Classic Form: Stir up mud and sediment from the bottom of a pond to cloud the water. The disoriented and blinded fish become easy to catch. The principle is to create chaos and confusion to mask your true actions and exploit the resulting disorder.
Modern Version: Flood the information ecosystem with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and contradictory narratives, especially during a crisis. This creates a "cognitive fog of war" where citizens cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, allowing the adversary to make strategic moves—political, economic, or military—unnoticed.
AI-Powered Execution: This stratagem is supercharged by AI-driven information flooding engines. These systems can generate and disseminate thousands of conflicting narratives simultaneously and at scale across multiple social media platforms. The goal is not to make one specific lie stick, but to make the very concept of objective truth seem impossible. This AI-created "fog" paralyzes a society's ability to make collective sense of reality, allowing the adversary to "catch the fish"—whether that be making a strategic acquisition, passing a subversive law, or moving military assets—while the target population is lost in confusion.
CCP Application: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CCP unleashed a massive disinformation campaign to "disturb the water" regarding the virus's origins. State media and bot networks simultaneously pushed multiple, contradictory theories: it came from a U.S. military lab, it originated in Italy, it was spread through frozen food packaging. This flood of noise was designed to obscure the CCP's own culpability in the initial cover-up and make any rational investigation impossible. The AI-amplified social divisions on platforms like TikTok serve the same purpose: to keep the waters of Western political discourse permanently muddied.
Collaborators: Clickbait-driven media outlets and social media influencers who are addicted to the engagement generated by sensational and conspiratorial content, acting as primary spreaders of the "mud". Domestic actors who seize on foreign-seeded disinformation to advance their own political agendas, further confusing the public.
Counter: Clear the water. Invest in and promote trusted sources of information and independent journalism. Build and defend dedicated channels for crisis communication that can cut through the noise. Aggressively de-platform and expose state-sponsored disinformation networks. Teach digital literacy and critical thinking skills to inoculate the population against manipulation. The net only works when the fish cannot see it.