Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first address to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September to announce the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence (NCID), a new British body intended to combat disinformation spread by the United Kingdom’s adversaries. The announcement was framed as a direct response to a rapidly changing information environment, in which social media has become a principal battleground for public opinion and artificial intelligence has dramatically lowered the cost, and increased the scale, of hostile influence operations. The Prime Minister said the NCID would bring together intelligence agencies, government departments, police forces and social media companies in a coordinated effort to “detect, attribute and disrupt” hostile state information attacks, and ultimately to “support and defend our democracy”. The new body is meant to be a central hub for defending the UK against cognitive interference, from covert social-media manipulation to AI-generated synthetic content. The initiative comes after years of official warnings that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have used information operations to exploit social divisions, interfere in democratic processes and undermine trust in institutions. It also follows a series of high-profile cases in which AI-generated images and audio were used to impersonate politicians and spread false narratives. The centre is expected to work alongside existing structures such as GCHQ, MI5 and the National Cyber Security Centre, but with a distinct public-facing mandate. However, the precise design of the new centre remains to be settled. In the latest Big Ask, five experts were invited to say what the NCID should look like. Their answers ranged from strategic caution and counterintelligence principles to proposals for public education, technical surveillance, offensive resilience-building and outreach to diaspora communities. Together they sketch a demanding role: the NCID must be neither a simple fact-checking service nor an unaccountable arbiter of truth, but a nimble, intelligence-led organisation capable of navigating the blurred boundaries between national security, digital technology and democratic freedom.
Among the first to respond was Professor Rory Cormac of the University of Nottingham, whose research on the history of British attempts to counter hostile information activity suggests three recommendations for the NCID and one thing to avoid. First, Cormac argued, the centre should be a strategic decision hub determining when and how to intervene, and crucially when not to intervene. Predecessors quickly learned that attribution and exposure could be counterproductive, especially if done by the wrong person, if the line was gaining little traction, or if it had too much of a kernel of truth for comfort. These are delicate decisions, he said, that must be thought through carefully rather than met with a reflexive response. Second, the centre should sit at the heart of a network bringing together wide expertise. The effectiveness of attribution and disruption depends heavily on local context and the credibility of the messenger among target audiences. The NCID should therefore build and sustain networks across academia, media, technology companies, civil society and international partners. Third, it should be part of a unified strategy. Convincing attribution sometimes depends on intelligence that cannot be fully disclosed, and disruption can involve counterattacks on hostile infrastructure at source. The centre will therefore require a close relationship with other branches of His Majesty’s Government, not dissimilar perhaps to the relationship between the National Cyber Security Centre and the National Cyber Force. As for what to avoid, Cormac warned that the NCID should not be, or be seen to be, some sort of public arbiter of truth, or even of what constitutes disinformation, or of who domestically is peddling it. That, he said, would lead to politicisation and exploitation, at best grinding the centre to a halt and at worst backfiring horribly. His warnings reflect a core tension: the authority to expose foreign lies can quickly become a weapon in domestic political disputes if the centre is not carefully insulated from partisanship.
A contrasting vision comes from Paul Mason, an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, who argues that the NCID should be modelled on the National Cyber Security Centre, as a public-facing and accountable body to protect British civil society from a range of hybrid and cognitive attacks. Although it should be strictly politically neutral, its aim should be to prevent, disrupt and attribute acts of cognitive aggression. For Mason, proactivity is key: the best defence against AI-driven disinformation campaigns is a population educated, and institutions trained, to identify and filter inauthentic online behaviour. This could include weekly bulletins to schools, universities, local authorities and police forces identifying and pre-empting key themes of disinformation from the “CRINK” nations, namely the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Mason also proposed free online courses for public servants, and a public information campaign to establish the state’s right to conduct cognitive self-defence. As with the NCSC, the new centre should be backed by the coordinated and legitimate efforts of the UK’s intelligence community to protect the country’s population from harm. But Mason was emphatic about the need for boundaries: the centre should be explicit that it does not monitor UK citizens, but rather monitors attempts to manipulate their cognition. In his words: “We do not transgress the information rights of fake accounts and disinformation swarms because machines do not have such rights.” This framing is designed to reassure the public that the state is not engaging in mass surveillance, while still giving it a strong mandate to identify and counter inauthentic actors. Mason’s approach would make the NCID a visible, trusted institution similar to the NCSC, publishing guidance, issuing alerts and building a culture of resilience among the public, rather than operating purely in the shadows.
Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent technology consultant and visiting senior research fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, takes a more technical and security-focused view. He argues that information influence, interference and operations are a defining security challenge of our time, and that Russia’s activity targeting the UK is but one example of a broader and growing risk. Artificial intelligence, he notes, increases that risk further by lowering the cost of producing persuasive content and enabling operations to run at machine speed. The centre’s task, in his view, should be continuous monitoring of the information environment for signs of malicious interference, including coordinated behaviour, artificial amplification, cross-platform activity and supporting infrastructure. It should then act on the detected signal, understand and investigate the threat, and ultimately disrupt it. Such analytical and practical actions, Olejnik insists, should be considered primarily as a technology and security problem; disinformation reduced to a media or journalistic framing will not succeed. The centre needs strong technical and security expertise, supported by proper analytical systems, software, compute, and access to both frontier closed and open AI models. He also argues that AI changes conventional staffing assumptions: capable teams can combine technical, linguistic, communication, public relations, human science and regional knowledge without requiring rigid divisions between backgrounds. The analytical objective should be campaign-level attribution, linking incidents, malign activities and the infrastructure used into coherent threat assessments that can inform policymakers and lead to warning society. Disruption, meanwhile, should be handled by existing authorities, such as GCHQ for technical infrastructure and MI5 where hostile-state influence or malign influencer-for-hire activity is suspected. Olejnik warns that AI-powered information operations are redefining the landscape and will make the centre’s mission challenging by enabling more persistent and adaptive campaigns, meaning the institution must be built for rapid evolution rather than a static, one-off design.
James Rogers, co-president for research at the Council on Geostrategy, sets out an even broader vision, warning that the NCID will fail if it becomes merely another reactive fact-checking body. Quoting Jonathan Swift’s observation that “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it,” he argues that hostile CRINK states, especially Russia and China, are waging political warfare against the UK. From coordinated flurries of tweets on X designed to inflate domestic division, to Facebook campaigns reinforcing narratives of national decline, these efforts are deliberately designed to turn Briton against Briton, ultimately weakening the country. Misinformation, Rogers argues, will always outpace official corrections, which will be lost in any case in the drumbeat of the modern media. Instead, the NCID must become an agile, proactive, cross-sector entity, part of a broader transformation towards asymmetric statecraft. Rather than chasing individual lies, it should operate as an intelligence-led horizon-scanning unit, combining threat intelligence, behavioural science, discourse analysis and technological expertise to map covert state campaigns, expose adversarial infrastructure and build institutional resilience before hostile narratives take root. Operationally, it should go on the offensive by championing critical thinking and cyber-literacy in schools, as well as public education campaigns targeting older people who may be more prone to nostalgia. It should also focus on binding the nation together and regenerating national self-confidence. Hostile narratives prey on national self-doubt, Rogers argues, and a confident, unified British nation provides the strongest shield, ensuring that foreign deception and misinformation meet immediate scepticism and resistance. This vision makes the NCID not just a defensive mechanism but an instrument of national renewal, one that seeks to strengthen the social fabric so that foreign manipulation becomes far harder to achieve in the first place.
The external dimension is underlined by Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, who cautions that Britain may not be the People’s Republic of China’s prime target for information operations, but is still firmly within its sights. He identifies two Beijing objectives that are particularly relevant to the UK: first, neutralising dissent within diaspora communities, especially the large Hong Kong population many of whom moved to Britain fleeing political repression, and second, weakening public support for NATO and the transatlantic alliance more broadly. Beijing pursues these goals through a broad toolkit, from state media such as CGTN platforming anti-NATO voices to networks of directed social media accounts amplifying preferred narratives. Increasingly, it also uses AI to design and execute information operations. YouTube channels run by bots post AI-generated content praising the PRC’s rise, while UK-based Hong Kong activists have been targeted by deepfake videos. Leaked GoLaxy documents suggest that Chinese state-backed actors are seeking to automate the entire cycle of information operations, from monitoring narratives and profiling targets to generating tailored content and distributing it through humanised bot accounts. To succeed, Yeh argues, the new centre must engage directly with the diaspora communities most exposed to these operations, because much of this content circulates in Chinese-language spaces on platforms such as WeChat, Xiaohongshu and Douyin, outside the view of mainstream monitoring. The centre will only detect and attribute these campaigns if it builds trusted, regular channels with these communities and integrates diaspora members into government working groups. Britain should also engage with Taiwan, which has faced Beijing’s information operations most intensely and has often been a testing ground for tactics later deployed elsewhere. The Taiwanese government has pioneered rapid “pre-bunking” techniques to dispel misinformation before it circulates widely, and numerous civil society groups have set up fact-checking and media literacy training at the community level. Regular dialogue with the Taiwanese government and civil society, Yeh concludes, would give the centre an early warning of the type of tactics that may be deployed in the UK. Only by listening to those at the frontline of the PRC’s information operations, both at home and in Taiwan, can the new centre succeed. Taken together, the five experts make clear that the NCID cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution; it must combine strategic restraint, technical sophistication, educational outreach, public accountability and deep engagement with affected communities if it is to defend British democracy in the age of AI-driven information warfare.