SHILLA HOTEL                                                                                                                            

SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA

MARCH 18, 2024

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Thank you.  Thank you very, very much, and good afternoon, everyone.  I want to start again by thanking our South Korean friends, all of our co-hosts, everyone here at this summit for coming together today and in the days to follow.  

Our democracies have different histories, different strengths, different challenges.  But we’re all determined to deliver a safer, healthier, more prosperous, more inclusive future for our people and for people around the world.

Now, we know there’s no shortage of obstacles to meeting that objective.  Lingering barriers to political participation.  Corruption.  Economic growth that isn’t broadly shared.

What I’d like to do this afternoon is spend a few minutes focusing on one longstanding problem that’s become increasingly complicated and increasingly consequential, and that’s the challenge of disinformation – of material deliberately meant to deceive and divide – as well as other forms of false and misleading content.

We all know that a world in which reliable information is readily accessible is pretty much foundational to every issue, in every country.  It empowers us to understand and engage with the world around us.  To make decisions that shape our lives, that shape our communities, that shape our countries.

But we also know the information space has become more crowded, more complex, more confusing, more contested than ever. 

That, in turn, creates an enabling environment for disinformation – an environment in which state and non-state actors are undermining the objective truths on which open societies depend.

And I think we all know this.  We’ve all experienced this in our daily lives.  As someone who’s a little bit older than probably most of the people in this audience, this has maybe been the most profound change that I’ve experienced during my own career and working life. 

If you go back the 30 or so years that I’ve been in government, the most profound change has been in the information space.  When I started out a little over 30 years ago, pretty much everyone did the same thing:  They opened the door of their apartment or their home in the morning and picked up a hard copy of a newspaper, and there were only a few newspapers that everyone tended to rely on.  And then, if you had a television in your office, which some people did but not everyone did, in the United States, you’d turn it on at 6:30 at night or 7:00 at night and you’d get one of our three broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC – for the evening news.  And those were the foundational sources of information that pretty much everyone relied on.

Now, to state the obvious, we live in a world where we seem to be intravenously connected to information, and we’re getting new inputs every millisecond.  The use of technology, particularly when it comes to digital technologies – social media, and now artificial intelligence – they’re dramatically accelerating what had already been an incredibly fast pace of change.  But that accelerant has also created an accelerant for disinformation, fueling polarization, adding to the general sense of confusion that people have about the world around them.

During COVID, disinformation discouraged millions from getting vaccinated – with sometimes fatal results.

Hashtags like “Climate Scam” have inundated online platforms, helping to delay action on the climate crisis.

Nearly half the people of the world are going to be going to the polls this year – this is an extraordinary election year in country after country – but citizens and candidates will face a flood of falsehoods that suffocate serious civic debate.

Our competitors, our adversaries are using disinformation to exploit fissures within our democracies by further sowing suspicion, cynicism, instability.  Pitting one group against another.  Discrediting our institutions.

People within our own societies have exacerbated these dynamics – sometimes deliberately, sometimes influenced by bots and algorithms that are trained on biased information.

This distortion of the marketplace of ideas is not an unfortunate byproduct of free speech – it’s a direct threat to freedom of expression itself.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines not only the right to express ourselves; it protects our freedom, and I quote, “to hold opinions without interference.”  The manipulation of information undermines our ability to exercise that fundamental right.

Building a more resilient information environment is, for us, a vital national security interest.  It’s also an urgent priority for our diplomacy.  And I want to discuss some of the ways we’re trying to advance that objective.

To begin with, we continue to expose, to disrupt, and to deter disinformation.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center coordinates our governmentwide and multilateral efforts to identify, to analyze, to reveal foreign manipulation of information.

Last September, we released a report detailing how the Chinese Government has invested billions of dollars to spread propaganda and twist the global information environment.  For example, buying cable TV platforms in Africa and excluding international news channels from subscription packages.  Or using local subsidiaries to surreptitiously purchase media companies in Southeast Asia – which then run heavily pro-PRC news.

We unmasked the Kremlin’s covert campaign to undermine support for Ukraine across the Western Hemisphere, laundering Russian content through Latin American media to make it look like it was organic.

By discovering and publicizing these influence operations, we’ve enabled other governments, media, civil society to track and to thwart them.  For example, after the United States disclosed Moscow’s hidden involvement in a Brazilian nationalist organization, a Brazilian political party expelled 50 members tied to the Russia-linked group.