How Dictators Collaborate to Create a Separate World
The internet makes great ideas available to many people. However, dictators have figured out how to use the internet to spread ideas that discredit dissidents.

The internet seems like a miraculous tool for spreading ideas to ordinary people. Usually, this sentiment is taken to mean only those ideas most conducive to human flourishing. It’s an incomplete picture that ignores the global-scale information laundering operation that’s not only possible, but also active and effective.
The world’s autocrats have figured out how to use the internet to spread ideas that undermine readers’ confidence in the world around them. This information promotes conspiracies about ordinary events and about the influence of democratic activists.
Anne Applebaum’s short book, Autocracy, Inc., explains the interconnectedness of the world’s dictatorships. The most influential autocrats prop foreign regimes up, giving rulers in China, Iran, and Russia allies who can act as buffers between the most dangerous rulers and the democratic world.
A Second World: The Global Network of Autocrats
Early in Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum describes resistance movements in Venezuela and Belarus. Both countries’ dictators are brutal and unpopular. On the surface, the democratic movements seemed poised to make real progress. However, there was an important reason they lost:
“…they were not fighting autocrats only at home; they were fighting autocrats around the world who control state companies in multiple countries and who can use them to make investment decisions worth billions of dollars. They were fighting regimes that can buy security cameras from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they were fighting against rulers who long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else.”
Across ideologies, modern autocracies are ways to steal from a country’s people. One of Alexei Navalney’s dissent projects was a documentary that used drone footage to show ordinary Russians how opulent Vladimir Putin’s private compound was. Nicolas Maduro bought food parcels meant for Venezuelans, then resold the food to ordinary people at higher prices. The profits went to Maduro and his inner circle.
Each regime’s ideological commitments may be different, but Iran’s ayatollah is as wealthy and corrupt as Xi Jinping. One of the reasons so many regimes can be so blatantly cruel is the alternative world created by their network. The democratic world may be more prosperous than the autocratic one, but Russia and China can sell goods to regimes that would be crippled otherwise by economic sanctions.
Even more destructive than the sale of goods is the laundering of information.
Fake News on a Global Scale
“Information laundering” is one of the most evocative phrases in Applebaum’s book. She uses it to describe the way that media companies run by autocracies disguise their origins to spread propaganda in other countries. Some of the companies include:
Xinhua - China
RT - Russia
Telesur - Venezuela
PressTV - Iran
It’s no surprise that these media companies produce content that supports their regimes. Their more insidious jobs are producing content in other countries:
“Nowadays, the Xinhua and RT offices in Africa, along with Telesur and PressTV, all produce stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of Autocracy, Inc. These are then repeated and amplified by authentic and inauthentic networks in many countries, translated into multiple languages, and reshaped for local markets.”
A website labeled as a Russian or Chinese media company would be easy to discredit. However, a news website with a name similar to local news companies and content in the local language — or languages — makes the information appear as though it’s legitimate local reporting. It’s much harder to identify anti-democratic messaging, trolling, and conspiracy theorizing when it’s written in Chibarwe instead of Farsi.
Information is a Weapon in and of Itself
Evan Mawarire was a democratic activist in Zimbabwe who built a robust grassroots campaign to challenge his country’s dictator. Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information orchestrated a smear campaign that had the veneer of legitimate reporting:
“…the authorities in Zimbabwe attacked Mawarire for allegedly being sponsored by Western governments, citing as evidence retweets and reports of his statements by foreign embassies. But they also attacked him for alleged financial scams. Mawarire’s ordinariness, even his financial struggles, had been a part of his appeal. Moyo [the Minister of Information] and his team therefore portrayed him as a fraudster who ‘collected money from gullible believers in the United Kingdom, only to evade tax.’”
Applebaum goes on to note that Freedom House calls this type of personal smear campaign “civic death.” For Mawarire, it was “impossible to live a productive life” in the wake of these attacks. Among the most damaging effects was sowing the idea that it was impossible for someone like Mawarire to crusade for the love of his country.
The idea that Mawarire’s campaign had to be a plot was a page out of Russia’s propaganda handbook. Applebaum cites the historian Marci Shore who describes the propaganda move:
“Kremlin propaganda, the conviction that American intelligence or some other world-controlling force must be pulling the strings, betrayed not only malicious intent, but also an inability to believe that there could be such a thing as individuals thinking and acting for themselves.”
These campaigns aren’t limited to third-world countries or autocratic regimes. The same content that sustains dictators sows divisions in democratic countries. Inflaming divisions along local fault lines is an autocratic specialty.
Unless you know the source of the information you’re receiving — the real source, not the masked one — you cannot take it at face value. Autocratic networks are a covert layer of information that any reader must navigate in the online ecosystem. Understanding the full network that autocrats have at their disposal is crucial for anyone who hopes to be informed.