Combating Foreign Disinformation on Social Media: Study Overview and Conclusions

This 136-page overview consolidates the findings of RAND's five-volume series on foreign disinformation on social media, covering Russian, Chinese, and North Korean operations and the policy options for countering them. The synthesis identifies cross-cutting patterns — the use of inauthentic amplification, the exploitation of platform recommendation systems, the targeting of specific demographic and geographic audiences — alongside the distinctive features of each state actor's approach.

The overview's value as a standalone document is its policy-oriented synthesis: rather than presenting the technical detail of each actor study, it distils the findings into actionable counter-disinformation recommendations across platform governance, government response, and civil society resilience. For practitioners who need the comparative picture without working through all five volumes, this is the entry point. The individual country volumes — particularly on Russia and China — reward deeper reading for those conducting actor-specific threat assessment.