Inoculating Ourselves Against Online Manipulation
- Soni Albright
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Part 1: Understanding the Threat
In June 2021, a Chinese government official sent an essay draft via WeChat to Eileen Wang, then a candidate for city council in Arcadia, California, and her co-conspirator. The directive: push back against an LA Times article about Xinjiang, the Uyghur heartland in China, where the U.S. government and several allies have formally declared Beijing’s policies to constitute genocide and crimes against humanity. Within minutes, Wang and her partner published the article on their website, “U.S. News Center,” falsely claiming there was no forced labor in Xinjiang, including in cotton production. The Chinese official’s response: “So fast, thank you everyone.” (U.S. Department of Justice, May 2026)
Wang was elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022. She resigned as mayor this month after federal prosecutors announced she would plead guilty to acting as an illegal foreign agent.
The website looked like community news for local Chinese Americans, and that was the point. The content was written by a foreign government, which was also the point. And the content itself was not merely political spin — it was a direct attempt to suppress awareness of what the U.S. government and several of its allies have formally designated as genocide. That is not just a domestic or US information problem. It is a global one, and it is not without precedent.
This Has Consequences Beyond US Politics
False narratives and the spread of misinformation can have real, life-or-death consequences. In Myanmar, Facebook’s failure to moderate coordinated hate speech and disinformation about the Rohingya Muslim minority contributed to real-world violence on a catastrophic scale. A UN fact-finding mission concluded that Facebook played a significant role in amplifying the incitement that accompanied the military’s campaign against the Rohingya, which the UN characterized as genocide. The platform became a vector for narratives that dehumanized a minority population, and people were terrorized, assaulted, displaced, and even died.
The Xinjiang (Uyghur) case is different in form but connected in logic. When a foreign government uses a fake news website in a California suburb to deny the existence of forced labor camps, it is actively working to suppress awareness of an ongoing humanitarian crisis. A crisis that human rights organizations have documented with satellite imagery, survivor testimony, and leaked government documents. Keeping that information muddied, disputed, and uncertain directly serves the perpetrators.
This is why media literacy is no longer just an educational issue. It is a matter of human rights for people whose suffering depends, in part, on whether the rest of the world can see it clearly.
The Mechanism Isn’t Lies. It’s Doubt.
The most effective influence operations don’t traffic in outright falsehoods; they use selective framing that omits inconvenient context, coordinated amplification from sources that appear independent, content targeted at specific audiences to deepen existing divisions, on platforms that look like journalism but serve a specific agenda.
The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee spent three years reviewing over a million documents and interviewing more than 200 witnesses to produce its bipartisan report on the 2016 election. The committee’s Republican acting chairman, Senator Marco Rubio, summarized the findings plainly: “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.” This was the conclusion of a Republican-led committee, stated on the record, after three years of investigation.
What Russia ran was not a fabrication campaign. It was a perception campaign, and the specifics are instructive. The Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed operation, ran thousands of targeted Facebook and Instagram ads across racially and politically divisive topics like Black Lives Matter, immigration, gun rights, and LGBTQ+ issues. This was not designed to advance any of those causes, but to pit Americans against each other. African Americans were targeted more than any other demographic group, with ads simultaneously designed to appear supportive of Black Lives Matter while also framing the movement as threatening to other audiences in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson. The goal was not persuasion but fracture, and the scale was staggering: Russian-linked content reached an estimated 150 million American users across Facebook and Instagram during the 2016 race.
Meta's adversarial threat reports have repeatedly documented the removal of similar networks from its platforms in the years since. The goal was never to convince you of something false. It was to make you uncertain, distrustful, and disengaged, because a confused public is easier to manipulate than an informed one.
We Were Already Vulnerable Before Any of This Started
The United States was not a healthy information environment when these operations began. Trust in media (which is at an all-time low) and government institutions has been declining for years, so we were ripe for exploitation.
On January 22, 2017, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet the Press and defended a demonstrably false claim about inauguration crowd sizes by describing it as providing “alternative facts.” The host’s response was accurate: alternative facts are not ‘facts,’ they are falsehoods. Though we can’t blame all media distrust on Kellyanne Conway, the phrase was emblematic of a broader decline in trust, and it seeded the idea that factual claims are just one perspective among many, that evidence is a matter of interpretation, and that the people presenting facts have motives you should distrust as much as the facts themselves.
That framing spread into areas where the stakes are considerably higher. Climate change is the clearest example. The scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is not a matter of genuine debate among researchers. It is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in modern science, according to NASA. And yet it is routinely treated in public discourse as a two-sided opinion question, as though the disagreement were between equally weighted positions, which it is not. But once people have been primed to believe that all information is politically motivated, the actual weight of the evidence matters less than the perceived motive of the person presenting it.
Today, only 28% of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media, down from 68% in 1972. Trust is now at record lows across all partisan groups: Republicans at 8%, Democrats at 51%, and Independents at 27%. When trust in information itself is this low, distinguishing between a legitimate news source and, say, a Chinese government front operation becomes significantly harder. Both get filed under “you can’t trust any of it,” and many people simply check out.
What Estonia Did Differently
When trust in information collapses, a population becomes easier to manipulate. Some countries have treated that as a national vulnerability and responded accordingly. Perhaps surprisingly, Estonia is one of the clearest examples.
The Bronze Soldier was a Soviet World War II memorial in central Tallinn. To ethnic Estonians, it symbolized Soviet occupation and repression. To the country’s Russian-speaking minority, it represented victory over Nazi Germany and a claim to belonging in Estonian society. That divide was real, longstanding, and unresolved.
When the Estonian government relocated the statue (April 2007) and the soldiers’ remains to a military cemetery, it triggered two nights of riots, the worst unrest since the Soviet reoccupation in 1944. One person was killed, and relations with Moscow deteriorated sharply.
Russia escalated beyond the street-level unrest by launching coordinated cyberattacks against Estonian government systems, banks, and media outlets. At the same time, it amplified narratives that reframed the conflict as evidence of Estonian hostility toward Russian people, taking a real internal division and projecting it outward as an international grievance.
Researchers identify this moment as the point when Estonia began treating disinformation as a national security issue rather than a communications problem.
Estonia’s response: Media literacy was embedded across the national curriculum, integrated into civics, history, and social studies. Students were taught not only to evaluate sources but to understand how influence works: who funds messaging, how it spreads, and why specific audiences are targeted.
The Estonian Ministry of Education frames this work as “psychological defense,” signaling that an uninformed public is a vulnerability, just as an undefended border is.
Estonia now ranks 6th in the Media Literacy Index of European Countries for 2026, which includes metrics in press freedom, education, trust, and e-participation. This is notable given that many other countries bordering Russia and Ukraine, where disinformation campaigns are heavily concentrated, rank near the bottom. Estonia demonstrates that sustained investment in media literacy education functions as a long-term inoculation strategy.
What American Classrooms Are Missing
In contrast to Estonia and other nations like Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, the United States has not treated media literacy as a systemic or national priority.
We do not have a national, targeted, standards-based, civics-based approach to media literacy in the U.S., at least not systematically. Instead, it depends on states, districts, individual schools and teachers, and elective programs. Access is uneven, and the students who most need these skills are often the least likely to receive them.
The questions students should be routinely asking are not complicated, but they need to become habitual:
Who created this, and what do they stand to gain?
How is this being distributed, and why to this audience?
What is missing or de-emphasized?
Does this source have transparent ownership and funding?
These are not questions for a single unit or a single class. They need to be practiced across subjects and grade levels, just as writing or mathematical reasoning is, because they do not stick without repetition and real-world application. Finland’s approach, for example, introduces media literacy from early childhood through adulthood (so-called “K-to-Gray”) as a continuous, system-wide effort. Countries that take this approach consistently rank among the most resilient to disinformation, with strong education systems, higher trust, and greater media freedom reinforcing those outcomes.
We Are Leaving This to Chance
Eileen Wang is not a propagandist in any recognizable sense. She is a local mother embedded in a community that trusted her, running a website that looked like neighborhood news for her Chinese-American community. Except that the content came from Beijing. Her neighbors had no particular reason to know the difference, and that was the entire point.
That is what an undefended information environment looks like at the street level. It’s not a broadcast tower, or a foreign accent, or an undercover agent in a trench coat. It’s much more familiar than that.
Estonia decided, after 2007, that leaving its public unprepared for such an operation was a security failure, on a par with an undefended border. It responded with a curriculum, a framework, and a national commitment to building evaluation habits that don’t depend on any individual school or district prioritizing them.
The United States has made no equivalent decision, and the gap between those two choices is stark. It is the difference between a public that can look at “U.S. News Center” (Eileen Wang’s website) and ask the right questions, and one that can’t.
The Arcadia case will be prosecuted, and Wang will likely plead guilty. But the infrastructure that made it work, like the low media literacy, the fragmented information environment, and the populations primed to distrust mainstream sources, remains exactly as it was. The next operation will find the same conditions still in place
Part 2 will look at what inoculation actually looks like in practice, and where it has worked. Stay tuned!
Soni Albright is a teacher, parent educator, curriculum specialist, researcher, and writer for Cyber Civics with nearly 24 years of experience in education. She has taught the Cyber Civics curriculum for 14 years and currently works directly with students while also supporting families and educators. Her experience spans a wide range of school settings—including Waldorf, Montessori, public, charter, and homeschool co-ops. Soni regularly leads professional development workshops and is passionate about helping schools build thoughtful, age-appropriate digital literacy programs. Please visit: https://www.cybercivics.com/parent-presentations
