Disinformation: Understanding it and fighting it

A guide for people in progressive politics

I’ve just given a talk to Labour Party activists about disinformation. But to me, having a seminar on disinformation is a bit like King Harold having a seminar about “arrows” on the eve of the Battle of Hastings. Like arrows, disinformation is a weapon.

Far more interesting are the strategy, tactics and objectives of the adversary that is deploying the weapon.

And that’s what is missing from most guides to combating disinformation formulated by governments and allied agencies. They tend to treat it as a politically disembodied threat rather than as a weapon in specific information warfare offensives.

So this edition of Conflict & Democracy takes the form of a short guide to fighting disinformation aimed at progressive and democratic people and organisations. Some of the key concepts are taken from this guide by the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, and from Sweden’s toolkit for its own citizens. But other bits of it are just the result of my thinking and could do with feedback…

I will preface this with the same warning I gave to the Labour activists: the moment you become publicly engaged with disinfo, you become a target. The primary enemy of the disinformation spreader is the person who is going to call them out. But be brave. They are defeatable…

1. Disinformation is an act: The deliberate creation and spreading of false information with the intent to deceive/mislead. It can be done by:

   1. Individuals

   2. Political groups, networks, politicians, parties

   3. Foreign governments and their intelligence agencies

   4. Foreign non-state actors (e.g. QAnon)

2. Some of its primary vectors are via social media platforms – e.g. Twitter, TikTok – and messaging services – e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram. But it is also amplified by bad actors in the analog world:

   1. Individuals – in the pub, at the school gate, in family WhatsApp Groups, via placards on demonstrations and even, as Labour found out in Islington North, by scrawled notes pinned to lamp-posts

   2. Alternative media: the alt-right outlets plus individual YouTube grifters, plus sometimes the alt-left outlets

   3. Mainstream media, through platforming the grifters as legitimate opinion formers or reporting “rows” as news.

   4. Books/Lectures produced outside the peer review process of academia

3. Two general points:

   1. Livestreaming and the spoken word allow far more deniability than text or pictures; because live human discourse is full of subtext

   2. Emotion is the key signature of all disinfo. Anger generates both income and democratic decay simultaneously

4. What are we up against? The actors spreading disinfo purposely are:

   1. Foreign states – this well understood by some democratic states (eg Sweden). Their aim is to promote:

      1. Information Influence – in order to boost reputation the reputation of an authoritarian states, and sow discord in the “state victim” (a Russian intelligence term)

      2. Information Manipulation – aka Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). This aims to cause political harm and disruption.

      3. Information Operations. This means formal, co-ordinated efforts at mass psychological effect for strategic goals, bordering on acts of war and aggression (e.g. the COLDRIVER attack on myself and other prominent British people, attributed to the Russian FSB)

   2. Domestic and Global civil society groups. Compared to the actions of foreign states, this is not well theorised, and there is little by way of a legal framework. There are three reasons why domestic political factions and individuals take part in disinfo:

      1. Willing participation in influence ops by foreign states whose objectives they share for example Russia, Iran, Hamas or the PRC

      2. Spontaneous reinforcement of narratives convenient to the conspiracy theories or myths that animate them (e.g. QAnon)

      3. Reward mechanisms:

         1. If you spread the lies, you can gain followers, algorithmic promotion and ultimately revenue

         2. Or you can gain kudos, getting invited onto mainstream shows, podcasts, normalising the face of the disinfo-spreader and boosting your own net worth

         3. Or you can gain status – getting invited to conferences, getting RTd by celebs, get funded by NGOs, get hothoused as influencer by bogus “think tanks” etc

5. Why is the centre left failing in the fight against disinformation?

   1. The state is moving too slowly to protect civil society; the Tories colluded with the rise of a far-right information ecosystem (helping to promote GB News and Talk TC). While the BBC runs fact-checking and counter-disinfo journalism, it regularly reports on political “rows” generated by false claims.

   2. Parties like Labour have no counter-disinfo strategy. Trade unions are targeted by pro-Russia influence ops, but seem too scared to take them on. Labour politicians still see this as an electoral issue, not a radicalisation issue.

   3. There is no systematic education of social-democratic activists; they are constrained by the rules of normal/polite discourse;

   4. Labour Party activists have little autonomy compared to their networked adversaries: they are obliged to follow “lines” codes of conduct and rarely feel they have permission to enter battle under their own steam with the disinfo merchants;

   5. All attempts to counter-disinformation make you a target; many, understandably, decide the personal costs are too great.

6. What can change?

   1. States generally frame their counter-disinformation strategies under four kinds of activity (this is based on the Swedish model):

      1. Threat intelligence – monitoring the themes, methods, individuals in real time.

      2. Deterrence – making it painful for the most powerful actors in the disinfo networks.

      3. Resilience – educating civil servants, police, teachers, and other administrators, and promoting a “fightback” attitude, based on the belief that our democracy is worth defending

      4. Strategic Communications – telling a clear and unified story, in real time, including “pre-bunking” the expected lies

         

7. Can centre-left political parties apply this method?

   1. Yes, but it will take more resources than we’re deploying at present.

      1. We need to monitor what the adversary is doing; what their themes and techniques they are using in real time. For a political party, however, threat intelligence is about more than just monitoring. We need a “guiding intelligence” that understands the wider strategy each theme speaks to; understands that the far right’s primary appeal is to the subconscious and is be afraid to explore that messaging, no matter how distasteful

      2. We can use the defamation laws; they can organise complaints both to platforms and to regulators; they can encouraged their senior politicians to call out and stigmatise the disinfo actions of the populist leaders

      3. We can build resilience through political education, by encouraging informal activist networks to “swarm” in defence of the truth.

      4. We can tell a single, clear story based on fact, and get their members and influencers to tell that story. This means adopting the “directed network” model, rather than a simple top-down “line to take”: creating a semi-autonomous network of activists who can formulate responses faster than the party itself.

8. What concrete measures should we demand?

   1. At the level of the state we need a Militant Democracy, which takes vigorous measures to constrain information warfare by foreign adversaries and domestic extremists, while protecting the right of all to free speech (see How to Stop Fascism for more on this). Concretely that means the state adopting an open and accountable domestic counter-disinfo strategy. In the UK this should mean:

      1. Apply the Online Safety Act. This would require platforms to register, present mitigation strategies against the worst disinfo and hate speech; if they resist – as it’s likely MAGA aligned platforms will – use the provisions of the act to impose massive fines and criminal penalties. The response will likely be to threaten shutdowns, or even – in the case of Musk/X – to mobilise diplomatic pressure. Our response should be FAFO.

      2. Use the National Security Act 2023 – which allows a 10 year sentence for knowingly spreading disinfo on behalf of a foreign power. It has never so far been used…

      3. Pass a law to debar electoral candidates from office, who deliberately lie. This is a live proposal in the Welsh Senedd.

   2. The Labour Party itself needs:

      1. A formal counter-disinformation policy, with legislative proposals and regulatory agenda, including tightening the Online Safety Act as the disinfo threat evolves

      2. Form a unit to monitor the activity of hostile and illegitimate political forces and spread knowledge of the realtime role of disinfo in their efforts

      3. Create a toolkit for local branches, councils, mayors, MPs and member

      4. Expand the members code of practice to forbid the dissemination of disinfo, and challenge parties like GPEW and Reform to do likewise

      5. Insist that other parties’ MPs and leaders follow the Nolan Principle of “honesty” - which should forbid the spreading of disinformation; complain publicly to the bodies tasked with upholding the Nolan Principles if, for example, councillors from hostile parties spread disinformation.

9. Some things we could do tonight:

   1. Set up a weekly national bulletin on disinformation themes targeted against Labour politicians, councils and the wider party.

   2. Form WhatsApp groups – eg regional level, or among women activists – to share info on disinfo

   3. Create memes stigmatising disinfo-merchants in politics and get everyone to use them constantly, with maximum humour and cruel irony.

   4. Create a public catalogue of disinfo ops staged against us. There were some eye-openers mentioned at my Labour seminar, but probably only known about locally.

Finally…it’s important to understand that, though the far right, radical Islamists and pro-Putin left trade routinely in disinformation for their political ends, for each of them it has a wider usefulness: anything that destabilises society, or destroys belief in democracy, or stigmatises the Labour government, has intrinsic worth. That’s why they increasingly collude with each other’s disinformation efforts. I call this “disinformation in stereo”. The more noise there is, the less any democratic signal can be heard.

And of course, even if many of those promoting this stuff do so simply because it confirms their sick prejudices (e.g. “The Rothschilds caused Grenfell”) – it is a happy hunting ground for FIMI operatives: they will amplify and sharpen everything that emerges spontaneously, and push the grievance narratives into their target groups (eg Crypto-bros, certain football fan groups).

There are two great concepts in the Swedish counter-disinfo work that I would like to promote here: "will to defend” and “spirit of resistance”. It’s about convincing people that disinformation is an attack on all of us, and inculcating a spirit of not accepting it, stigmatising it as anti-British as well as anti-democratic, and calling people to arms against it.

If you want to read more, start here.

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