The Insiders Know How Covert Foreign Malign Influence Works. You Should Too.

Given the federal government’s dismantling of the machinery built to address covert foreign malign influence, those who care deeply about these issues need to think more creatively about how America can best defend itself. It’s true that a new administration (Republican or Democrat) in 2028 might try to rebuild some of the tools Americans need in this space. It might even be true that a new Congress after the 2026 midterms might take some important steps in this direction. But Americans cannot simply sit around “waiting for Godot.” The need to do more is only becoming more urgent as artificial intelligence (AI)—what the Trump administration now calls super intelligence—makes these operations cheaper, faster, and easier to scale.

The federal government remains indispensable for sanctions, indictments, domain seizures, and other disruptive actions, but those actions often come only after a foreign malign influence operation is well underway. Helping Americans recognize the tactics being used against them can begin much earlier. And, if doing so makes those tactics less effective in the first place, it could ultimately prove as important as the government’s after-the-fact disruptive actions.

The federal government does not have a monopoly on the information needed to help Americans recognize and understand the threat. These particular threats play out largely on a landscape owned by private actors, and those private actors, like the federal government, have a lot of the information about the tactics being used. Regardless of whatever the government does or does not do in response to these threats, two related steps are worth pursuing now: First, technology companies and researchers should have a better mechanism for pooling what they are seeing across platforms to identify recurring tactics and patterns across individual companies’ investigations. Second, that information needs to reach the Americans who are actually being targeted, through sources they trust.

Part I: Pooling the Information

Technology companies have been publicly reporting on threats they identify for years, including cybersecurity and state-sponsored hacking threats and, since at least 2017, covert foreign malign influence operations conducted through their platforms. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others publish helpful reports on what they are seeing. On October 8, OpenAI reported disrupting Russian and Iranian influence operations that used its tools to support deceptive activities, including creating fake journalists who placed articles in legitimate news outlets and promoting Russian narratives through a purported think tank in Latin America. This summer OpenAI also disclosed that accounts likely originating in China had used ChatGPT to generate posts and images about AI data centers, electricity prices, and U.S. tariffs, designed to look like ordinary Americans weighing in on current debates, an operation it called the “Data Center Bandwagon.” Anthropic’s September 2026 report identified nine influence operations across six continents, including efforts that used AI to create fake personas, to make state-backed content look like independent reporting, and to produce thousands of articles for fake news sites. For its part, Meta releases adversarial threat reports twice a year. (They have scaled back from the quarterly reports they previously issued.) Meta’s most recent report, from August 2026, described coordinated influence operations originating in Russia, Iran, Israel, and elsewhere, including operations targeting Americans that used fake personas posing as U.S. activists, students, and other ordinary Americans, fake local media brands, bots, and AI-generated content to hide who was actually behind the messaging.

Since technology companies already investigate misuse of their platforms, identify patterns, shut down accounts, share some information with one another, and publish reports about what they find, why not build on those efforts to pool and analyze information more systematically, looking across platforms for recurring tactics and developments in how those tactics are being deployed? Given the federal government’s retreat from efforts to counter foreign malign influence, one way to move forward without government involvement is an industry-supported clearinghouse that borrows from existing private-sector threat sharing models. Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) let companies within a sector pool and analyze threat information. The Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) offers another model: a nonprofit created and funded by competing cybersecurity companies to pool what each sees, giving a broader picture of threats than any one company can see alone.

An industry-supported clearinghouse focused on covert foreign malign influence could identify tactics appearing across platforms, track changes in how those tactics are being deployed, and produce regular reports that synthesize what individual companies and researchers are seeing. It could start with information companies are already willing to disclose, then develop legal and privacy safeguards for sharing additional threat information where useful.

This part of the idea isn’t new. In 2018, Renée DiResta and Jonathon Morgan proposed an Information Operations ISAC to let technology companies and researchers share information about influence operations across platforms. Congress later took up a related idea, authorizing and then mandating an independent nonprofit Social Media Data and Threat Analysis Center, which would bring technology companies and outside researchers together to study foreign malign influence operations across platforms. Congress even recognized that this work could be done “without direct Government involvement, direction, or regulation.”

Despite the mandate, the center was never established. Whatever the reason, Americans shouldn’t have to just keep waiting. The companies already have much of the information needed to get started. They could support an independent organization that brings together what they are seeing and makes their individual reporting more useful. If the federal government eventually wants to contribute what it knows, all the better. But the effort does not have to depend on it.

Part II: Getting the Information to the Public

The technology companies’ threat reports are valuable, but most Americans will never see them. I teach law students who have chosen to study national security, and every semester I am struck by how little even these engaged, well-informed students have heard about how covert foreign malign influence actually works. The problem is not a lack of interest. Although authoritative news outlets report on these operations, too little of this information reaches the general public in ways that help people understand and recognize the tactics being used. That’s why the second part of this plan is just as critical as the first.

The information about these threats needs to reach the people being targeted. It can’t stay with the tech companies, the researchers, and those who follow these issues closely. And the vehicle that carries it to the public has to be one people will trust. Public libraries are one promising avenue. A 2026 national survey found libraries tied with friends and family as Americans’ most trusted source of information, ahead of scientists, local news, the federal government, and social media. There is already good work to build on. For example, the American Library Association has developed media literacy resources and programming for public libraries. The Empowering Informed Communities project at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public works with libraries around the country on information literacy. And the Urban Libraries Council has encouraged libraries to make AI literacy and “misinformation resilience training” part of their programming, highlighting novel programs already doing related work.

That work should continue and expand, but it could also draw much more directly on what technology companies and researchers are learning about covert foreign malign influence: the fake personas, spoofed news sites, coordinated accounts, undisclosed foreign funding, and other tactics they are seeing in actual foreign operations. The findings of the clearinghouse proposed in Part I could provide the basis for short, usable materials that help people recognize those tactics, rather than focusing on the underlying political messages themselves. For example, knowing that foreign actors have used a tactic of placing articles in legitimate news outlets under fictitious journalists’ names might prompt readers to look more closely at an unfamiliar author’s background before trusting or sharing an article. Funding from participating technology companies and philanthropy could support the creation of those materials and help libraries and other trusted organizations use them in their communities.

Libraries are not the only way to reach people. Schools and universities, local news organizations, and civic groups could use the same information. The point is to take the substantial amount of information that technology companies and independent researchers are uncovering about how foreign malign influence actually works and more effectively get it to Americans through organizations that already reach them and that they trust.

Other countries place far more emphasis on preparing their populations for these threats than the United States does. Their efforts are government sponsored, unlike the approach proposed here, but they reflect a recognition that helping the public understand and resist covert foreign influence is necessary to defend against it. Sweden’s Psychological Defense Agency, for example, works directly with municipalities and civil society to help people recognize and resist foreign malign influence. Ahead of Sweden’s 2026 elections, the agency gave municipalities and regions ready-to-use social media posts and web content about covert foreign influence, explaining that working through local communicators lets it reach more people than its own channels could. In September, in a speech at the UN General Assembly, U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence to detect, attribute, and disrupt information attacks by hostile states. Few details are available, but Burnham specifically emphasized that the center’s work would include increasing Britain’s public resilience.

Making It Work

This two-part concept is not without challenges. First, technology companies would have to be willing to participate and help fund the industry-supported clearinghouse. There is something in it for them: Pooling information would give each company a better picture of threats that cross platforms, and a better-informed public would make operations that misuse their platforms less effective. The initial ask is also modest. Many of the companies already investigate these operations and publish what they find, so the first step is to organize and share that work more usefully, not to create a new reporting burden. Not every company will necessarily join, but the effort doesn’t need everyone at the table to start. It could begin with those already investigating these operations and publishing what they find.

Second, a clearinghouse focused on the tactics of foreign influence operations would need genuine independence from the companies that contribute to it. An independent board could oversee the organization, with participating companies providing funding but unable to dictate its findings or conclusions. Any nonpublic information they share also would need appropriate legal and privacy protections.

Third, any effort like this will inevitably face accusations that it is targeting speech. That makes it especially important to focus on exposing covert foreign operations and their tactics, not on judging the views of Americans who may share or agree with the underlying content. Making that distinction won’t always be easy, because foreign influence operations often seek to get Americans, sometimes unwittingly, to repeat or amplify their messages. But that makes the focus on tactics and attribution even more important. The relevant question is not whether an American is expressing a particular view, but whether there is evidence of a concealed foreign effort behind it.

That distinction between covert foreign activity and legitimate domestic activity should shape the effort’s structure from the start. A clearinghouse should publish its methodology and evidence so that outsiders can check its work, flag uncertainty where it exists, and stay focused on documented covert foreign activity rather than deciding whether underlying viewpoints are true or false, or whether Americans should agree with them.That same principle applies to the public-facing side. Libraries and other organizations that pass the information along to the public should help people recognize covert foreign malign influence, not tell them what to believe.

None of this is a substitute for government action. The federal government has authorities and capabilities that private actors do not. But addressing a problem this serious does not require waiting for it. Past political controversies surrounding earlier efforts to counter foreign malign influence should not deter renewed efforts to address a threat that persists.

If this works, there may be other benefits. Understanding how covert foreign malign influence works might help change the way Americans talk to one another. These operations often work by exploiting divisions that already exist and making them worse. Recognizing that the United States as a whole is a target might make Americans slower to assume the worst of one another, and quicker to notice who benefits when they do.

Technology companies, government officials, and researchers already know a great deal about how foreign governments exploit U.S. divisions and manipulate domestic debates. Too little of that knowledge reaches the Americans those governments are actually targeting. Getting it to them should be part of defending the country.