Putin’s Bots and Drones Target Trust
And the American media ecosystem leaves us vulnerable.
by Mark Hertling
The Bulwark, September 17, 2025
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”
–E.O. Wilson
INFORMATION IS ONE OF THE FOUR traditional elements of national power, alongside diplomacy, military, and economic strength. Those elements make up the “DIME” that national security experts use in strategy development. Of the four, information is the one most often overlooked, or dismissed as soft or secondary. That is a mistake: Information shapes perceptions, drives alliances, corrodes trust, and determines the resilience and power found in democracies.
The last week has offered two sharp examples of how information can be weaponized. Within hours of the shooting of Charlie Kirk one week ago, bot accounts flooded social media with conspiracy theories, claims of government coverups, and “deep state” narratives. Many started invoking “civil war.” There is good reason, based on precedent, to believe these accounts were run by Russian botfarmers with the goal of harvesting division and hate from Americans on both the left and the right.
At the same time, a different kind of Russian provocation was playing out in Europe. Drones from Russia crossed into Polish airspace, as they had done previously in Moldova and Romania. Within hours, Russian state media and Duma delegates were crowing that NATO and the United States had done nothing in response. For the government-controlled TV network RT (formerly Russia Today) it was the occasion for a disinformation campaign designed to project strength abroad and weakness in the West.
These incidents—one domestic tragedy twisted online, the other an international provocation that violated a nation’s sovereign territory met with propaganda—are both pages from the Russian playbook. Both demonstrate how Moscow uses information as a weapon, exploiting different audiences for the same goal: weakening democratic trust and emboldening authoritarian control.
The Kirk shooting was a human tragedy—but for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, such tragedies are opportunities. And increasingly, rather than relying only on disinformation (that is, misinformation intended to deceive), Russia makes use of what is sometimes called
malinformation: the deliberate seeding of distortions and half-truths that are designed to pit Americans against each other, make the United States appear as a failing nation on the world stage, and erode faith in the very institutions meant to keep us safe.
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