How Autocrats Manipulate Online Information: Putin’s and Xi’s Playbooks

Democracies are engaged in a broad, persistent asymmetric competition with authoritarian challengers who seek to reshape the global order to suit their interests. The competition is playing out across multiple intersecting domains, and the information space is a critical theater. In this competition, Russia and China intentionally choose tools that give them the upper hand. In the political domain, Russia and China take advantage of permissive influence regimes, covertly funneling millions of dollars to political parties and civil society groups to sway policy decisions. They exploit democracies’ visible domestic challenges—from inequality to polarization—in the service of deepening social divides. And they conduct cyberattacks against legislatures, businesses, media organizations, and other entities to cripple a target society or retaliate against those that would hold them accountable. In the economic domain, Russia deploys corruption as an instrument of national strategy, transforming the grift that was once simply a routine feature of its own society into a weapon for subverting democratic ones. Both regimes cultivate economic dependencies, make coercive investments, and deploy unfair trade practices as leverage. In the technology domain, China is investing significant resources into attaining an edge in global markets. As it does so, it is shaping the standards for how new technologies will be developed and the norms that will govern how they will be used for decades to come, with potentially significant consequences for the rights to privacy and expression of individuals worldwide.