A Crisis of Exploitable and Profitable Ignorance.

The For-Profit Disinformation Machine and What Your State Can Do About It

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Jeff Spicer / Getty.

Call it the for-profit disinformation industry. You could view it as a social phenomenon or a crisis of exploitable ignorance, and plenty of smart people have spent the last decade doing exactly that. You can also realize what we are looking at is a supply chain, with producers, buyers, distributors, and customers, organized the way any other industry is organized, and once you see it that way it is the single most effective political weapon deployed against the American public in our lifetimes.

The producers come first, because everything downstream depends on who makes the product and what it costs to make. A working newsroom is expensive. Reporters and editors and fact-checkers draw salaries, lawyers review stories before they run, sources take years to develop, and institutional memory, the kind that lets a city-hall reporter recognize the new zoning proposal as the same scam the last mayor ran in 2007, takes decades to build. A person willing to invent a story needs a laptop and a few hours. When those two products compete for the same audience attention, one costs thousands of dollars per story and the other costs nothing, and the market sorts itself accordingly.

It sorted itself fast. American newspapers employed about 71,000 newsroom workers in 2008, and by 2020 that number had fallen to 31,000. Forty thousand reporters, editors, and photographers are no longer at their desks, the buildings where they worked have been sold, and the beats they covered, school boards and county commissions and state agencies and zoning authorities, are now uncovered across most of the country. What filled the space behind them was not silence. It was cheaper content, produced faster, verified less, and engineered for emotional reaction, because emotion moves faster through a feed than verification does and always has.

Downstream from the producers are the buyers, and they are not usually the people who appear on camera. They are fossil fuel companies protecting oil reserves worth hundreds of billions of dollars, tobacco executives who spent decades paying scientists to question their own research, pharmaceutical companies burying trial data, cryptocurrency operators running pump-and-dump schemes, hostile foreign governments, oligarchs, and political donors who would rather pay ten million dollars to confuse the public than face a regulation that would cost them a hundred million. From their spreadsheet, disinformation is the single most efficient investment available. Ten million in, a hundred million saved. No other asset class offers that return, which is why the money keeps flowing.

Between the buyers and the audience sit the distributors. A digital platform is an auction house. Advertisers, political operatives, dark-money networks, and foreign influence operations bid against each other for access to specific audiences. The platform does not read the ad copy or ask whether the claims are true; it runs the auction, delivers the eyeballs, and takes its cut. Honest actors bidding for the same audience, the public-health campaigns and civic organizations and small news outlets, compete at the same rates against buyers who can afford to pay more because their return on investment is orders of magnitude higher. The market, operating exactly as designed, hands the megaphone to whoever is profiting most from public confusion. This is a system that rewards predation and exploitation.

That is the structure end to end. Producers manufacture the product, buyers pay for its promotion, platforms distribute it, the audience consumes it, everyone in the chain makes money, and the only thing being degraded is the public’s capacity to tell truth from fiction.

Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, talking to the writer Michael Lewis. The Democrats don’t matter, he said. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit. Commentators since have treated the quote as a propaganda slogan, but read it again. It is a purchasing strategy. Bannon was telling Lewis what the customers of the for-profit disinformation industry are actually buying, and they are not trying to convince anyone of anything specific. They are buying confusion. They are buying the collapse of the shared factual ground on which coordinated public action depends. A public that cannot agree on what happened yesterday cannot organize around what needs to happen tomorrow, a public that cannot identify a specific perpetrator cannot hold that perpetrator accountable, and a public too exhausted to sort truth from lie will eventually stop trying. That exhaustion is the product being sold.

We have seen this operation before, and the tobacco version of it is the one most people remember. Internal memos later revealed that tobacco executives knew by the 1950s that their product caused cancer. They hid the knowledge and spent decades funding scientists, public-relations firms, and friendly journalists to manufacture doubt about the research. When the lawsuits finally caught up with them, they argued their public statements were protected commercial speech. The courts disagreed, juries disagreed, attorneys general disagreed, and the tobacco companies ended up paying more than two hundred billion dollars in settlements and accepting restrictions on how they could advertise. The lie was a product. The product was sold. The sellers paid for the harm they caused.

Oligarchs took that loss personally. How dare they be held accountable?

As I researched the For-Profit Disinformation Machine, I started to notice a pattern that reminded me of something that on its surface might seem unrelated.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration wanted to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. Congress said no, and passed a law called the Boland Amendment making it illegal to fund the Contras, the right-wing guerrilla force trying to do the overthrowing. The administration decided to fund them anyway. Part of the money came from secretly selling missiles to Iran. Part of it came from something uglier. Contra leaders and their American handlers moved cocaine into the United States, sold it through West Coast dealers, and routed the profits back to the war in Central America. The CIA knew. In some cases, the CIA helped.

In 1996, a reporter named Gary Webb at the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part series called “Dark Alliance” that laid out the supply chain. The Contras. The cocaine. The Los Angeles dealers. The CIA’s awareness of the operation. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times attacked the series. They attacked Webb personally. The Mercury News eventually backed away from his reporting. Webb was pushed out of journalism and could not find work. In 2004, he killed himself.

Three years after Webb’s series ran, the CIA’s own Inspector General released a report confirming the substance of what Webb had written. The agency had indeed worked with Contra-connected drug traffickers, had indeed protected some of them from prosecution, and had indeed known that cocaine profits were funding the war. The major papers that had destroyed Webb’s career did not retract their attacks. They wrote polite correctives and moved on. Webb was already dead.

That is what happens when a supply chain runs through institutions the legal system is structured to protect. The producers were never the story. The distributors were never the story. The question of who profited was treated as a conspiracy theory even after the CIA itself admitted the conspiracy was real. The blame sat with the users, the parents, and the neighborhoods, which is exactly where the producers and distributors needed the blame to sit in order to keep doing what they were doing.

This is the template we are working with. If we accept the framing that disinformation is a problem of gullible consumers, we are already inside the same trap the crack users were in. The producers keep operating. The distributors keep distributing. The blame sits with the people at the end of the chain. And the industry that put the product there in the first place never has to answer for any of it.

So we have two models. Tobacco, where the courts eventually caught up. Iran-Contra, where they did not. Which one applies to the disinformation industry depends entirely on whether we create accountability rather than insulation, and the legal framework for accountability already exists.

The Supreme Court decided Illinois ex rel. Madigan v. Telemarketing Associates, 538 U.S. 600, unanimously, in 2003. Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion. A for-profit telemarketing company had been soliciting donations for Vietnam veterans and pocketing 85 cents of every dollar raised, telling donors most of the money was going to the veterans when most of it was not. The company argued the First Amendment protected their solicitations, and the Court said no. Paid deception targeting a public audience is not protected speech, states can bring fraud actions against commercial speakers who knowingly mislead the public about matters of material fact, and every justice on the Court, left to right, agreed.

The groundwork was laid twenty-three years earlier in Central Hudson Gas and Electric v. Public Service Commission, 447 U.S. 557 (1980). The first prong of the Central Hudson test is blunt: for commercial speech to receive First Amendment protection, it must concern lawful activity and must not be misleading. Commercial speech that is false or misleading receives no constitutional protection at all, none, and knowingly false commercial speech can be prohibited, regulated, and punished without the government having to clear any balancing test to do it.

So now a question. Why should fraud be lawful so long as it is political in nature? Courts determine truth everywhere else, and that is part of why the fascists work so hard to capture them. But is the answer, then, that you can lie and cheat and steal as much as you want in every context except politics? Does that keep us safe?

It does not, and every state in the country already has the statute that says so. The Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices laws exist in all fifty states, and forty-five states and the District of Columbia broadly prohibit deceptive acts. Under that standard the attorney general does not have to prove intent to deceive, only that the statement was false or misleading and that a reasonable person could be misled. New York’s Martin Act gives the attorney general sweeping investigative authority with a tiered penalty structure that escalates from civil fines to criminal prosecution, and it requires no proof of intent to defraud. California Business and Professions Code section 17500 prohibits any statement that is untrue or misleading and known or reasonably knowable to be so. Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 93A authorizes treble damages for willful violations. These statutes were written to handle used-car salesmen who rolled back odometers and grocers who put their thumb on the scale, and they apply, on their own terms, to a cable network that sells election-fraud claims its own hosts privately called asinine.

What we do next follows from what we now know. The first step is naming the industry, which means dropping the word misinformation, because misinformation implies an accident, and dropping the phrase fake news, because fake news implies a single bad story. The for-profit disinformation industry is a commercial enterprise with identifiable producers, buyers, distributors, and customers, and every conversation we have about it should use language that reflects that structure. Words shape what people can see. A public that hears “disinformation industry” starts asking who the owners are. A public that hears “misinformation” keeps blaming itself, which is exactly what the industry is selling.

The For-Profit Disinformation Industry is arguably a seditious conspiracy to profit from the destruction of the United States and proffer its demise at the behest of the worst actors on Earth.

The second step is pressing state attorneys general to use the tools they already have. The Dominion case was a private lawsuit, and it recovered three-quarters of a billion dollars for a company whose revenues that year were under a hundred million. A state attorney general, operating under an existing UDAP statute, can bring the same kind of action on behalf of a state’s residents without waiting for a private plaintiff with deep enough pockets to survive discovery. Letitia James has built most of her career on the Martin Act. Other state attorneys general have the same authority, and they need constituents asking them to use it.

The third step is applying the same economic logic to the platforms. A platform that sells algorithmic amplification is selling a product, and when the product it amplifies is a knowingly false claim about a matter of material public interest, the platform is a commercial speaker participating in a commercial transaction. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from liability for what users post, but it does not protect platforms from liability for what they themselves choose to promote. The legal theory is available. It has not yet been tested at scale. It should be.

The fourth step is changing what we buy. Every dollar spent on a subscription to an independent outlet with actual reporters is a dollar that does not go to a platform that sells false content to the highest bidder. Every hour of attention given to a verified source is an hour not sold at auction to a buyer of confusion. The industry exists because there is a customer for its product. We are, collectively, that customer, and the consumer side of the equation is the part we control directly.

The Dominion settlement is the model and the warning. A jury, presented with the evidence, was prepared to find that a major media company had knowingly broadcast false claims for profit. Fox paid $787.5 million and went back to work the next morning, running the same playbook with different hosts. The settlement did not end the industry. It priced the industry. Every buyer of disinformation in this country now knows what the exposure looks like, and most of them have concluded it is an acceptable cost of doing business.

Our job is to make it an unacceptable cost. The tools exist, the precedent exists, the evidence exists, and what we need now is use what we already have, and the language to describe what we are actually fighting, which is an industry that sells price gouges propaganda.

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