In 2019, I sat in a classroom at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a bunch of guys about to get their full doves and a few invited civilians. The instructor asked, “What is our greatest threat to national security?” It wasn’t terrorism, it wasn’t nuclear weapons, it was cyber attacks.
This week, Elon Musk’s social media platform
One fake account called itself “ULTRAMAGA us TRUMPus2028” (with American flags in the name) and claimed to be based in Washington, DC, but is actually listed as based in Africa. Another, now deleted, was ‘Trump Is My President’, mentioned in Macedonia. A very patriotic account called @American had a profile photo with a bald eagle above an American flag, but it turns out it’s in South Asia.
We have known since the aftermath of the 2016 election that evil foreign governments have used fake social media accounts to sow discord. In one example from the Mueller report, a fake Russian account organized an actual, physical political rally in America.
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Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., during a press conference with President Donald Trump, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on Friday, May 30, 2025. (Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Like me wrote about in this June column, the MAGA movement in particular was recently targeted by foreign influences seeking to drive it apart. Fake foreign accounts can not only give the appearance of high influence through clicks and likes, but can also fund malicious users by generating revenue.
The bad news is that our nation is particularly vulnerable to information attacks precisely because we are a free society, we are militarily, economically and diplomatically dominant, but our Achilles heel is information, the free exchange of which we value more than security.
In no universe, for example, would China allow the United States to feed its children an endless doom loop of propaganda like it does with TikTok for our children. And even if it were banned, as Congress tried to do, someone else would simply take its place. The First Amendment ties our hands.
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This is why, and I hate to throw something on top of everyone’s busy day, but this is why the only thing that can mitigate these attacks on foreign information is an informed citizenry. There are actually very few other meaningful solutions.
Because we are a free society, the government can’t really protect you from bad foreign actors pretending to be a Denver housewife. That’s why Musk’s decision to add country of origin to accounts is such a major game-changer.
But using that important tool is not enough. We must remain diligent and always remember, in every online moment, that what we are communicating with may not be real, and may be trying to harm us and our nation.
It is without a doubt a great responsibility to constantly doubt what we see online, but only because freedom itself is daunting and there are a number of giveaways and clues that we need to look for.
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When you hear that such-and-such an influencer has incredible influence over their online audience, ask yourself if you’ve ever seen an example of that offline. Do they organize physical events? Have you ever heard someone talk about them in real life?
As I wrote in this column in June, the MAGA movement in particular has recently been the target of foreign influences seeking to break it up.
Then ask yourself who could benefit from the discord and doubt that these influencers plant in our society, the distrust of each other, even the dehumanization of each other. The obvious answers are Russia, China and Iran.
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I’m pretty sure my Army War College instructor from those years ago would applaud Elon Musk for adding a country-of-origin label; it’s a huge blow to foreign information operations, but he’s also pointing the finger at us and telling us to be diligent.
Ultimately, it is important to remember that most of our neighbors, our compatriots, are good and decent, and that when our online screens try to show us otherwise, we should always be skeptical, because our enemies will not stop taking advantage of this advantage.
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