America Surrenders in the Global Information Wars

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1. Anne Applebaum: “Every day, some 2 billion people around the world use privacy-protection tools supported by the Open Technology Fund. When people in China escape their government’s firewalls and censorship software—now so dense that the system has been called the ‘locknet’—or when users in Cuba or Myanmar evade cruder internet blocks, they can access material written in their own languages and read stories they would otherwise never see. Both the access and some of the information are available because the U.S. government has for decades backed a constellation of programs—the technology fund, independent foreign-language broadcasters, counterpropaganda campaigns—designed to give people in repressive countries access to evidence-based news.

   “The information that people in the autocratic world receive from this network is wide ranging, based on reporting, and very different from what they are told by state media in their own country. If they live in Iran, for example, they might have learned from Radio Farda (backed by U.S. funding, broadcast in Persian) that their government did not, as it had claimed, capture an Israeli pilot during June’s bombing campaign, and they might even have heard, in their own language, American explanations of the campaign instead. If they live in Siberia, they could hear from Radio Liberty (U.S.-backed, staffed by Russian-speaking journalists) precise information about the poor condition of their local roads, including one highway that is 89 miles long but so muddy and full of potholes that traversing it takes 36 hours. If they are Uyghurs living in China, they could have heard, at least before the end of May, reporting in Uyghur from Radio Free Asia (also U.S.-backed, producing reports in nine languages), the broadcaster that originally informed the world about internment camps for members of the persecuted minority.

   “But for how much longer will this information flow? Right now, all of America’s foreign broadcasters, which also include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and a handful of others, are in grave danger. At the end of February, President Donald Trump appointed Kari Lake as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees them. Lake is an ideologue and former local-TV anchor who failed to be elected governor of Arizona, and then failed to be elected as a senator from Arizona. With no experience in international broadcasting or foreign policy, she put the entire staff of VOA on administrative leave and announced plans to cut the funding of all of the organizations under the USAGM umbrella; she did so with venomous relish, hypocritically accusing chronically underfunded broadcasters of wastefulness, tarring journalists as foreign agents. She began firing contract employees, in some cases giving visa holders who had worked for years on behalf of the U.S. government 30 days to leave the country.”

   Read more: [ttps://theatln.tc/Yo0fdoAS](https://theatln.tc/Yo0fdoAS)

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