The Pentagon is mobilizing to defend November’s elections. Yet, in some respects, the Pentagon’s hands are tied. U.S. law allows foreign governments to direct propaganda at American audiences without disclosing the material’s origin.
On Sept. 22, five weeks before Election Day, War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Cyber Command and the Defense Intelligence Enterprise to take all lawful actions to defend U.S. election infrastructure ahead of the midterm elections. Hegseth’s instructions were to collect intelligence on foreign threats, mitigate foreign meddling, and defend against cyber threats. While important, the directive runs on an old playbook. The Pentagon can only reach foreign networks and infrastructure. It can do nothing about the conduct inside the United States that lets foreign networks operate undetected.
The government can and has disrupted foreign networks seeking to influence or interfere in elections, but the disruption often takes place long after the network has spread its propaganda. Since 1927, Congress has recognized the importance of identifying the sponsor of a broadcast, and in 2021, the Federal Communications Commission extended that requirement to programming sponsored by foreign governments specifically. Broadcasters who lease airtime must ask the programmer whether a foreign government is involved in any way and keep a record of the ask. A social media platform that holds no license and faces no comparable duty may carry the same message to a far larger audience. Congress can and should close this gap by requiring platforms to establish whether a foreign government is behind the accounts and networks distributing content to Americans.
The threat is not theoretical. Researchers have attributed a recent wave of AI-generated videos, in which celebrities appear to comment on specific Senate races, to the Russian operation known as Matryoshka. Meta separately took down an Iranian network whose operators posed as American activists and students in Washington, San Diego, and Atlanta.
Both foreign actors built an audience by hiding their hand, and we only know about them because someone looked. Meta found the Iranian network, and outside researchers surfaced the Russian one. No law required anyone to look, report findings, or act on them. Nobody can say how much more is out there. We require other industries to know who they are dealing with. Platforms face no such duty.
Capability is not the obstacle. The Iranian network ran through U.S. and Canadian proxy infrastructure, and Meta found it anyway. Platforms can see indicators of who is behind an account. What they lack is an obligation to look and an incentive to publish what they find. Meta published its findings because it chose to, but disclosure invites headlines and congressional scrutiny. We should not rely on corporate goodwill. A duty to report foreign state-linked activity to a designated federal agency would make detection a requirement and would give outside researchers a channel for their work.
Some will object that any federal reporting duty aimed at platforms risks becoming a lever over speech, and for good reason. The Supreme Court held unanimously in 2024 that a government official may not coerce private parties into punishing disfavored speech. However, nothing here asks the government to remove a post or judge a claim. What a platform does with what it finds remains its own decision. This is not a rollback of platform liability protections or a mandate to moderate content. A foreign government is free to speak to Americans. It should not be free to pretend to be someone else. That is the bargain broadcast has lived under for a century.
Congress should do three things. Require platforms to identify whether foreign governments or their agents are behind accounts and networks buying or receiving distribution, as broadcasters must. Require disclosure when a foreign government pays for a message reaching Americans, whether through an advertisement or a paid American voice. Bills already before Congress, one of them bipartisan, would do both. Lastly, create a reporting duty when a platform identifies deceptive behavior traceable to a foreign state, modeled on suspicious activity reports in banking, so that detection no longer depends on a company’s willingness to look and to publish.
CHINA TWISTED TRUMP’S WORDS — AND PROVED YOU DON’T NEED LIES TO WIN AN INFORMATION WAR
None of this asks the government to judge a single claim, and none of it distinguishes among foreign governments, adversary, or ally. It asks only that people be able to see who is speaking to them.
The Pentagon’s directive expires in November. The networks responsible for foreign propaganda will remain a threat.
Jacob Breach is a senior adviser at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served 15 years in the intelligence community, including as a founding member of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center.