Personal Thoughts on Physical Limits, Complexity, City Planning, and Community

Feds Took Down Their Own Anti-Disinformation Video

Mar 30, 2025

Some time in 2024, I watched a helpful 5-minute video about disinformation by foreign service officer Chris Smith. It was listed on both the State Department website and Facebook. I noticed that as recent as March 19th, 2025, the State Department has taken it down. I was able to find it it on Facebook and also Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/), so I am sharing it here along with screenshots of what has happened.

First, the video. (Uploading a video to this website is a premium feature I don’t have, so it is a Google Drive link.) It is about five minutes long, so you can watch it easily in one session. About three minutes in are helpful tips on fighting disinformation. I think people should really watch the video, but my summary of the tips are:

The classic way of refuting lies is not effective because you end up repeating the lies and raising the profile of the lies.
Moving to a counter-brand approach where you are not discussing a particular falsehood but discussing why people are engaged in falsehoods can be helpful.
Prebunking, where you warn people in advance about lies people are going to say if you know the lies already, can be helpful.
Working with local groups such as NGOs and media can be much more effective than trying to solve it on your own.

What has happend?

I am going to write about what has happened to the original video, along with screenshots, without interjecting my opinions. As of March 19, 2025, the State Department webpage that used to host the video removed the video. If you go there, https://diplomacy.state.gov/teacher-resources/what-is-disinformation-video/, you will see it now says “Under Construction.”

Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/ is a website that automatically archives various sites on the Internet. It is a helpful tool to recover deleted content. When I searched the above webpage, I found out that January 18, 2025 was the last date when the page and the video were still up. The direct link to the archived page is here, https://web.archive.org/web/20250118183720/https://diplomacy.state.gov/teacher-resources/what-is-disinformation-video/. Screenshot is below.