There’s a global war on information today, and it’s segmented by country, generation, and medium.
We used to live in a world where there was a small funnel which all information was strained through. In that funnel was TV, where TV networks essentially had a couple of major news media channels that most of the population tuned into.
Nowadays that funnel has been wiped and filled with countless digital platforms, podcasts, and broadcasting. They’re oftentimes populated by international actors, bots, and millions of individuals who want to share their opinions with the world. Social media has democratized influence and blown the funnel open. Anyone can be an influencer.
This shift creates a new global competition for information – one that hostile actors can participate in. Take the Iranian-produced “LEGO-like” animated rap videos on TikTok and YouTube positioned as entertainment. The videos are far from traditional state propaganda – they’re culturally fluent, funny, and designed to blend into the Gen Z ecosystem. They increase exposure to alternative geopolitical narratives and introduce ambiguity. And they’re everywhere in everyday content feeds.
Engineered, platform-native narratives wrap adversarial messages in culture, giving them near-infinite reach and attention. If gone viral, content these days can trigger consumer boycotts, reputation crises, and investor hesitation or volatility. It’s a completely new medium for economic warfare, and it’s governed by social media algorithms.
Indeed, our citizens are increasingly susceptible to these narratives. A 2024 survey from The Harris Poll found 52% of Americans get their information from national media outlets, while 51% get it through social media. That number increases to 78% among Gen Z. Nearly three in five Gen Zers believe information from social media is trustworthy, 13 points higher than the rest of the population.
And with the average person spending more than 10 hours online daily, that’s 10 potential hours of ambient exposure to adversarial content that can shape voter sentiment, create confusion or distrust, and trigger behavioral reactions. When it comes to the war in Iran, for example, two-thirds of Americans are following the conflict. That’s roughly 114 million people consuming some kind of Iran content on social media. The consumption compounds and aggregates into real economic and geopolitical consequences.
Governments should take the information war as a serious threat to national security. Legacy institutions like Voice of America or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that provide credible news at scale are no longer the primary means of communication. They reflect a kind of sinecure public broadcasting in a world ruled by fragmentation and speed. Social media does not reward authority, and no federal agency is really up to snuff with this shift.
The U.S. needs a strategy to win in the global competition for information – one that treats the flow of information with the same rigor as financial markets or supply chains. We should track and measure adversarial digital influence as economic and geopolitical risks. We should be investing in cutting-edge technology – tools that can detect shifts in sentiment and narrative velocity early, tools like those my company Stagwell has built with its Marketing Cloud giving brands global insights in real time. We should be building counternarratives that stabilize trust, not just rebut claims.
We need to make communications and information a critical part of our country’s economic and national security infrastructure before it’s too late. It’s how America can win on this new battleground.
