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