The Russian government’s draft budget for 2026 allocated $1.77 billion for propaganda efforts. But that figure just covers overt state media. Covert troll farms, front organizations and cyber operations add further spending on top of that.
The total for China is even harder to pin down. In 2023, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center issued a report that the People’s Republic of China “spends billions of dollars annually on foreign information manipulation efforts.” In 2024, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a right-of-center Washington think tank, put the figure at $10 billion.
And even Iran, with a much smaller economy, spent an estimated $600 million on propaganda over the 12 months that ended in March 2025. Again, as with Russia, that’s the official figure for state media at home and abroad. The covert propaganda and disinformation spending by parts of the government such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is off the books — and substantial.
You may have seen the pro-Iranian — and often virulently antisemitic — music videos featuring Lego characters depicting a panicking President Donald Trump, hapless American soldiers and Americans angry that their government is controlled by Israel. One of the video’s creators, going by the moniker “Mr Explosive,” told the BBC that the Iranian government is a “customer” of his.
You might be wondering what the U.S. government is doing in response. The answer is, not much.
Upon taking office, the Trump administration closed the Global Engagement Center (which had been renamed the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference center). Secretary of State Marco Rubio contended the office “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” While the U.S. government should not be pressuring any social media company to remove American voices, there’s nothing wrong with urging companies to label, impede or remove foreign voices. Russian FSB-sponsored bot farms don’t have First Amendment rights.
The upshot is that the United States isn’t in the business of monitoring and rebutting foreign propaganda and disinformation anymore. Nor is it aggressively putting out its side of the story or the facts. Voice of America has been gutted and is operating on a skeleton staff, although court challenges are attempting to undo those decisions.
But U.S. allies don’t have the option of unilaterally disengaging the information warfare battlefield. Last week in Warsaw, I met with officials from NASK — the Polish national institute for cybersecurity.
“It is more than just ‘fake news,’” one NASK researcher told me. “It is a systematic effort to change how people perceive things and understand the world. Russia has been pushing further along the intensity axis. Polarization always works best; divide and conquer.”
The narratives are about what you would expect: That Ukrainians, not Russians, are committing acts of sabotage against Poland. That the Polish government is incompetent and always lying. That Russia is blameless and peaceful, while Poland, Ukraine and NATO are aggressive warmongers.
“We report this information to the platform” where it appears, the researcher said, “but often the response is nothing.” The researcher told me that Telegram, with more than a billion users worldwide, is particularly unresponsive.
Telegram is owned by Russia-born entrepreneur Pavel Durov, whonow lives in Dubai. According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a nonprofit investigative journalism group based in Amsterdam, a Russian entrepreneur named Vladimir Vedeneev “owns the company that maintains Telegram’s networking equipment and assigns thousands of its IP addresses. Court documents show that he was granted exclusive access to some of Telegram’s servers and was even empowered to sign contracts on Telegram’s behalf.” The OCCRP also found that “two other closely linked Vedeneev companies — one of which also assigns Telegram IP addresses, and another which did so until 2020 — have had multiple highly sensitive clients tied to [Russian] security services. Among their clients is the FSB intelligence agency.”
Considering that, it’s not exactly shocking that Telegram isn’t that interested in clamping down on Russian propaganda.
America’s enemies collectively spend billions of dollars attempting to shape perceptions around the world. They don’t spend that kind of money on a whim; they spend it because they’re convinced it’s worth it.
Apparently, to the Trump administration, it isn’t worth the cost. But it will spend $200 million on an ad campaign featuring then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on a horse.
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