A Compendium of Recommendations for Countering Russian and Other State-Sponsored Propaganda
This RAND review tackles a meta-problem in the counter-influence space: there are now so many reports recommending ways to counter Russian and other state-sponsored propaganda that the recommendations themselves have become hard to navigate. The authors coded recommendations across 64 prior reports, sorting them into five buckets—social media platform policies, U.S. and allied government policies, coordination mechanisms, awareness and education, and support for various media and content. Government policy changes dominated the recommendations, with platform reforms, coordination, and education clustering in the middle, and direct support for broadcast and content media drawing the least attention. The single most common asks across the literature: expand media literacy initiatives, and push platforms to do better on detecting and removing foreign propaganda and tightening advertising practices.