Firehose of falsehood
Based on Wikipedia: Firehose of falsehood
The Art of Drowning Truth
Here's an unsettling truth about modern propaganda: it doesn't need to convince you of anything specific. It just needs to exhaust you.
The firehose of falsehood—a term coined by the RAND Corporation in 2016—describes a propaganda technique so brazenly obvious that it seems like it shouldn't work. And yet it does. Devastatingly well.
The approach is simple in concept: blast out an enormous volume of messages across every available channel—television, social media, websites, podcasts, everything—without any concern for whether those messages are true or even consistent with each other. The goal isn't to persuade through logic. It's to overwhelm through sheer volume.
Why Lies Don't Need to Be Believable
Conventional wisdom about persuasion says that to convince someone, your message should be truthful, credible, and internally consistent. The firehose of falsehood throws all of this out the window. And counterintuitively, it still works.
Why?
Because the technique exploits a fundamental vulnerability in how humans process information. When we encounter a claim from what appears to be multiple independent sources, we're more likely to believe it. This is a reasonable mental shortcut most of the time—if several different newspapers report the same event, it probably happened. But propagandists can game this system by creating networks of seemingly unrelated websites, social media accounts, and news outlets that all echo the same false narratives.
Russia, for instance, doesn't just broadcast through RT, its recognizable state-sponsored news network. It also operates dozens of proxy websites whose connections to Russian state media are, as researchers put it, "disguised or downplayed." When the same claim appears across all these platforms, it creates the illusion of independent verification.
There's another psychological lever at work here too: social proof. People are more likely to believe something when they think others in their community believe it. So if a coordinated campaign can make it seem like "everyone" in your social circle holds a particular view, you become more susceptible to adopting it yourself—even if that apparent consensus was manufactured by a handful of operatives using fake accounts.
The Four Pillars of the Firehose
The RAND Corporation identified four distinguishing characteristics that set this propaganda model apart from more traditional approaches:
High volume and multichannel distribution. The messages come from everywhere—not just one official source, but a flood of content across television, radio, websites, social media platforms, and messaging apps. This creates the impression of widespread agreement and makes the propaganda nearly impossible to escape.
Rapid, continuous, and repetitive messaging. The firehose never stops. Before one false claim can be debunked, ten more have already taken its place. This keeps defenders perpetually on the back foot, spending all their energy responding to yesterday's lies while today's go unchallenged.
No commitment to objective reality. Traditional propaganda at least pretends to be true. The firehose of falsehood doesn't bother with this pretense. Claims can be demonstrably false—it doesn't matter. What matters is that they're out there, taking up space in the public conversation.
No commitment to consistency. This is perhaps the most disorienting aspect. The same source might make two completely contradictory claims on the same day. Instead of weakening the propaganda, this actually serves a purpose: it signals that truth itself is meaningless, that all information is equally unreliable.
The Real Goal: Manufactured Cynicism
Understanding what the firehose of falsehood is trying to accomplish helps explain why it works the way it does. The immediate goal is to entertain, confuse, and overwhelm audiences while creating hostility toward fact-checking and accurate reporting. But there's a deeper strategic objective.
Research published in Frontiers in Political Science identified a profound consequence of sustained exposure to this technique:
When leaders employ a firehose of falsehoods, citizens retreat into cynicism and the belief that the truth is fundamentally unknowable. If the truth is unknowable, reasoned debate is pointless because there are no agreed-upon facts. When reasoned democratic discourse is not possible because there are no agreed upon facts, all that is left is the political exercise of raw power.
This is the endgame. Not to convince people that any particular lie is true, but to convince them that truth itself is inaccessible—that all sources are equally biased, all claims equally suspect, and the only thing that matters is who has power.
Political psychology research has shown that this manufactured uncertainty has predictable effects on how people think about politics. When people feel epistemically unmoored—uncertain about what's true and what they can trust—they become more likely to adopt conservative and authoritarian beliefs. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, and strongman leaders who project confidence can seem like an anchor in the chaos, even if they're the ones creating that chaos in the first place.
Russia's Laboratory
While propaganda is as old as human communication, the modern firehose technique emerged from a specific context: Vladimir Putin's Russia, equipped with the vast amplification capabilities of the internet age.
What distinguishes this from Soviet-era propaganda isn't the willingness to lie—that was always present—but the sheer scale made possible by digital technology. During the Cold War, spreading disinformation required printing presses, radio transmitters, and human agents. Today, a relatively small team can flood the global information environment with content through social media platforms, automated bots, and networks of websites.
Russia first deployed this technique at scale during the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, a brief but intense conflict over the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The information warfare ran parallel to the military operation, with Russian state media pumping out a steady stream of narratives justifying the intervention.
The technique was refined during Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and has been a constant feature of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Russian information operations have also targeted the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—and other post-Soviet countries that Moscow considers part of its sphere of influence.
Perhaps most notably for American audiences, Russian operatives deployed the firehose during interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. This wasn't about promoting one candidate over another so much as it was about sowing division and undermining confidence in democratic institutions—goals that aligned perfectly with the technique's core purpose of manufacturing cynicism and confusion.
The 5G Example: Weaponizing Distrust
In 2019, something curious happened. The Russian state-funded network RT America launched an aggressive campaign warning American audiences about the supposed health dangers of fifth-generation wireless technology, commonly known as 5G.
William J. Broad, a science writer at The New York Times, documented how RT broadcast numerous segments suggesting that 5G phones could cause cancer, brain tumors, and various other ailments—claims that have been thoroughly debunked by mainstream scientific research.
The irony was striking: even as RT was telling Americans that 5G was dangerous, Vladimir Putin was ordering the rollout of 5G networks across Russia. The contradiction was apparently irrelevant. The goal wasn't to protect anyone's health. It was to slow the adoption of advanced telecommunications infrastructure in a geopolitical rival while simultaneously demonstrating that Americans couldn't trust their own institutions to tell them what was safe.
The American Adaptation
The firehose of falsehood is not exclusively a Russian invention. Similar techniques have been adopted—and adapted—by political actors in other countries, including the United States.
Steve Bannon, who served as chief executive of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and later as White House chief strategist, articulated a related approach in characteristically blunt terms. Describing his strategy for dealing with the press, Bannon said the goal was to "flood the zone with shit."
This American variant, sometimes called "flooding the zone," differs from the Russian firehose in emphasis. Where firehosing specifically involves broadcasting falsehoods, flooding the zone focuses on overwhelming public attention with a rapid succession of initiatives, policies, announcements, and controversies—regardless of whether the content is false. The two tactics can be, and often are, combined.
In February 2025, a public relations executive explained the strategic logic: the tactic is designed to ensure that no single action or event stands out above the rest. By generating controversy at such a rapid pace, the public struggles to keep up, and no individual scandal or concerning development can gain enough traction to create sustained outrage.
This approach has been documented across multiple presidencies and political contexts. Analysts have noted its use during presidential debates, where one participant might deploy what's known as a "Gish gallop"—a related technique named after creationist debater Duane Gish, who was known for rapidly presenting an excessive number of arguments without regard for their accuracy, making it impossible for an opponent to address them all in the allotted time.
Beyond Politics: The Technique Spreads
What started as a tool of state propaganda has spread to various movements and causes. The anti-vaccine movement, for instance, has employed firehosing to spread debunked theories about the supposed dangers of vaccination. The volume and repetition of false claims creates the impression that there's genuine scientific controversy where none exists.
The technique has also been used in Indonesia's 2019 presidential race, where incumbent Joko Widodo accused his opponent's campaign of disseminating hateful propaganda using foreign consultants and "Russian propaganda" methods.
According to the cybersecurity company Recorded Future, the Chinese government has deployed similar tactics to undermine the credibility of BBC reporting on the persecution of Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region. Rather than directly refuting specific claims, the strategy involves flooding the information environment with alternative narratives and attacks on the source's credibility.
Author and former military intelligence officer John Loftus has argued that Iran employs comparable methods to incite hostility toward Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel—with some "fake news" attributed to Russia actually originating from Iranian information operations.
Why the Squirt Gun of Truth Doesn't Work
Here's the problem for anyone trying to combat the firehose of falsehood: conventional counterpropaganda doesn't work.
The natural response to a lie is to correct it—to clearly and factually explain why the claim is false. But against a firehose, this approach is doomed. As RAND researchers put it with memorable bluntness: "Don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth."
There simply isn't enough time or attention to debunk every false claim before new ones take their place. Worse, research by the German Marshall Fund suggests that repeating a false story—even to refute it—can actually make people more likely to believe it. The mere exposure effect means that familiar claims feel more true than unfamiliar ones, regardless of whether they've been labeled as false.
This creates a dilemma for journalists, fact-checkers, and anyone else trying to maintain an accurate public record. Every correction potentially amplifies the original falsehood. But staying silent allows lies to spread unchallenged.
Fighting Back: What Actually Works
Despite the challenges, researchers have identified several strategies that can help counter the firehose of falsehood:
Preemption over correction. The most effective time to counter a false narrative is before it takes hold. Being first to tell the story—getting accurate information out quickly as events unfold—can prevent false narratives from gaining traction. Military strategists call this "getting inside the enemy's decision loop."
An example from 2018 illustrates this approach. When Syrian pro-regime forces began shelling Syrian Democratic Forces near the town of Khasham and coalition forces responded in self-defense, the Combined Joint Task Force for Operation Inherent Resolve immediately published a news release titled "Unprovoked attack by Syrian pro-regime forces prompts coalition defensive strikes." By establishing the facts first, they prevented Russian news outlets from spinning the story as they had done with similar incidents in 2017.
Providing alternative narratives. Simply removing false information leaves a gap that other falsehoods can fill. Effective countermeasures involve providing a compelling alternative story that explains events in a way that's both accurate and satisfying.
Inoculation. Forewarning people about propaganda techniques—explaining how propagandists manipulate public opinion—makes audiences more resistant to those techniques. This is sometimes called "prebunking" as opposed to debunking.
Countering effects rather than claims. If propaganda is designed to undermine support for a cause, it may be more effective to work directly on boosting support for that cause rather than refuting specific false claims. This sidesteps the amplification problem.
Platform intervention. Enlisting the help of internet service providers and social media companies to reduce the spread of coordinated disinformation can help "turn off the flow" at the source.
Teaching digital literacy. Security expert Bruce Schneier recommends education as a long-term solution, helping people develop the skills to critically evaluate information sources and recognize manipulation techniques.
The Consistency Imperative
Military strategists Wilson C. Blythe and Luke T. Calhoun, writing in their 2019 paper "How We Win the Competition for Influence," stress that consistent messaging is crucial in the information environment. They draw a striking parallel: information operations should be treated like other weapons in the military arsenal—tools deployed strategically to achieve specific objectives.
The information environment is an inherent part of today's battlefields.
This framing underscores how seriously professional strategists take the threat. The firehose of falsehood isn't just a nuisance or a political tactic—it's a weapon being deployed in an ongoing conflict over public perception and democratic legitimacy.
The Stakes
Understanding the firehose of falsehood matters because its effects extend far beyond any particular false claim. The technique attacks the very foundation of informed public discourse: the shared belief that facts can be known, that evidence matters, and that honest debate can help us find better answers to hard problems.
When that foundation erodes, what remains is a political landscape where power is the only currency that matters—where the loudest voice wins not because it speaks truth, but simply because it drowns out everyone else.
Recognizing the technique is the first step toward resisting it. When you encounter a flood of contradictory claims from seemingly multiple sources, when you feel confused and exhausted by the sheer volume of information, when you're tempted to conclude that truth is simply unknowable—that's when it's worth asking whether you're on the receiving end of a firehose.
The goal of the firehose is your disengagement. The counter, difficult as it may be, is to stay engaged—to maintain your commitment to distinguishing true from false, even when the propagandists have made that task as hard as possible.