Burnham Unveils Anti-Disinformation Agency to Counter ‘Poisonous Tide’

Russian disinformation campaigns vary in their falsehoods and strategies, The Guardian reported. They 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. Burnham said: “We're talking about an insidious campaign that reaches into people's homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community – creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair.” He described the problem as a “poisonous tide.”

Experts say picking off individual examples is the wrong approach. Ned Mendez, head of research at Alliance4Europe, a nonprofit that analyses these destabilising threats, said going after isolated examples of disinformation is a “losers' game.” “You can spend all your time looking for a TikTok or a post on X but it's not an effective use of your day. It's the infrastructure that is the problem, so this is a step in the right direction, going after the networks,” he said.

Sophie Williams-Dunning, a cyber analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) thinktank, said 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,” she said. 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.

Williams-Dunning said the Burnham announcement is “welcome, if overdue,” adding 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 said.

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.

Labour has become increasingly concerned about Russian disinformation affecting the UK. The Starmer government in May cited information warfare from Moscow when it warned Britain was “confronting an industrial-scale attack on the UK's and our allies' information environment, aimed at undermining our security and democratic systems.”

Earlier this year MPs on the foreign affairs select committee called for the creation of a national counter-disinformation centre, in a similar vein to Sweden's Psychological Defence Agency and France's Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference service. Experts said Burnham's announcement at least shows the UK government catching up, although Keir Starmer's administration showed an awareness of social media's contribution to unrest by launching the National Internet Intelligence Investigations unit after the Southport disturbances. Operated by the police, it monitors social media to help local forces “manage public safety threats and risks.”

The UK government has been taking action prior to Burnham's announcement. In May it sanctioned employees of the Social Design Agency and ANO Dialog, Russian entities which it said the Kremlin uses for large-scale interference campaigns. One example is the Doppelgänger network, so-called due to its technique of imitating the appearance of established media organisations including Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Fox News. Other examples include the 2023 surge in reports of bedbug infestations in France, falsely blaming Ukrainian refugees. The disinformation leaked into the British press and the French government concluded the stories were being artificially amplified by Russian-linked social media accounts.

One of the most longstanding misinformation campaigns has centred on the idea that London is “dangerous” and “lawless.” Analysis of Reddit accounts by King's College London examined such posts.