In April and May, hundreds of users of the social media platform Bluesky discovered that their accounts had been hijacked and used to spread content about Ukraine. Researchers at Clemson University later attributed the campaign to the Social Design Agency, a Russian consulting firm sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury for running Kremlin-directed malign influence campaigns. The Bluesky effort turned out to be only one piece of the SDA’s much larger portfolio of recent operations: leaked documents obtained by the news portal Delfi Estonia and shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed plans for real-world acts of vandalism, intimidation, and election interference.

Most discussions of online influence and disinformation campaigns assume that attacks such as the one on Bluesky are discrete efforts. But as the SDA’s operations show, influence operations are increasingly interconnected and part of propaganda strategies that transcend traditional boundaries. Sophisticated states such as China, Iran, and Russia routinely combine overt public messaging with covert influence and mix broadcast channels with social media platforms. State media outlets, official government accounts, paid influencers, fake personas, hacked accounts, and bot armies are parts of the same system. This integrated approach, which we call “full-spectrum propaganda,” is now the norm for U.S. adversaries trying to spread their message abroad.

In full-spectrum propaganda, as we outlined in a recent Security Studies article, the many channels that states can use reinforce each other, making narratives seem more credible and allowing them to proliferate more widely. A story publicized on a state-backed broadcast channel may reach one audience, while social media accounts catch the attention of another. Official outlets can quote from posts on fake accounts whose creators masquerade as ordinary members of the public, making a fringe claim seem normal. Paid influencers can tailor messages in a style that resonates with niche audiences. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is making this strategy even more powerful: states are increasingly integrating AI into every level of their propaganda operations, allowing small groups or individuals to conduct propaganda campaigns that would previously have required far greater resources.

Strategies that merely address discrete foreign influence campaigns will fail to meet the challenges presented by full-spectrum propaganda. The United States needs to be able to understand, assess, and counter influence operations holistically, yet as the threat grows, the United States has been undercutting the capacity that would allow it to do so. Politicians have been dismantling the government agencies designed to track foreign influence, and social media companies are raising barriers to research on their platforms, leaving the country unprepared. As AI accelerates the spread and expands the reach of global propaganda, Washington is blinding itself to the challenge.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

For much of the last decade, politicians and the public understood foreign influence operations on social media through the parts that first became visible. Most often, this would be a network of fake accounts discovered by social media companies as part of their efforts to eliminate bots, scams, and online deception on their platforms. After taking down such accounts, companies would write reports and researchers (including us) would publish analyses to explain the evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures of online influence campaigns. The focus on the specifics of each individual operation led people to think of the threats as narrow, distinct incidents.

But the fragment of what is visible is not the whole story. State-backed propagandists do not have to choose between state media and fake accounts, between covert personas and overt broadcasters, or between a spoofed media outlet or a Telegram channel. They can use all of them together—and they are increasingly doing........

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