brought a pro-European politician, Mikheil Saakashvili, to power the year before.Shaken by those two events, Putin put the bogeyman of “color revolution” at the center of Russian propaganda. Civic protest movements are now always described as color revolutions in Russia, and as the work of outsiders. Popular opposition leaders are always said to be puppets of foreign governments. Anti-corruption and prodemocracy slogans are linked to chaos and instability wherever they are used, whether in Tunisia, Syria, or the United States. In 2011, a year of mass protest against a manipulated election in Russia itself, Putin bitterly described the Orange Revolution as a “well-tested scheme for destabilizing society,” and he accused the Russian opposition of “transferring this practice to Russian soil,” where he feared a similar popular uprising intended to remove him from power.Putin was wrong—no “scheme” had been “transferred.” Public discontent in Russia simply had no way to express itself except through street protest, and Putin’s opponents had no legal means to remove him from power. Like so many other people around the world, they talked about democracy and human rights because they recognized that these concepts represented their best hope for achieving justice, and freedom from autocratic power. The protests that led to democratic transitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, and Mexico; the “people’s revolutions” that washed across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989; the Arab Spring in 2011; and, yes, the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia—all were begun by those who had suffered injustice at the hands of the state, and who seized on the language of freedom and democracy to propose an alternative.This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.In the 20th century, Communist Party propaganda was overwhelming and inspiring, or at least it was meant to be. The future it portrayed was shiny and idealized, a vision of clean factories, abundant produce, and healthy tractor drivers with large muscles and square jaws. The architecture was designed to overpower, the music to intimidate, the public spectacles to awe. In theory, citizens were meant to feel enthusiasm, inspiration, and hope. In practice, this kind of propaganda backfired, because people could compare what they saw on posters and in movies with a far more impoverished reality.A few autocracies still portray themselves to their citizens as model states. The North Koreans continue to hold colossal military parades with elaborate gymnastics displays and huge portraits of their leader, very much in the Stalinist style. But most modern authoritarians have learned from the mistakes of the previous century. Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy around the world, lists 56 countries as “not free.” Most don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, apathetic and afraid, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade their own people to stay out of politics, and above all to convince them that there is no democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong. The democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development, and to promote a Beijing model of progress through dictatorship and “order” that’s superior to the chaos and violence of democracy. Chinese media mocked the laxity of the American response to the pandemic with an animated film that ended with the Statue of Liberty on an intravenous drip. China’s Global Times wrote that Chinese people were mocking the January 6 insurrection as “karma” and “retribution”: “Seeing such scenarios,” the publication’s then-editor wrote in an op-ed, “many Chinese will naturally recall that Nancy Pelosi once praised the violence of Hong Kong protesters as ‘a beautiful sight to behold.’ ” (Pelosi, of course, had praised peaceful demonstrators, not violence.) The Chinese are told that these forces of chaos are out to disrupt their own lives, and they are encouraged to fight against them in a “people’s war” against foreign influence.[Read: I watched Russian TV so you don’t have to]Russians, although they hear very little about what happens in their own towns and cities, receive similar messages about the decline of places they don’t know and have mostly never visited: America, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland—countries apparently filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and Russophobia. A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state-controlled, an average of 18 times a day. Some of the stories were obviously invented (European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples! ), but even the true ones were cherry-picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, that Europeans are weak and immoral, and that the European Union is aggressive and interventionist. If anything, the portrayal of America has been more dramatic. Putin himself has displayed a surprisingly intimate acquaintance with American culture wars about transgender rights, and mockingly sympathized with people who he says have been “canceled.”The goal is clear: to prevent Russians from identifying with Europe the way they once did, and to build alliances between Putin’s domestic audience and his supporters in Europe and North America, where some naive conservatives (or perhaps cynical, well-paid conservatives) seek to convince their followers that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens and migrants. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed, in practice, by elements of Sharia law. The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestantism. Nevertheless, among the slogans shouted by white nationalists marching in the infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstration in 2017 was “Russia is our friend.” Putin sends periodic messages to this constituency: “I uphold the traditional approach that a woman is a woman, a man is a man, a mother is a mother, and a father is a father,” he told a press conference in December 2021, almost as if this “traditional approach” would be justification for invading Ukraine.[Michael Carpenter: Russia is co-opting angry young men]This manipulation of the strong emotions around gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world, often as a means of defending against criticism of the regime. Yoweri Museveni, who has been the president of Uganda for more than three decades, passed an “anti-homosexuality” bill in 2014, instituting a life sentence for gay people who have sex or marry and criminalizing the “promotion” of a homosexual lifestyle. By picking a fight over gay rights, he was able to consolidate his supporters at home while neutralizing foreign criticisms of his regime, describing them as “social imperialism”: “Outsiders cannot dictate to us; this is our country,” he declared. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war. He pretends that ongoing tension between his government and the U.S. ambassador to Hungary concerns religion and gender: During Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Hungary, Carlson declared that the Biden administration “hates” Hungary because “it’s a Christian country,” when in fact it is Orbán’s deep financial and political ties to Russia and China that have badly damaged American-Hungarian relations.The new authoritarians also have a different attitude toward reality. When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. After Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: It blamed the Ukrainian army, and the CIA, and a nefarious plot in which dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.[Anne Applebaum: The American face of authoritarian propaganda]Fear, cynicism, nihilism, and apathy, coupled with disgust and disdain for democracy: This is the formula that modern autocrats, with some variations, sell to their citizens and to foreigners, all with the aim of destroying what they call “American hegemony.” In service of this idea, Russia, a colonial power, paints itself as a leader of the non-Western civilizations in what the analyst Ivan Klyszcz calls their struggle for “messianic multipolarity,” a battle against “the West’s imposition of ‘decadent,’ ‘globalist’ values.” In September 2022, when Putin held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he claimed that he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.” He did not speak of the people he had tortured or the Ukrainian children he had kidnapped. A year later, Putin told a gathering in Sochi: “We are now fighting not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world. We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit. We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous for others.” The language of “hegemony” and “multipolarity” is now part of Chinese, Iranian, and Venezuelan narratives too.In truth, Russia is a genuine danger to its neighbors, which is why most of them are re-arming and preparing to fight against a new colonial occupation. The irony is even greater in African countries like Mali, where Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have helped keep a military dictatorship in power, reportedly by conducting summary executions, committing atrocities against civilians, and looting property. In Mali, as in Ukraine, the battle against Western decadence means that white Russian thugs brutally terrorize people with impunity.And yet Mali Actu, a pro-Russian website in Mali, solemnly explains to its readers that “in a world that is more and more multipolar, Africa will play a more and more important role.” Mali Actu is not alone; it’s just a small part of a propaganda network, created by the autocracies, that is now visible all over the world.The infrastructure of antidemocratic propaganda takes many forms, some overt and some covert, some aimed at the public and some aimed at elites. The United Front, the fulcrum of the Chinese Communist Party’s most important influence strategy, seeks to shape perceptions of China around the world by creating educational and exchange programs, controlling Chinese exile communities, building Chinese chambers of commerce, and courting anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. The Confucius Institutes are probably the best-known elite Chinese influence project. Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies not unlike the Goethe-Institut, run by the German government, and the Alliance Française, they were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion, policing Chinese students at American universities by restricting open discussions of Tibet and Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. They have now been mostly disbanded in the United States. But they are flourishing in many other places, including Africa, where there are several dozen.These subtler operations are augmented by China’s enormous investment in international media. The Xinhua wire service, the China Global Television Network, China Radio International, and China Daily all receive significant state financing, have social-media accounts in multiple languages and regions, and sell, share, or otherwise promote their content. These Chinese outlets cover the entire world, and provide feeds of slickly produced news and video segments to their partners at low prices, sometimes for free, which makes them more than competitive with reputable Western newswires, such as Reuters and the Associated Press. Scores of news organizations in Europe and Asia use Chinese content, as do many in Africa, from Kenya and Nigeria to Egypt and Zambia. Chinese media maintain a regional hub in Nairobi, where they hire prominent local journalists and produce content in African languages. Building this media empire has been estimated to cost billions of dollars a year. Tyler Comrie For the moment, viewership of many of these Chinese-owned channels remains low; their output can be predictable, even boring. But more popular forms of Chinese television are gradually becoming available. StarTimes, a satellite-television company that is tightly linked to the Chinese government, launched in Africa in 2008 and now has 13 million television subscribers in more than 30 African countries. StarTimes is cheap for consumers, costing just a few dollars a month. It prioritizes Chinese content—not just news but kung-fu movies, soap operas, and Chinese Super League football, with the dialogue and commentary all translated into Hausa, Swahili, and other African languages. In this way, even entertainment can carry China-positive messages.This subtler shift is the real goal: to have the Chinese point of view appear in the local press, with local bylines. Chinese propagandists call this strategy “borrowing boats to reach the sea,” and it can be achieved in many ways. Unlike Western governments, China doesn’t think of propaganda, censorship, diplomacy, and media as separate activities. Legal pressure on news organizations, online trolling operations aimed at journalists, cyberattacks—all of these can be deployed as part of a single operation designed to promulgate or undermine a given narrative. China also offers training courses or stipends for local journalists across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, sometimes providing phones and laptops in exchange for what the regime hopes will be favorable coverage.The Chinese also cooperate, both openly and discreetly, with the media outlets of other autocracies. Telesur, a Hugo Chávez project launched in 2005, is headquartered in Caracas and led by Venezuela in partnership with Cuba and Nicaragua. Selectively culled bits of foreign news make it onto Telesur from its partners, including headlines that presumably have limited appeal in Latin America: “US-Armenia Joint Military Drills Undermine Regional Stability,” for example, and “Russia Has No Expansionist Plans in Europe.” Both of these stories, from 2023, were lifted directly from the Xinhua wire.Iran, for its part, offers HispanTV, the Spanish-language version of Press TV, the Iranian international service. HispanTV leans heavily into open anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial: One March 2020 headline declared that the “New Coronavirus Is the Result of a Zionist Plot.” Spain banned HispanTV and Google blocked it from its YouTube and Gmail accounts, but the service is easily available across Latin America, just as Al-Alam, the Arabic version of Press TV, is widely available in the Middle East. After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international group dedicated to fighting disinformation, found that Iran was creating additional hacking groups to target digital, physical, and electoral infrastructure in Israel (where it went after electoral rolls) and the United States. In the future, these hacking operations may be combined with propaganda campaigns.RT—Russia Today—has a bigger profile than either Telesur or Press TV; in Africa, it has close links to China. Following the invasion of Ukraine, some satellite networks dropped RT. But China’s StarTimes satellite picked it up, and RT immediately began building offices and relationships across Africa, especially in countries run by autocrats who echo its anti-Western, anti-LGBTQ messages, and who appreciate its lack of critical or investigative reporting.RT—like Press TV, Telesur, and even CGTN—also functions as a production facility, a source of video clips that can be spread online, repurposed and reused in targeted campaigns. Americans got a firsthand view of how the clandestine versions work in 2016, when the Internet Research Agency—now disbanded but based then in St. Petersburg and led by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, more famous as the mercenary boss of the Wagner Group who staged an aborted march on Moscow—pumped out fake material via fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, designed to confuse American voters. Examples ranged from virulently anti-immigration accounts aimed at benefiting Donald Trump to fake Black Lives Matter accounts that attacked Hillary Clinton from the left.Since 2016, these tactics have been applied across the globe. The Xinhua and RT offices in Africa and around the world—along with Telesur and HispanTV—create stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies; these, in turn, are repeated and amplified in many countries, translated into many languages, and reshaped for many local markets. The material produced is mostly unsophisticated, but it is inexpensive and can change quickly, according to the needs of the moment. After the October 7 Hamas attack, for example, official and unofficial Russian sources immediately began putting out both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material, and messages calling American and Western support for Ukraine hypocritical in light of the Gaza conflict. The data-analytics company Alto Intelligence found posts smearing both Ukrainians and Israelis as “Nazis,” part of what appears to be a campaign to bring far-left and far-right communities closer together in opposition to U.S.-allied democracies. Anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages also increased inside China, as well as on Chinese-linked accounts around the world. Joshua Eisenman, a professor at Notre Dame and the author of a new book on China’s relations with Africa, told me that during a recent trip to Beijing, he was astonished by how quickly the previous Chinese line on the Middle East—“China-Israel relations are stronger than ever”—changed. “It was a complete 180 in just a few days.”Not that everyone hearing these messages will necessarily know where they come from, because they often appear in forums that conceal their origins. Most people probably did not hear the American-biolabs conspiracy theory on a television news program, for example. Instead, they heard it thanks to organizations like Pressenza and Yala News. Pressenza, a website founded in Milan and relocated to Ecuador in 2014, publishes in eight languages, describes itself as “an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence,” and featured an article on biolabs in Ukraine. According to the U.S. State Department, Pressenza is part of a project, run by three Russian companies, that planned to create articles in Moscow and then translate them for these “native” sites, following Chinese practice, to make them seem “local.” Pressenza denied the allegations; one of its journalists, Oleg Yasinsky, who says he is of Ukrainian origin, responded by denouncing America’s “planetary propaganda machine” and quoting Che Guevara.Like Pressenza, Yala News also markets itself as independent. This U.K.-registered, Arabic-language news operation provides slickly produced videos, including celebrity interviews, to its 3 million followers every day. In March 2022, as the biolabs allegation was being promoted by other outlets, the site posted a video that echoed one of the most sensational versions: Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery vehicle for bioweapons, infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread disease.Yala did not invent this ludicrous tale: Russian state media, such as the Sputnik news agency, published it in Russian first, followed by Sputnik’s Arabic website and RT Arabic. Russia’s United Nations ambassador addressed the UN Security Council about the biobird scandal, warning of the “real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bioagents from Ukraine.” In an April 2022 interview in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and me that the biobirds story reminded him of a Monty Python sketch. If Yala were truly an “independent” publication, as it describes itself, it would have fact-checked this story, which, like the other biolab conspiracies, was widely debunked.[Read: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg interview Volodymyr Zelensky]But Yala News is not a news organization at all. As the BBC has reported, it’s an information laundromat, a site that exists to spread and propagate material produced by RT and other Russian facilities. Yala News has posted claims that the Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha was staged, that Zelensky appeared drunk on television, and that Ukrainian soldiers were running away from the front lines. Although the company is registered to an address in London—a mail drop shared by 65,000 other companies—its “news team” is based in a suburb of Damascus. The company’s CEO is a Syrian businessman based in Dubai who, when asked by the BBC, insisted on the organization’s “impartiality.”Another strange actor in this field is RRN—the company’s name is an acronym, originally for Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (like Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive. RRN is prolific. During its short existence, it has created more than 300 sites targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Links to these sites are then used to make Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media posts appear credible. When someone is quickly scrolling, they might not notice that a headline links to a fake Spiegel.pro website, say, rather than to the authentic German-magazine website Spiegel.de.Doppelganger’s efforts, run by a clutch of companies in Russia, have varied widely, and seem to have included fake NATO press releases, with the same fonts and design as the genuine releases, “revealing” that NATO leaders were planning to deploy Ukrainian paramilitary troops to France to quell pension protests. In November, operatives who the French government believes are linked to Doppelganger spray-painted Stars of David around Paris and posted them on social media, hoping to amplify French divisions over the Gaza war. Russian operatives built a social-media network to spread the false stories and the photographs of anti-Semitic graffiti. The goal is to make sure that the people encountering this content have little clue as to who created it, or where or why.Russia and China are not the only parties in this space. Both real and automated social-media accounts geolocated to Venezuela played a small role in the 2018 Mexican presidential election, for example, boosting the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Notable were two kinds of messages: those that promoted images of Mexican violence and chaos—images that might make people feel they need an autocrat to restore order—and those that were angrily opposed to NAFTA and the U.S. more broadly. This tiny social-media investment must have been deemed successful. After he became president, López Obrador engaged in the same kinds of smear campaigns as unelected politicians in autocracies, empowered and corrupted the military, undermined the independence of the judiciary, and otherwise degraded Mexican democracy. In office, he has promoted Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine along with Chinese narratives about the repression of the Uyghurs. Mexico’s relationship with the United States has become more difficult—and that, surely, was part of the point.None of these efforts would succeed without local actors who share the autocratic world’s goals. Russia, China, and Venezuela did not invent anti-Americanism in Mexico. They did not invent Catalan separatism, to name another movement that both Russian and Venezuelan social-media accounts supported, or the German far right, or France’s Marine Le Pen. All they do is amplify existing people and movements—whether anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Ukrainian, or, above all, antidemocratic. Sometimes they provide a social-media echo. Sometimes they employ reporters and spokespeople. Sometimes they use the media networks they built for this purpose. And sometimes, they just rely on Americans to do it for them.Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.Given that both Russian and Chinese actors now blend in so easily with the MAGA messaging operation, it is hardly surprising that the American government has difficulty responding to the newly interlinked autocratic propaganda network. American-government-backed foreign broadcasters—Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Farda, Radio Martí—still exist, but neither their mandate nor their funding has changed much in recent years. The intelligence agencies continue to observe what happens—there is a Foreign Malign Influence Center under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—but they are by definition not part of the public debate. The only relatively new government institution fighting antidemocratic propaganda is the Global Engagement Center, but it is in the State Department, and its mandate is to focus on authoritarian propaganda outside the United States. Established in 2016, it replaced the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which sought to foil the Islamic State and other jihadist groups that were recruiting young people online. In 2014–15, as the scale of Russian disinformation campaigns in Europe were becoming better known, Congress designated the GEC to deal with Russian as well as Chinese, Iranian, and other propaganda campaigns around the world—although not, again, inside the United States. Throughout the Trump administration, the organization languished under the direction of a president who himself repeated Russian propaganda lines during the 2016 campaign—“Obama founded ISIS,” for example, and “Hillary will start World War III.”Today the GEC is run by James Rubin, a former State Department spokesperson from the Bill Clinton era. It employs 125 people and has a budget of $61 million—hardly a match for the many billions that China and Russia spend building their media networks. But it is beginning to find its footing, handing out small grants to international groups that track and reveal foreign disinformation operations. It’s now specializing in identifying covert propaganda campaigns before they begin, with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies. Rubin calls this “prebunking” and describes it as a kind of “inoculation”: “If journalists and governments know that this is coming, then when it comes, they will recognize it.”The revelation in November of the Russian ties to seemingly native left-wing websites in Latin America, including Pressenza, was one such effort. More recently, the GEC published a report on the African Initiative, an agency that had planned a huge campaign to discredit Western health philanthropy, starting with rumors about a new virus supposedly spread by mosquitoes. The idea was to smear Western doctors, clinics, and philanthropists, and to build a climate of distrust around Western medicine, much as Russian efforts helped build a climate of distrust around Western vaccines during the pandemic. The GEC identified the Russian leader of the project, Artem Sergeyevich Kureyev; noted that several employees had come to the African Initiative from the Wagner Group; and located two of its offices, in Mali and Burkina Faso. Rubin and others subsequently spent a lot of time talking with regional reporters about the African Initiative’s plans so that “people will recognize them” when they launch. Dozens of articles in English, Spanish, and other languages have described these operations, as have thousands of social-media posts. Eventually, the goal is to create an alliance of other nations who also want to share information about planned and ongoing information operations so that everyone knows they are coming.It’s a great idea, but no equivalent agency functions inside the United States. Some social-media companies have made purely voluntary efforts to remove foreign-government propaganda, sometimes after being tipped off by the U.S. government but mostly on their own. In the U.S., Facebook created a security-policy unit that still regularly announces when it discovers “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—meaning accounts that are automated and/or evidently part of a planned operation from (usually) Russian, Iranian, or Chinese sources—and then takes down the posts. It is difficult for outsiders to monitor this activity, because the company restricts access to its data, and even controls the tools that can be used to examine the data. In March, Meta announced that by August, it would phase out CrowdTangle, a tool used to analyze Facebook data, and replace it with a tool that analysts fear will be harder to use.X (formerly Twitter) also used to look for foreign propaganda activity, but under the ownership of Elon Musk, that voluntary effort has been badly weakened. The new blue-check “verification” process allows users—including anonymous, pro-Russian users—to pay to have their posts amplified; the old “safety team” no longer exists. The result: After the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine last summer, a major environmental and humanitarian disaster caused by Russian bombing over many weeks, the false narrative that Ukraine had destroyed it appeared hundreds of thousands of times on X. After the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March, David Sacks, the former PayPal entrepreneur and a close associate of Musk’s, posted on X, with no evidence, that “if the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it.” His completely unfounded post was viewed 2.5 million times. This spring, some Republican congressional leaders finally began speaking about the Russian propaganda that had “infected” their base and their colleagues. Most of that “Russian propaganda” is not coming from inside Russia.Over the past several years, universities and think tanks have used their own data analytics to try to identify inauthentic networks on the largest websites—but they are also now meeting resistance from MAGA-affiliated Republican politicians. In 2020, teams at Stanford University and the University of Washington, together with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council and Graphika, a company that specializes in social-media analytics, decided to join forces to monitor false election information. Renée DiResta, one of the leaders of what became the Election Integrity Partnership, told me that an early concern was Russian and Chinese campaigns. DiResta assumed that these foreign interventions wouldn’t matter much, but she thought it would be useful and academically interesting to understand their scope. “Lo and behold,” she said, “the entity that becomes the most persistent in alleging that American elections are fraudulent, fake, rigged, and everything else turns out to be the president of the United States.” The Election Integrity Partnership tracked election rumors coming from across the political spectrum, but observed that the MAGA right was far more prolific and significant than any other source.The Election Integrity Partnership was not organized or directed by the U.S. government. It occasionally reached out to platforms, but had no power to compel them to act, DiResta told me. Nevertheless, the project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation, and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.Over time, the attack on the Election Integrity Partnership has itself acquired some of the characteristics of a classic information-laundering operation. The most notorious example concerns a reference, on page 183 of the project’s final post-2020-election report, to the 21,897,364 tweets gathered after the election, in an effort to catalog the most viral false rumors. That simple statement of the size of the database has been twisted into another false and yet constantly repeated rumor: the spurious claim that the Department of Homeland Security somehow conspired with the Election Integrity Partnership to censor 22 million tweets. This never happened, and yet DiResta said that “this nonsense about the 22 million tweets pops up constantly as evidence of the sheer volume of our duplicity”; it has even appeared in the Congressional Record.The same tactics have been used against the Global Engagement Center. In 2021, the GEC gave a grant to another organization, the Global Disinformation Index, which helped develop a technical tool to track online campaigns in East Asia and Europe. For a completely unrelated, separately funded project, the Global Disinformation Index also conducted a study, aimed at advertisers, that identified websites at risk for publishing false stories. Two conservative organizations, finding their names on that latter list, sued the GEC, although it had nothing to do with creating the list. Musk posted, again without any evidence, “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” and that organization also became caught up in the endless whirlwind of conspiracy and congressional investigations.As it happens, I was caught up in it too, because I was listed online as an “adviser” to the Global Disinformation Index, even though I had not spoken with anyone at the organization for several years and was not aware that it even had a website. A predictable, and wearisome, pattern followed: false accusations (no, I was not advitheatlantic.com
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SNL Has No Idea What to Do With the College Protests The Saturday Night Live cold open is usually a place for the series to do its most topical, often political, material. But an awkward sense of obligation hung over last night’s sketch, about campus protests surrounding the conflict in Gaza. The activism at colleges across the U.S. has been dominating the news, especially as the university and police responses have led to arrests. SNL seemed compelled to acknowledge this in some way, but all it gave its audience was uncomfortable, limp material that failed to make any real point about the urgent subjects animating protesters.The show opened with a fake NY1 community-affairs panel featuring parents of New York City college students. Even the cast seemed ill at ease. Heidi Gardner’s Hunter College mom spoke of the strain the protests had put on her relationship with her daughter. Mikey Day’s New School dad said, “I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary.” Kenan Thompson, playing a Columbia dad named Alphonse Roberts, appeared to be fully supportive of the protests—“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight for what they believe in”—until it was implied that his daughter might be out there. “I am supportive of y’all’s kids protesting,” he said; “not my kids.”Thompson’s delivery is routinely one of the most delightful things SNL has to offer, and that was the case here. Yet the sketch was underdeveloped, with little discussion of the reason students are demonstrating, and that tension hung in the air. There was some loose commentary on class and race in the divide between the concerned white parents and Alphonse, a Black man who works multiple jobs to pay Columbia’s exorbitant tuition. It turned out that Alphonse didn’t really care about the protests, as long as his daughter “had her butt in class,” pursuing the degree he was paying for. By the time Thompson got to the close and yelled, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!,” he looked both surprised and relieved the moment had come.It was as if the writers felt moved to say something but ended up reaching for the most potentially inoffensive angle. The ultimate joke was less about the protests and more about how expensive it is to attend college—a fact probably anyone in the audience would agree with. The sketch certainly didn’t have the boldness of Ramy Youssef’s opening monologue earlier this season, a deft stand-up set about how “complicated” his prayers are these days, in which he also said, “Please free the people of Palestine, please,” and “Please free the hostages, all the hostages, please.”In general lately, SNL seems to be struggling with the most newsworthy material. Regarding Israel and Gaza, that makes sense. The war is nearly impossible to joke about, especially for a program trying to be broadly appealing. But even in a sketch last night on a lower-stakes topic—the ongoing beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, featuring host Dua Lipa as a clueless southern morning-show reporter with limited knowledge of Black culture—the gags were labored.The sketches that hit were the most bizarre and absurdist: Sarah Sherman’s riff on The Elephant Man, titled “The Anomalous Man,” in which a 19th-century woman, played by Lipa, falls for Sherman’s monstrous playwright, who turns out to be a major player and is cheating on her; and “Sonny Angel,” in which Bowen Yang played a tiny, naked doll hooking up with Lipa’s character, a woman with a fixation on her “little boyfriend” toys.One sketch late in the night perhaps unintentionally captured SNL’s predicament. In a fake ad for the “Teeny Tiny Statement Pin,” the writers mocked celebrities who were too afraid of taking a stand to wear a normal-size pin on the red carpet. “It’s wrong to stay silent, but it’s also wrong to say too much,” Gardner said. “I just wish there was a way to split the difference.” The joke was supposed to be on wishy-washy famous people—but SNL might as well have been sending up itself.theatlantic.com
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A Terse and Gripping Weekend Read This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites The Culture Survey: Kevin TownsendA quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”The Week Ahead Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum. I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine ExistsBy Elena Dudum My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.” His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him … Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.” Read the full article.More in Culture How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie? The godfather of American comedy The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory Hacks goes for the jugular. “What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago” Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk? The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting The diminishing returns of having good taste When poetry could define a life Catch Up on The Atlantic What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? Democrats defang the House’s far right. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Photo Album Shed hunters unpack their haul on the opening day of the Wyoming shed-hunt season. (Natalie Behring / Getty) Take a look at these images of devastating floods across Kenya, a pagan fire festival in Scotland, antler gathering in Wyoming, and more.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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‘By Any Means Necessary’ at Columbia Last month, a pro-Palestinian activist stood in front of me on Columbia University’s campus with a sign that read By Any Means Necessary. She smiled. She seemed like a nice person. I am an Israeli graduate student at the university, and I know holding that sign is within her rights. And yet, its message was so painful and disturbing that after that moment, I left New York for a few days.If I’d had the courage, I would have asked that student, "What exactly do you mean by ‘any means necessary’?” Holding up signs? Leading demonstrations? Or do knives also fall under that category? Guns and rifles as well? Raping and taking civilians hostage? (As of this writing, 133 hostages are still being held in Gaza.) And whom would these means be employed against? Columbia? The Israeli government? Soldiers? Civilians? Children?Since my return to Columbia, tensions have escalated dramatically. After protesters broke into Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night, the administration sent in the NYPD to evacuate the building and arrest the occupiers. This is the second time such measures have been taken—and they may only intensify the frustration and hostility of all involved. More worrying, this frustration might push more students to believe that “by any means necessary” is the only way to achieve their goals.At this point, anyone reading this essay might suspect that I am not objective, and they would be absolutely right. Because if you ask me what I think about when I see the words by any means necessary, it is only one thing. I think about Sagi: my best friend, whom I knew since sixth grade, the funniest and kindest person I have ever met.On the morning of October 7, Sagi Golan woke up at home with his boyfriend, Omer Ohana, whom he was supposed to marry two weeks later. They had already bought their beautiful white suits, and I had bought a plane ticket to the wedding. As a reservist, Sagi immediately headed south, where he fought bravely for hours at Kibbutz Be’eri, saving the lives of innocent adults and children, until he was killed in combat with terrorists. One hundred civilians were killed in Be’eri, and 30 more were taken hostage.I am a writer who has published short stories and a novel, but the day Sagi was killed, I lost my words. I couldn’t get a plane ticket to Israel for the funeral, so I just showed up at the airport. I was so confused and upset that when the ticketing agent tried to understand why I was trying to get on a plane without a ticket, I said, “My best friend … a wedding … a funeral …” The agent, a complete stranger, asked if he could give me a hug. Half an hour later, he’d arranged a one-way ticket.I landed an hour before Sagi’s funeral. The flowers that were meant for my best friend's wedding were laid upon his grave.[Mark Leibovich: House Republicans at the ‘Liberation Camp’]Back in New York, I barely left my apartment. I barely ate, barely slept. By that time, protests had already become routine on campus, but I was so deep in my own grief that I didn’t even notice. This went on for months. Toward the end of the fall semester, a professor took me aside after class. He told me that in his youth, he’d had friends who spent summers at kibbutzim in Israel, describing the people there as the nicest in the world. Neither he nor his friends were Jewish, but they were captivated by the concept of a cooperative socialist society. “Hearing about the attacks on those kibbutzim on October 7 was deeply painful for me,” he said. “So I can’t even imagine how painful it is for you.”That professor is a strong critic of the Israeli government and its policies. But in that particular moment, he chose to address only my pain. Although I’m still grieving and will be for a long while, his compassion helped me start to heal, and allowed me to better perceive the suffering of many others, Israelis and Palestinians, whose lives have been shattered since October 7.As an Israeli, I despise the rhetoric emerging from certain extremist politicians, who have claimed that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza or advocated for a forced deportation of Palestinians. I also believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the Jewish people. His willingness to grant political power and public legitimacy to racist and fascist ideologues is a moral stain on the history of the nation, and I am alarmed by the possibility that Netanyahu would reject a hostage deal and a cease-fire to preserve his own power.But some of the demonstrators are calling for something categorically different from an end to the Netanyahu government or even the war. Some of them are suggesting, implicitly, that there is no place for Jewish life between the river and the sea. Indeed, many of their slogans have nothing to do with peace. Almost every day, I hear protesters chant “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has to fall” and “Intifada Revolution.” Growing up in Israel during the early 2000s, I lived through the Second Intifada. I witnessed buses blown up by suicide bombers and mass shootings in city centers, terrorist attacks that killed many innocent civilians in the name of an “Intifada Revolution.”Recently, a video surfaced of a student leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; on campus, an individual stood in front of Jewish students with a sign reading Al-Qassam’s next targets. In the encampment itself, signs hang with small red triangles that might seem like an innocent design choice. Whether the protesters realize it or not, Hamas uses that icon to indicate Israelis that they’ve targeted and murdered.I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. Bringing the NYPD onto campus on April 18, when the encampment had just been established, likely contributed to the escalation, and I know that off-campus bad actors, including politicians, are taking advantage of the volatile situation and fueling tensions. Most of the student protesters are peaceful; Jews are participating in the demonstrations. But most is not all. And what’s significant is that many students on campus minimize or ignore extreme or violent rhetoric, and some even laugh and cheer along. I’ve heard Columbia students claim that these incidents are so petty that they are not worth discussing at all. I find myself debating intelligent people who treat reported facts like myths if they don’t align with their narrative.Universities don’t have to be battlefields. More people, including faculty and students, should speak out against hateful rhetoric that is morally wrong, even if this rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment. Fundamentally, I don’t see how the protesters’ insistence on using the language of violence will contribute to the Palestinian cause, or their own. They have to know that their actions have only strengthened the extreme-right political forces in the U.S. and Israel, who are already using these statements to consolidate more power. Their expressions and actions trample the voices of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who advocate for complexity and compassion. And they further entrench today’s distorted public discourse, which demands complete conformity from people within the same group and zero compassion for those in another.theatlantic.com
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China’s Plan to Turn Buddhism Into Communist Propaganda Shangri-la is best-known as a fictional place—an idyllic valley first imagined by a British novelist in the 1930s—but look at a map and you’ll find it. Sitting at the foot of the Himalayas in southwestern China, Shangri-la went by a more prosaic name until 2001, when the city was rebranded by Chinese officials eager to boost tourism. Their ploy worked.The star of Shangri-la is the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery. Since its destruction in 1966, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this Tibetan Buddhist monastery has been rebuilt into a sprawling complex crowned by golden rooftops and home to more than 700 monks. It was humming with construction when I visited in October—and filled with Chinese tourists.Like many monasteries, Sumtseling is thriving thanks to Tibetan Buddhism’s growing popularity in China. When the government loosened restrictions on religious worship in the 1990s, the practice took off, especially among urban elites unsatisfied with the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist worldview. It’s an open secret that even high-ranking party officials follow Tibetan lamas.Tibetan Buddhism’s recent spread presents both a threat and an opportunity for President Xi Jinping. He wants to make China politically and culturally homogenous, a goal that could be jeopardized by a tradition steeped in Tibetan language and history. But Xi is enacting a program that seeks to turn the rising popularity of Tibetan Buddhism to his advantage—to transform the tradition from a hotbed of dissent into an instrument of assimilation and party propaganda. If it works, it could smooth his path to lifelong power and help him remake China according to his nationalist vision.[Read: Xi Jinping is fighting a culture war at home]Tibetan Buddhism isn’t only a spiritual practice; it’s an expression of Tibet’s cultural identity and resistance to Chinese rule. The CCP annexed Tibet in 1951, claiming that the then-independent country belonged to historical China and had to be liberated from the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist theocracy. The Dalai Lama fled to India to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile, and Tibet has been a source of opposition to Beijing ever since.According to the Tibetan scholar Dhondup Rekjong, Xi’s ultimate goal is to erase Tibet’s language and cultural identity entirely. In a campaign similar to the CCP’s oppression of China’s Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan teachers and writers have been arrested as “separatists” for promoting the Tibetan language, and more than 1 million Tibetan children have been sent to boarding schools to be assimilated into Chinese culture. Xi’s effort to control Tibetan Buddhism is just one piece of this long-standing effort to suppress Tibetan identity, but it has taken on an additional valence as the practice expands in China.To co-opt Tibetan Buddhism’s popularity, the CCP recruits religious leaders willing to implement what it calls Sinicized Buddhism—a combination of state-sanctioned religious teachings and socialist propaganda taught by party-approved clergy—and rewards their monasteries with money and status. The well-funded Sumtseling monastery, for example, has been officially designated by the CCP as a “forerunner in implementing the Sinification of Buddhism.” To detach Buddhism from Tibetan culture, monks are pressured to replace traditional Tibetan-language scriptures with Chinese translations. According to Rekjong, they will soon be expected to practice in Mandarin.The approach is part of a broader campaign to influence all religions in China. As of January 1, every religious group is legally required to “carry out patriotic education and enhance the national awareness and patriotic sentiments of clergy and believers.” Failure to pledge loyalty to Xi, display the Chinese flag, and preach “patriotic sentiments” is now punishable by law. If Mao wanted to eliminate religion, Xi wants to nationalize it.Co-opting Tibetan Buddhism will bring Xi one step closer to achieving what he and the CCP call the “Chinese dream,” a vision that seeks to unite China’s ethnic groups—its Han majority, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and dozens more—in their dedication to the motherland and party. Xi has already consolidated more political power than just about any other modern leader, but realizing the Chinese dream will require something arguably more difficult: winning the hearts and minds of his subjects. As communist ideology loses its allure, Xi is enlisting religion to sell his program to the people.But it may not be that easy. Joshua Esler, a researcher who studies Tibetan culture at the Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Australia, told me that Tibetan Buddhism has grown so popular precisely because it offers the Chinese something their government can’t. Many Han Chinese, he said, “believe that Tibetan Buddhism has retained a spiritual authenticity that is lost in China.” They see Tibet as an alternative to the corruption, materialism, and environmental degradation that characterize life under the CCP. Any government interference in Tibetan Buddhism might alienate its followers, pushing them toward Buddhist leaders who secretly support the exiled Dalai Lama.[Arthur C. Brooks: Five teachings of the Dalai Lama I try to live by]As for Tibetans themselves, Sinicized Buddhism is unlikely to become popular anytime soon. Many of them consider monasteries that have too eagerly embraced Xi’s program to be sellouts. But as the government ramps up its campaign—and as a new generation of assimilated Tibetans comes of age—that might begin to change.After visiting Shangri-la, I went to the remote Tibetan town of Daocheng, where a young monk named Phuntsok showed me around his monastery. “Without the Communist Party, we would not have freedom of religion,” Phuntsok told me as we walked through ornate chapels. He extolled the CCP’s support for Tibetan Buddhism, and no wonder: Locals told me that the monastery, Yangteng Gonpa, had received substantial government funding. A freshly paved road snaked up the mountainside on which the monastery was perched, ending at a parking lot built to accommodate hundreds of visitors. A new welcome gate was being erected, and the tourism office promoted Yangteng as one of the area’s main attractions.I followed Phuntsok up to the second floor of a chapel, where he showed me an exhibit celebrating the monastery’s “liberation” by the Red Army in 1950. The space doubled as a classroom; a whiteboard showed the faint outlines of a lesson on how monks can “actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society.” Though the monastery belongs to the Buddhist tradition of the Dalai Lama, Phuntsok didn’t mention the exiled spiritual leader, whose name and image are censored in Tibet. Mural at the Yangteng Gonpa monastery celebrating its “liberation” by the Red Army (Photograph by Judith Hertog) Instead, Phuntsok praised Gyaltsen Norbu, a Buddhist leader who was handpicked by the CCP as a child to be the Panchen Lama, a position second only to the Dalai Lama. (Many Tibetans don’t recognize Norbu as legitimate; in 1995, the Dalai Lama identified another child as the Panchen Lama, whom Chinese authorities promptly detained, and whose whereabouts remain unknown.) When the 88-year-old Dalai Lama dies, Norbu will likely be tasked by the CCP to select his replacement, who will be raised under CCP supervision and expected to promote Sinicized Buddhism. Westerners tend to imagine the Dalai Lama as a force for peace and human rights, but the position can just as easily be put into the service of totalitarianism.Gray Tuttle, a Tibetan-studies professor at Columbia University, told me that the CCP is wary of any religious movement that isn’t under its control. In 2017, the government issued orders to tear down Larung Gar, Tibet’s most popular Buddhist monastery. Thousands of residents, including many Han Chinese, were displaced from the remote valley where they had come to study. The official reason for the evictions was that the monastery didn’t comply with safety regulations; the likelier explanation is that, despite the government’s initial support for the monastery, the CCP felt threatened by its success and the influence of its teachers. “The CCP definitely wants to limit the charismatic power of any particular lama,” Tuttle told me.The challenge Xi has set for himself, then, is to reshape Tibetan Buddhism without undermining its allure. Judging by the large crowds at Sumtseling, he’s succeeding—at least among some Han Chinese. “Tibetan lamas possess the deepest knowledge,” a Han woman named Jin Yi, who had traveled 400 miles to the monastery to meet her guru, told me. But devotees like her were considerably outnumbered by tourists, many of them dressed up as Tibetan pilgrims and modeling for photos—striking lotus poses, spinning prayer wheels, or staring in feigned rapture at Buddhist murals. Few entered the chapels, where photography was prohibited. Government-sponsored monasteries like Sumtseling might attract tourists looking for a photo op, but lavish temples won’t win over true believers.theatlantic.com
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No Subject Hope exhausted years agobut I still try.Heart thumps on doggedlyand wants to knowif nice surprises might in time arrive,and mind likewise. I readto keep a lookoutunbeknownst,or make a wild surmise. I dreamthe ground I plough and plantmight even nowsprout greenery I never saw beforeand not, as I expect, remainas rolling oceans do in falling snow.theatlantic.com
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What Will Biden’s Stance on Israel Mean for His Campaign? “The actual war is in Gaza, but you wouldn't know it from news coverage this week of American campuses.”theatlantic.com
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Milk’s Identity Crisis The ubiquity of plant-based alternatives has challenged ideas about what the word encompasses.theatlantic.com
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When the National Guard Arrived at Kent State, Images From 1970 Photographs from a pivotal day in American historytheatlantic.com
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Oh Great, Spiders Can Swim This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.Shrubbery, toolsheds, basements—these are places one might expect to find spiders. But what about the beach? Or in a stream? Some spiders make their homes near or, more rarely, in water: tucking into the base of kelp stalks, spinning watertight cocoons in ponds or lakes, hiding under pebbles at the seaside or along a creek bank.“Spiders are surprisingly adaptable, which is one of the reasons they can inhabit this environment,” says Ximena Nelson, a behavioral biologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.Finding aquatic or semiaquatic spiders is difficult work, Nelson says: She and a student have spent four years chasing a jumping spider known as Marpissa marina around the pebbly seaside beaches it likes, but too often, as soon as they manage to find one, it disappears under rocks. And sadly, some aquatic spiders may disappear altogether before they come to scientists’ attention, as their watery habitats shrivel because of climate change and other human activities.What scientists do know is that dozens of described spider species spend at least some of their time in or near the water, and more are almost surely awaiting discovery, says Sarah Crews, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco. It also appears that spiders evolved aquatic preferences on several distinct occasions throughout the history of this arthropod order. Crews and colleagues surveyed spiders and reported in 2019 that 21 taxonomic families are associated with aquatic habitats, suggesting that the evolutionary event occurred multiple independent times. Only a swashbuckling few—not even 0.3 percent of described spider species—are seashore spiders; many more have been found near fresh water, Nelson says.It’s not clear what would induce successful land-dwelling critters to move to watery habitats. Spiders, as a group, probably evolved about 400 million years ago from chunkier creatures that had recently left the water. These arthropods lacked the skinny waist sported by modern spiders. Presumably, the spiders that later returned to a life aquatic were strongly drawn by something to eat there, or driven by unsafe conditions on land, says Geerat Vermeij, a paleobiologist and distinguished professor at UC Davis—because water would have presented major survival challenges.“Since they depend on air so much, they are severely limited in whether they can do anything at all when they are submerged, other than just toughing it out,” Vermeij says. Newly aquatic spiders would have had to compete with predators better adapted to watery conditions, such as crustaceans, with competition particularly fierce in the oceans, Vermeij says. And if water floods a spider’s air-circulation system, it will die, so adaptations were obviously needed.But spiders as a group already possess several water-friendly features, Crews suggests. They have waxy, water-repellent exteriors, often covered in hairs that conveniently trap air bubbles. Even having eight legs is helpful, Nelson says: Spiders can distribute their weight nicely while they skitter across a water surface, or use their octet of appendages to row along.[Read: The spiders that choose death]Some spiders take their aquatic adaptations to the next level, though. Consider the diving-bell spider, Argyroneta aquatica, an overachieving arachnid that is the only one known to do it all underwater: breathe, hunt, dine on insects and their larvae, and make spiderlings. Found in fresh water in Europe and parts of Asia, it spins a silken underwater canopy and brings air bubbles from the surface to its submerged home via its body hairs. When it goes out, it carries a smaller air bubble, like a little scuba tank, on its back.Seashore spiders face particularly daunting conditions, says Nelson, who co-authored an article about adaptations of marine spiders for the 2024 Annual Review of Entomology. “There’s a splash zone,” she says. “It’s kind of a wild environment.” A spider might be baking in the hot sun one minute and drenched in chilly salt water the next. Some spiders migrate up and down their beaches with the tides; Nelson speculates that they monitor lunar cycles to anticipate when to move.Other seashore spiders spin watertight nests where they hide out for hours while the tide is in. M. marina, for example, seeks seashells with nice, concave spaces in which to spin safe tents. Another spider, Desis marina, hides in holdfasts where bull kelp attaches to rocks, lining the holdfast’s interior with silk to create an air-filled pocket and staying submerged for as long as 19 days. D. marina emerges only when the tide is going out, to hunt for invertebrates like shrimp.A spider that’s even occasionally submerged in salt water or that eats briny seafood will also have to maintain proper internal salt levels. “Presumably, they will be able to concentrate the salt somehow and then poo it out,” Nelson says. Scientists don’t know how marine spiders pull this off. And at least one intertidal-zone spider, Desis formidabilis of South Africa’s cape, comfortably maintains an interior salt concentration much like the crustaceans it eats, according to a 1984 study. (Freshwater species also probably require adaptations because their insides must stay saltier than their surroundings or food, Vermeij speculates.)When a spider hides out with a limited air supply for days or weeks at a time, oxygen levels also may become a crucial issue. Intriguingly, researchers have identified gene variants within the oxygen-guzzling, energy-making mitochondria of aquatic spiders that may help them cope with low-oxygen environments. These changes mirror beneficial changes to mitochondrial genes in birds that live in high-altitude, low-oxygen environments.In another study, researchers investigated the genes used in the silk glands of aquatic and land spiders. They found that water-spider silk seems to have a high proportion of water-repelling amino acids—which might also be an adaptation, they suggest.But all the adaptations in the world might not be enough to save some water spiders. Nelson’s M. marina, for example, seems to be very particular about the beaches it occupies. The pebbles must be just right, not too big or small. If sea-level rise inundates M. marina’s beaches, it’s possible the spiders will have nowhere else to go, Nelson says. “So those spiders will be lost.”Marco Isaia, an arachnologist at the University of Turin, in Italy, investigated the wetland habitats of the diving-bell spider and the fen raft spider, Dolomedes plantarius. As wetlands continue to disappear, the habitats available to each species will contract by more than 25 percent over a decade, and their ideal ranges will move northward, Isaia and colleagues predicted in a 2022 study. It would be difficult for the spiders to cross dry land for new wetlands, and Northern European winters might prove too cold anyway. “The loss and degradation of wetland habitats is expected to have serious impacts on their survival,” Isaia says, “and an increase in their extinction risk.”Given these risks, some aquatic spiders might go the way of the dodo before science gets a handle on them. “I suspect in every rocky bed of beach or river, there are probably spiders that we just don’t know exist there,” Nelson says. “Because they’re hiding.”theatlantic.com
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Is Venezuela Serious About Invading Guyana? A war between two Latin American states is nearly unimaginable. Then again, so was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.theatlantic.com
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ElevenLabs Is Building an Army of Voice Clones My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles, and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press. That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert ums and ahs: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body. Listen to the author's AI voice: Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare. Listen to ElevenLabs read Hamlet: ElevenLabs launched an early version of its product a little over a year ago, but you might have listened to one of its voices without even knowing it. Nike used the software to create a clone of the NBA star Luka Dončić’s voice for a recent shoe campaign. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s office cloned the politician’s voice so that it could deliver robocall messages in Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole. The technology has been used to re-create the voices of children killed in the Parkland school shooting, to lobby for gun reform. An ElevenLabs voice might be reading this article to you: The Atlantic uses the software to auto-generate audio versions of some stories, as does The Washington Post.It’s easy, when you play around with the ElevenLabs software, to envision a world in which you can listen to all the text on the internet in voices as rich as those in any audiobook. But it’s just as easy to imagine the potential carnage: scammers targeting parents by using their children’s voice to ask for money, a nefarious October surprise from a dirty political trickster. I tested the tool to see how convincingly it could replicate my voice saying outrageous things. Soon, I had high-quality audio of my voice clone urging people not to vote, blaming “the globalists” for COVID, and confessing to all kinds of journalistic malpractice. It was enough to make me check with my bank to make sure any potential voice-authentication features were disabled.I went to visit the ElevenLabs office and meet the people responsible for bringing this technology into the world. I wanted to better understand the AI revolution as it’s currently unfolding. But the more time I spent—with the company and the product—the less I found myself in the present. Perhaps more than any other AI company, ElevenLabs offers a window into the near future of this disruptive technology. The threat of deepfakes is real, but what ElevenLabs heralds may be far weirder. And nobody, not even its creators, seems ready for it.In mid-November, I buzzed into a brick building on a London side street and walked up to the second floor. The corporate headquarters of ElevenLabs—a $1 billion company—is a single room with a few tables. No ping-pong or beanbag chairs—just a sad mini fridge and the din of dutiful typing from seven employees packed shoulder to shoulder. Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ 29-year-old CEO, got up from his seat in the corner to greet me. He beckoned for me to follow him back down the stairs to a windowless conference room ElevenLabs shares with a company that, I presume, is not worth $1 billion.Staniszewski is tall, with a well-coiffed head of blond hair, and he speaks quickly in a Polish accent. Talking with him sometimes feels like trying to engage in conversation with an earnest chatbot trained on press releases. I started our conversation with a few broad questions: What is it like to work on AI during this moment of breathless hype, investor interest, and genuine technological progress? What’s it like to come in each day and try to manipulate such nascent technology? He said that it’s exciting.We moved on to what Staniszewski called his “investor story.” He and the company’s co-founder, Piotr Dabkowski, grew up together in Poland watching foreign movies that were all clumsily dubbed into a flat Polish voice. Man, woman, child—whoever was speaking, all of the dialogue was voiced in the same droning, affectless tone by male actors known as lektors.They both left Poland for university in the U.K. and then settled into tech jobs (Staniszewski at Palantir and Dabkowski at Google). Then, in 2021, Dabkowski was watching a film with his girlfriend and realized that Polish films were still dubbed in the same monotone lektor style. He and Staniszewski did some research and discovered that markets outside Poland were also relying on lektor-esque dubbing. Mati Staniszewski’s “investor story” as CEO of ElevenLabs begins in Poland, where he grew up watching foreign films clumsily dubbed into a flat voice. (Daniel Stier for The Atlantic) The next year, they founded ElevenLabs. AI voices were everywhere—think Alexa, or a car’s GPS—but actually good AI voices, they thought, would finally put an end to lektors. The tech giants have hundreds or thousands of employees working on AI, yet ElevenLabs, with a research team of just seven people, built a voice tool that’s arguably better than anything its competitors have released. The company poached researchers from top AI companies, yes, but it also hired a college dropout who’d won coding competitions, and another “who worked in call centers while exploring audio research as a side gig,” Staniszewski told me. “The audio space is still in its breakthrough stage,” Alex Holt, the company’s vice president of engineering, told me. “Having more people doesn’t necessarily help. You need those few people that are incredible.”ElevenLabs knew its model was special when it started spitting out audio that accurately represented the relationships between words, Staniszewski told me—pronunciation that changed based on the context (minute, the unit of time, instead of minute, the description of size) and emotion (an exclamatory phrase spoken with excitement or anger).Much of what the model produces is unexpected—sometimes delightfully so. Early on, ElevenLabs’ model began randomly inserting applause breaks after pauses in its speech: It had been training on audio clips from people giving presentations in front of live audiences. Quickly, the model began to improve, becoming capable of ums and ahs. “We started seeing some of those human elements being replicated,” Staniszewski said. The big leap was when the model began to laugh like a person. (My voice clone, I should note, struggles to laugh, offering a machine-gun burst of “haha”s that sound jarringly inhuman.)Compared with OpenAI and other major companies, which are trying to wrap their large language models around the entire world and ultimately build an artificial human intelligence, ElevenLabs has ambitions that are easier to grasp: a future in which ALS patients can still communicate in their voice after they lose their speech. Audiobooks that are ginned up in seconds by self-published authors, video games in which every character is capable of carrying on a dynamic conversation, movies and videos instantly dubbed into any language. A sort of Spotify of voices, where anyone can license clones of their voice for others to use—to the dismay of professional voice actors. The gig-ification of our vocal cords.What Staniszewski also described when talking about ElevenLabs is a company that wants to eliminate language barriers entirely. The dubbing tool, he argued, is its first step toward that goal. A user can upload a video, and the model will translate the speaker’s voice into a different language. When we spoke, Staniszewski twice referred to the Babel fish from the science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—he described making a tool that immediately translates every sound around a person into a language they can understand.Every ElevenLabs employee I spoke with perked up at the mention of this moonshot idea. Although ElevenLabs’ current product might be exciting, the people building it view current dubbing and voice cloning as a prelude to something much bigger. I struggled to separate the scope of Staniszewski’s ambition from the modesty of our surroundings: a shared conference room one floor beneath the company’s sparse office space. ElevenLabs may not achieve its lofty goals, but I was still left unmoored by the reality that such a small collection of people could build something so genuinely powerful and release it into the world, where the rest of us have to make sense of it.ElevenLabs’ voice bots launched in beta in late January 2023. It took very little time for people to start abusing them. Trolls on 4chan used the tool to make deepfakes of celebrities saying awful things. They had Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro making racist comments about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the tool’s first days, there appeared to be virtually no guardrails. “Crazy weekend,” the company tweeted, promising to crack down on misuse.ElevenLabs added a verification process for cloning; when I uploaded recordings of my voice, I had to complete multiple voice CAPTCHAs, speaking phrases into my computer in a short window of time to confirm that the voice I was duplicating was my own. The company also decided to limit its voice cloning strictly to paid accounts and announced a tool that lets people upload audio to see if it is AI generated. But the safeguards from ElevenLabs were “half-assed,” Hany Farid, a deepfake expert at UC Berkeley, told me—an attempt to retroactively focus on safety only after the harm was done. And they left glaring holes. Over the past year, the deepfakes have not been rampant, but they also haven’t stopped.I first started reporting on deepfakes in 2017, after a researcher came to me with a warning of a terrifying future where AI-generated audio and video would bring about an “infocalypse” of impersonation, spam, nonconsensual sexual imagery, and political chaos, where we would all fall into what he called “reality apathy.” Voice cloning already existed, but it was crude: I used an AI voice tool to try to fool my mom, and it worked only because I had the halting, robotic voice pretend I was losing cell service. Since then, fears of an infocalypse have lagged behind the technology’s ability to distort reality. But ElevenLabs has closed the gap.The best deepfake I’ve seen was from the filmmaker Kenneth Lurt, who used ElevenLabs to clone Jill Biden’s voice for a fake advertisement where she’s made to look as if she’s criticizing her husband over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The footage, which deftly stitches video of the first lady giving a speech with an ElevenLabs voice-over, is incredibly convincing and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The ElevenLabs technology on its own isn’t perfect. “It’s the creative filmmaking that actually makes it feel believable,” Lurt said in an interview in October, noting that it took him a week to make the clip.“It will totally change how everyone interacts with the internet, and what is possible,” Nathan Lambert, a researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, told me in January. “It’s super easy to see how this will be used for nefarious purposes.” When I asked him if he was worried about the 2024 elections, he offered a warning: “People aren’t ready for how good this stuff is and what it could mean.” When I pressed him for hypothetical scenarios, he demurred, not wanting to give anyone ideas. Daniel Stier for The Atlantic A few days after Lambert and I spoke, his intuitions became reality. The Sunday before the New Hampshire presidential primary, a deepfaked, AI-generated robocall went out to registered Democrats in the state. “What a bunch of malarkey,” the robocall began. The voice was grainy, its cadence stilted, but it was still immediately recognizable as Joe Biden’s drawl. “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” it said, telling voters to stay home. In terms of political sabotage, this particular deepfake was relatively low stakes, with limited potential to disrupt electoral outcomes (Biden still won in a landslide). But it was a trial run for an election season that could be flooded with reality-blurring synthetic information.Researchers and government officials scrambled to locate the origin of the call. Weeks later, a New Orleans–based magician confessed that he’d been paid by a Democratic operative to create the robocall. Using ElevenLabs, he claimed, it took him less than 20 minutes and cost $1.Afterward, ElevenLabs introduced a “no go”–voices policy, preventing users from uploading or cloning the voice of certain celebrities and politicians. But this safeguard, too, had holes. In March, a reporter for 404 Media managed to bypass the system and clone both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s voices simply by adding a minute of silence to the beginning of the upload file. Last month, I tried to clone Biden’s voice, with varying results. ElevenLabs didn’t catch my first attempt, for which I uploaded low-quality sound files from YouTube videos of the president speaking. But the cloned voice sounded nothing like the president’s—more like a hoarse teenager’s. On my second attempt, ElevenLabs blocked the upload, suggesting that I was about to violate the company’s terms of service.For Farid, the UC Berkeley researcher, ElevenLabs’ inability to control how people might abuse its technology is proof that voice cloning causes more harm than good. “They were reckless in the way they deployed the technology,” Farid said, “and I think they could have done it much safer, but I think it would have been less effective for them.”The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways.In the basement of a Sri Lankan restaurant on a soggy afternoon in London, I pressed Staniszewski about what I’d been obliquely referring to as “the bad stuff.” He didn’t avert his gaze as I rattled off the ways ElevenLabs’ technology could be and has been abused. When it was his time to speak, he did so thoughtfully, not dismissively; he appears to understand the risks of his products. “It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “We need to be quick.”Later, over email, he cited the “no go”–voices initiative and told me that ElevenLabs is “testing new ways to counteract the creation of political content,” adding more human moderation and upgrading its detection software. The most important thing ElevenLabs is working on, Staniszewski said—what he called “the true solution”—is digitally watermarking synthetic voices at the point of creation so civilians can identify them. That will require cooperation across dozens of companies: ElevenLabs recently signed an accord with other AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, to combat deepfakes in the upcoming elections, but so far, the partnership is mostly theoretical.The uncomfortable reality is that there aren’t a lot of options to ensure bad actors don’t hijack these tools. “We need to brace the general public that the technology for this exists,” Staniszewski said. He’s right, yet my stomach sinks when I hear him say it. Mentioning media literacy, at a time when trolls on Telegram channels can flood social media with deepfakes, is a bit like showing up to an armed conflict in 2024 with only a musket.The conversation went on like this for a half hour, followed by another session a few weeks later over the phone. A hard question, a genuine answer, my own palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. I can’t look at ElevenLabs and see beyond the risk: How can you build toward this future? Staniszewski seems unable to see beyond the opportunities: How can’t you build toward this future? I left our conversations with a distinct sense that the people behind ElevenLabs don’t want to watch the world burn. The question is whether, in an industry where everyone is racing to build AI tools with similar potential for harm, intentions matter at all.To focus only on deepfakes elides how ElevenLabs and synthetic audio might reshape the internet in unpredictable ways. A few weeks before my visit, ElevenLabs held a hackathon, where programmers fused the company’s tech with hardware and other generative-AI tools. Staniszewski said that one team took an image-recognition AI model and connected it to both an Android device with a camera and ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech model. The result was a camera that could narrate what it was looking at. “If you’re a tourist, if you’re a blind person and want to see the world, you just find a camera,” Staniszewski said. “They deployed that in a weekend.”Repeatedly during my visit, ElevenLabs employees described these types of hybrid projects—enough that I began to see them as a helpful way to imagine the next few years of technology. Products that all hook into one another herald a future that’s a lot less recognizable. More machines talking to machines; an internet that writes itself; an exhausting, boundless comingling of human art and human speech with AI art and AI speech until, perhaps, the provenance ceases to matter.I came to London to try to wrap my mind around the AI revolution. By staring at one piece of it, I thought, I would get at least a sliver of certainty about what we’re barreling toward. Turns out, you can travel across the world, meet the people building the future, find them to be kind and introspective, ask them all of your questions, and still experience a profound sense of disorientation about this new technological frontier. Disorientation. That’s the main sense of this era—that something is looming just over the horizon, but you can’t see it. You can only feel the pit in your stomach. People build because they can. The rest of us are forced to adapt.theatlantic.com
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