Once again, fake news is being weaponized to undermine our elections. About 66 years ago, the United States ousted the democratically elected president of Guatemala, the popular reformer and FDR fan, Jacobo Árbenz. That story is well-known by now.
But over the past year, my research team and I investigated a more obscured aspect of that coup that has taken on surprising relevance today: The primary weapon the U.S. used to overthrow Guatemala’s democracy was fake news. A key part of why the plot worked tells us something important about what Americans need to watch out for as the Russian government tries to interfere with our democracy in 2020.
To get rid of Árbenz in 1954, CIA agents and U.S. State Department officials created a hoax radio station in the style of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds. CIA director Allen Dulles, in a now-declassified memo to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, explained the plan. “The entire effort,” Dulles wrote, was “more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength.”
Pretending to be Guatemalan patriots, the Americans aired false news reports and what they called “terror broadcasts” for months. At first, the CIA radio station broadcast music and political commentary for a couple hours each day, including false reports of a brewing rebel movement and defections of high-ranking officials who were upset that the Árbenz government was secretly operating under Soviet control. (None of this was true.) Over time, the station upped the fear factor and urgency, until it was eventually broadcasting all day long and reporting civil rights abuses by the government — and claiming that Árbenz was actively trying to find the station and crush the ever-growing rebel army.
If we stop caring as individuals, we’re giving up our collective power.
Local papers and social networks (the offline kind) repeated this “news” — which escalated to the point that it convinced Guatemalans that a bloody civil war had erupted. The campaign culminated in the public, military, and presidential cabinet giving up and letting the U.S. walk a puppet president into their highest office.
But there was no war — just a guerilla radio station sowing falsehoods, a few CIA mercenaries dropping smoke bombs to back up the charade, and a narcissistic and inexperienced right-wing politician that the U.S. wanted to take Árbenz’s place. After the U.S. put its preferred man in office, it would be decades before Guatemala would have free and fair elections again.
As part of a series for Narratively, my research team and I recently spent time in Guatemala digging up the old propaganda materials that the CIA claimed to have lost, along with news reports from 1954 showing how people were fooled by the campaign. Among our most shocking findings: Documents outlining a six-stage playbook for exactly how the U.S. would use media manipulation to subvert the Guatemalan democracy.
The most head-spinning part, though, is that this CIA playbook spells out the same basic steps the Kremlin took in 2016 to interfere in America’s democracy — and is attempting to repeat right now.
Obvious irony aside, the CIA’s fake news plot in Guatemala can teach us something crucial about Russia’s plan to interfere in the 2020 election on behalf of President Donald Trump. Information warfare campaigns like these are not actually about getting people to switch from Democrat to Republican, or from pro-Árbenz to anti. The real goal is far easier: to get the public to give up its power to stop foreign actors from having their way.
This fake news story about Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS was the third most popular story on Facebook in the run-up to the 2016 election. Only one true story was shared more than it, according to an analysis of BuzzSumo data. Stories like these resulted in suppressing would-be Clinton voters.
“The misunderstanding people have about the electoral impact of the trolls and hackers is that they think that they were trying to change votes,” communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania told us in an interview, referring to the 2016 Russian interference. “But they weren’t. They were trying to mobilize and demobilize.”
As Jamieson outlined in her 2018 book Cyberwar, data indicate that the most measurable effect of Russian interference was getting previously committed voters to not go to the polls. “If the trolls and hackers and disinformation in any combination dropped Hillary Clinton percent by 1% nationally, we don’t even need to ask about the battleground states,” Jamieson said. “They’ve already decisively affected the election.”
More recent social media data analyzed by Young Mie Kim, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin, backs this up, showing clearly that Russian operatives’ primary use of “stealth media” to try to influence the current election appears to be suppression, not conversion. “It’s all about just getting [people] to not turn out,” Kim told us in an interview. “Especially if you’re targeting already marginalized voters.”
Kim’s research shows that though tech platforms like Facebook are trying to fight voter suppression in 2020, they’re missing one of the biggest threats. “I define voter suppression as a strategy that breaks the coalition of the opposition,” said Kim. For example, “If you disguise yourself as Democrats, or feminists, and then criticize Joe Biden, that’s trying to break the Democratic coalition.”
This explains U.S. intelligence reports about Russian social media actors promoting content about Bernie Sanders. Since the Kremlin is pro-Trump, Kim explained, it hopes to split Biden’s coalition by getting groups to not want to be associated with one another — and therefore to decide not to vote at all.
It’s also what recent reports have concluded is afoot as Russian trolls are disguising themselves as West Africans on social media in an effort to disenfranchise Black American voters. Data analysis of these coordinated social media and fake news efforts shows that Russian agents are attempting to hijack movements like Black Lives Matter and reframe them in ways that generally increase mistrust — which in turn increases the likelihood that people will simply give up on making an effort.
And, unfortunately, this is also what some domestic actors are doing. For example, last week the Washington Post caught a group of young Republicans acting like a troll farm in a stealthy attempt to sow societal mistrust and seed doubt in this year’s election results, via mass Facebook posts and retweets.
This is all eerily similar to what the U.S. did to President Árbenz in Guatemala. Because Árbenz’s coalition included peasant workers, liberals, moderates, and the military, the CIA’s propaganda campaign was designed to “accentuate divisionist activity.” The agency’s hoax radio station spread lies meant to get military folks to mistrust Guatemalan workers, to get women moderates to mistrust liberals, and so on.
Snippet from 1954 CIA instructions for undermining Guatemala’s democracy.
In the end, Árbenz did not fall because an army occupied the capital. He resigned when his cabinet and military stopped taking orders, and the public gave up on him.
After seeing how effective the CIA’s plan to wear down Guatemalans in the 1950s was, I’m concerned about Americans’ increasing culture of apathy — and that tuning out is becoming an acceptable form of self-care. Is it a coincidence that the self-help book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck has sold millions of copies in the last four years? The downside of a society buying into the promise of such a title might be described as “toxic individualism.”
If we stop caring as individuals, we’re giving up our collective power. In other words, the suppression that we’re not talking about right now — but should be more wary of than ever — is the temptation to stop reading, stop caring, stop mobilizing, and ultimately, stop voting. And that’s been a key democracy-subversion strategy since we started doing it to other countries 66 years ago ourselves.