Russian disinformation campaigns are varied in their falsehoods and strategies. The narratives range from a deepfake Tom Cruise slamming the Paris Olympics to portraying a recent Russian attack on a train near the Ukraine-Poland border as a false-flag operation. Some efforts are blatant deepfakes, such as stamping the BBC logo on a video wrongly blaming Ukraine for a deadly missile salvo on its own citizens in Kramatorsk four years ago.
The tactics evolve too, from disseminating deceitful narratives through the Telegram messaging platform to “poisoning” AI systems by littering the internet with false stories in the hope they will be regurgitated by chatbots. It is systematic and Andy Burnham has seen enough, announcing a new anti-disinformation agency, the National Centre for Information Defence. Experts say picking off individual examples is the wrong approach and Burnham is right to tackle what he describes as a “poisonous tide”.
Going after isolated examples of disinformation is a “losers’ game”, says Ned Mendez, head of research at Alliance4Europe, a nonprofit that analyses these destabilising threats. It’s the infrastructure that is the problem, so this is a step in the right direction, going after the networks,” he says. Sophie Williams-Dunning, a cyber analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) thinktank, says there is now a “sophisticated ecosystem which exists to exacerbate provokable users for one reason or another”.
Although Burnham is targeting “hostile state information attacks” this ecosystem does not just include Russia, which likes to amplify “divisive content”, says Williams-Dunning. It also includes far-right influencers who immediately jump on social flashpoints like the Southport and Belfast riots and individuals simply looking to make money by producing highly engaging content riffing on disruption. The Burnham announcement is “welcome, if overdue”, says Williams-Dunning, who adds that there will be an accompanying debate about free speech and the right level of government intervention.
Inevitably, malign networks will amplify those free-speech concerns, she says. It is not just Russia deploying information attacks. China and Iran have both used deepfake newscasters to advance their goals.
One recent study, conducted mostly in February by the Social Market Foundation, found that more than a quarter of posts on X that relate to news were misinformation, a third of which were anti-immigration or Islamophobic. The UK government defines misinformation as the inadvertent spread of false information, while disinformation is the deliberate creation and spread of falsehoods to create harm or disruption. The two can intertwine to highly disruptive effect.
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