Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America
by Barbara McQuade
View on GoodreadsFormer US Attorney Barbara McQuade's argument that disinformation is not just a media problem but a structural legal and democratic one, and that the tools to fight it require constitutional reasoning, not just media literacy.
Core ideas
- The book catalogs the recurring disinformation tactics — flooding, whataboutism, gaslighting, the firehose of falsehood — and argues each has a counter-strategy that has worked historically when applied.
- The First Amendment makes US disinformation policy harder than in peer democracies, but McQuade argues there's more room for action than civil-liberties absolutists acknowledge — defamation, fraud, and incitement law all have unused capacity.
- The case for accountability journalism, civic education reform, and platform regulation is treated as integrated — no single move fixes the problem, but coordinated moves can shift the equilibrium.
Published2024
Pages384
ISBN9781644213636
ReadSep 2024
