How to Achieve Peace in the War of Disinformation

A new book examines how to combat the disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats online that are undermining U.S. democracy.
By Annalee Newitz | July 1, 2025

In 2020, I witnessed an online influence campaign so devious that I could not stop thinking about it—­in fact, it inspired me to begin researching my book, Stories Are Weapons, from which this essay is adapted.

The reason I found it so compelling was that it was a two-­stage psychological operation—or psyop, as the military would call it: First, the unknown operatives spread a wave of disinformation; next, they spread a second wave that was designed to inoculate people against any efforts to debunk the first wave of disinformation.

Here’s how it went down. One night I started to see posts on Twitter claiming that the entire DC area was in lockdown and there was a blackout in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. Posts with the hashtag #DCBlackout began piling up in my feed, and at first they appeared to be from ordinary citizens reporting from the ground.

But then I noticed some red flags that made the #DCBlackout reports seem suspicious.

First of all, many people posting under the hashtag used the exact same words to describe what was happening, as if they were copy-­pasting from a script. And then posts with the #DCBlackout hashtag started sharing a new message, which was that law enforcement was blocking cell phone access to prevent them from sharing the truth.

That’s when I knew #DCBlackout was a ruse. How could people be posting on their phones from the scene of the protests if their cell signals were blocked?

Despite this logical inconsistency, rumors of the blackout spread quickly, resulting in 500,000 tweets with the #DCBlackout hashtag. Some included fake images of a fire near the Washington Monument, which came from the (fictional) TV series Designated Survivor.

Reputable news sources moved to counter the blackout rumors. And that’s when the second wave of the psyop began to inundate my feed. Hundreds of posts with a new hashtag, #DCSafe, started to pop up, denying that the DC blackout was happening.

Unlike the tweets from news reporters debunking the blackout, these were clearly copy-­pasted by psywarriors or maybe bots. They all used the exact same, quirky phrasing:

yeah . . . as someone seeing #dcblackout trending, who lives and works in the DC metro area, and who has friends telecommuting into DC rn. . . . . This hashtag looks like misinformation. “No social media from DC” because we were asleep. Stop scaring people. #dcsafe

It was a psyop designed to look like a psyop. People on Twitter quickly noticed the duplicate tweets coming from a wide variety of accounts, and called them out as fake. But why would a group of psyops agents want their targets to figure out that they were being fooled?

The answer is that they didn’t. By making the “debunking” tweets from #DCSafe so obviously inauthentic, the operatives also cast doubt on the real tweets from journalists at NPR and elsewhere. The #DCSafe operation made it seem like some shady group was trying to cover up what was happening in D.C., and that the mainstream media was in on it. Anyone debunking #DCBlackout looked suspicious by association, as if they were part of a psyop.

It was a brilliantly nefarious move: an influence operation to arouse fear over a fake blackout, and then to arouse fear over a fake coverup of the fake blackout.

The DCBlackout/DCSafe operation was an example of what disinformation experts call “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Though nobody has identified the perpetrators of this particular psyop, it was certainly coordinated by operatives—­possibly foreign—­and then amplified by regular people tuning in to the hashtag. The first tweet to use the #DCBlackout hashtag had only three followers, but then it got amplified by accounts with greater reach and went massively viral in a matter of minutes. I was left wondering how that happened, and so quickly.

I wrote Stories Are Weapons in order to find out...

@fraterchaos @Andrew Pam @Kenny Chaffin

Indivisibles,

Remember the night Trump’s first reconciliation bill failed and we saved the Affordable Care Act?

I do. It was July 28, 2017.

After months of nonstop calls, packed town halls, and rallies in blistering Arizona heat, every sign pointed to defeat. Republicans appeared to have the votes to kill Obamacare, and we had our “we lost” email written, proofed, and ready to send. But we should have known better.

Because in those months, weeks, and days leading up to that vote, Indivisibles never stopped fighting.

Activists like you showed up at Susan Collins’ Fourth of July parades with signs and bullhorns. You stood outside John McCain’s Phoenix office in 100-degree heat. You flooded the Senate with calls. And at 1:29am that July morning, McCain gave the most famous thumbs-down in Senate history -- joining Collins and Murkowski to kill Trumpcare for good.

That wasn’t luck. That was power -- your power. We fought until the gavel fell, and we changed the course of history.

So, why am I telling you this story?

Simple.

Moments ago, almost 8 years to the day after we killed Trumpcare, the Senate passed Trump’s Medicaid-slashing, billionaire-enriching, big ugly bill. Republicans are celebrating, and we understand if you’re feeling angry and deflated. Lord knows, we’re angry.

But this fight isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

You’ve already moved the needle. You made Medicaid the defining issue of the debate. Senator Thom Tillis broke with Trump on national TV, called out the cruelty of this bill, and announced he wouldn’t seek re-election rather than betray his state’s Medicaid recipients. That didn’t happen in a vacuum -- it happened because North Carolinians showed up, called in, rallied at Hands Off events, and refused to let him look away.

The bill now heads back to the House, where Republicans can only afford to lose three votes. It barely squeaked by with a single-vote margin the first time, and it’s only gotten more divisive since:

The so-called deficit hawks are fuming about the $3 trillion this adds to the debt.

Vulnerable “moderates” understand that ripping health insurance away from 17 million people and kicking 11.8 million more off SNAP in order to shovel $4.5 trillion to the ultra-rich might not be a winning message back home.

Anyone who tells you this is a done deal doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Is it an uphill battle? Yes. But so was 2017.

So no matter where you live or who your Member of Congress is, here’s what you can do right now:

If You Live in a Republican House District

📞 Flood the phones. Tell your representative that a vote for this bill is a vote to destroy lives -- and you’ll remember it. Then, send an email to drive home the point.

💪 Fight back with friends. We’re stronger together, so encourage your friends and family to take action to stop the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Sign up and get access to Empower, an app that has everything you need to text your circle about the Republican tax scam: ready-to-use scripts and messages with links they can use to call their own Members of Congress.

🧑‍💻 Help spread the word about what’s in this bill using our social toolkit. When people know what’s in the bill, they overwhelmingly oppose it -- but a lot of people still aren’t aware of the details. You can help change that.

📤 Forward this email. Five texts. One group chat. You never know who’s in a swing district until you ask.

If You Don’t Live in a Republican District

📞 Call folks whose GOP representatives are flippable. If you can spare 1-2 hours for the fight, join a phonebank to call people in vulnerable Republican districts, sound the alarm about this bill, and patch them through to let their GOP representative have it. Anyone can join a phonebank; you just need a phone and a computer.

💪 Fight back with friends. We’re stronger together, so encourage your friends and family to take action to stop the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Sign up and get access to Empower, an app that has everything you need to text your circle about the Republican tax scam: ready-to-use scripts and messages with links they can use to call their own Members of Congress.

🧑‍💻 Help spread the word about what’s in this bill using our social toolkit. When people know what’s in the bill, they overwhelmingly oppose it -- but a lot of people still aren’t aware of the details. You can help change that.

📤 Forward this message. Think your friends in swing districts already know? Don’t risk it. Hit forward.

We already changed the trajectory of this fight in the Senate. We may have come up a vote short, but all the pressure we’ve built is now being felt by the House.

Will we win? I don’t know.

But this is what movements do. We rise when they expect us to fold. We organize through the setbacks. And we win the fights they say are impossible -- because we refuse to give up.

You ready?

Let’s finish what we started.

In solidarity,
Sarah Dohl
Co-founder, Chief Campaigns Officer, Indivisible