Burnham launches UK anti-disinformation agency to counter ‘poisonous tide’ of Russian influence operations
Russian disinformation campaigns are as varied as they are relentless, deploying everything from deepfake celebrities to false-flag narratives in an effort to destabilise Western societies. Recent examples range from a fabricated Tom Cruise clip criticising the Paris Olympics to the bogus claim that a Russian missile attack on a train near the Ukraine-Poland border was staged by Kyiv as a provocation. Some efforts are blatantly crude, such as stamping the BBC logo on a video that falsely blamed Ukraine for a deadly missile salvo against its own citizens in Kramatorsk four years ago. But the tactics are evolving just as quickly as the content. The Kremlin has shifted from simply disseminating deceitful stories through Telegram channels to “poisoning” artificial intelligence systems, littering the internet with false narratives in the hope that chatbots will eventually regurgitate them as fact. The scale and sophistication of this campaign have finally prompted a major political response. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, has announced the creation of the National Centre for Information Defence, a new anti-disinformation agency designed to push back against foreign interference and the domestic narratives it amplifies. “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 warned. The Labour mayor described the threat as a “poisonous tide” and said the time for piecemeal resistance was over. Experts have broadly welcomed the move, arguing that while Britain has been slow to respond compared to allies such as Sweden and France, the creation of a dedicated institution signals an important shift in recognising the systemic nature of the threat. The announcement is a recognition that the UK can no longer rely on reactive debunking, but must instead build a resilient information environment capable of withstanding coordinated attacks from hostile states.
Going after isolated examples of disinformation, however, is a “losers’ game”, according to Ned Mendez, head of research at Alliance4Europe, a nonprofit that analyses destabilising threats. “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. Mendez and other analysts argue that the focus should be on the underlying infrastructure of disinformation – the coordinated networks, automated accounts and fake media outlets that launder false narratives into the mainstream – rather than chasing individual viral posts. 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 has explicitly targeted “hostile state information attacks”, Williams-Dunning cautioned that this ecosystem does not include only Russia. Moscow is eager to amplify “divisive content”, she noted, but it is not the sole actor. The broader menace also encompasses far-right influencers who immediately jump on social flashpoints such as the Southport and Belfast riots, as well as individuals simply looking to make money by producing highly engaging content that riff on disruption and grievance. This messy convergence of state-backed malice, ideological extremism and commercial opportunism makes the challenge far more complex than simply tracing every falsehood back to the Kremlin. The Burnham announcement is therefore “welcome, if overdue”, said Williams-Dunning. Yet she added that the initiative will inevitably spark an accompanying debate about free speech and the right level of government intervention. Those concerns are legitimate, she said, but it is a near-certainty that malign networks will attempt to amplify such free-speech worries for their own ends, seeking to delegitimise any official effort to expose their activities.
It is not just Russia that is deploying information attacks, nor are such operations confined to the traditional battlefield. China and Iran have both used deepfake newscasters to advance their foreign policy goals, creating realistic-looking presenters to deliver propaganda to global audiences. The threat is therefore global, diffuse and increasingly difficult to separate from the ordinary noise of online public discourse. A recent study by the Social Market Foundation, a British thinktank, conducted mostly in February, found that more than a quarter of posts on X that relate to news are misinformation, and a third of those were anti-immigration or Islamophobic in tone. The UK government draws a formal distinction between misinformation, defined as the inadvertent spread of false information, and disinformation, the deliberate creation and spread of falsehoods specifically to cause harm or disruption. In practice, the two frequently intertwine to highly disruptive effect, as false claims are innocently shared by ordinary users and then weaponised by more cynical actors. Labour has become increasingly concerned about the domestic consequences of Russian disinformation, warning that it is deliberately seeking to undermine public trust in democratic institutions. The government in May cited information warfare from Moscow when it cautioned that 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 added their voices to the growing clamour for action, calling for the creation of a national counter-disinformation centre. They looked to successful models elsewhere: Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency, which coordinates whole-of-society resilience against influence operations, and France’s Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference service, which monitors foreign digital manipulation. The select committee’s report was explicit that the UK had fallen behind its partners in this critical new arena of hybrid warfare, and the Burnham announcement is at least a sign that the country is beginning to catch up.
The UK has, in fact, taken some steps before this announcement, although they have often been piecemeal and reactive. In May, the government sanctioned employees of two Russian entities, the Social Design Agency and ANO Dialog, which it said the Kremlin uses for large-scale interference campaigns. One of the most well-known operations is the Doppelgänger network, so-called because of its technique of imitating the appearance of established media organisations, including Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Fox News. The network creates lookalike websites to publish fabricated stories, and then uses social media amplifiers to give them viral distribution. Another spectacular example was the 2023 surge in reports of bedbug infestations in France, which falsely blamed Ukrainian refugees for the outbreak. The disinformation leaked into the British press, and the French government concluded that the stories were being artificially amplified by Russian-linked social media accounts. Perhaps the most longstanding misinformation campaign has centred on the idea that London is “dangerous” and “lawless”. Analysis of Reddit accounts by King’s College London found that the number of such posts rose from 874 in 2008 to 258,444 in 2024. Robert Topinka, reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London, noted that Russia did not necessarily originate such storylines but enthusiastically amplified them. He warned, however, against an overly simplistic view that sees the public as passive victims of foreign manipulation. Counter-disinformation efforts, he argued, should not assume “people are just being fooled by some sort of outside actor”. Rather, Russia tends to identify a pre-existing point of tension in British society and then create more content around it. “What really is happening is people are feeling like Britain is run-down – that’s the real source of it,” he said. The implication is that any effective response must also address the genuine grievances that make populations susceptible to such narratives, otherwise the disinformation will simply continue to find fertile ground.
Artificial intelligence is adding a new and particularly challenging dimension to the problem. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has acknowledged that AI-generated content is now a “near-standard” part of disinformation campaigns. The technology lowers the cost of producing convincing fake media, enabling hostile actors to manufacture deepfakes, fake news articles and synthetic social media personas on an industrial scale. A particularly insidious technique currently worrying researchers is “chatbot poisoning”. The UK thinktank Demos recently highlighted a campaign in which falsehoods published online by a discredited Russian organisation – including the grotesque claim that the bodies of deceased Ukrainian soldiers were being processed into meat products – were then repeated by chatbot models. The aim is to convert the open web into a polluted archive of lies that future AI systems will treat as trusted sources, thereby embedding disinformation into the very tools that people increasingly use to search for information. This is a form of data laundering that is extremely difficult to counter, because the falsehoods are not being directly pushed at audiences but are instead being woven into the underlying model weights of generative AI tools. The challenge for the new National Centre for Information Defence will be to understand these dynamics and develop countermeasures that are as adaptive and technical as the threats themselves. It will need to build close relationships with technology companies, academic researchers and international partners to share intelligence on emerging tactics. The centre will also need to work with social media platforms to disrupt coordinated networks before they can build momentum, rather than simply taking down content after it has already spread.
The creation of the National Centre for Information Defence is a significant political statement that the UK is finally treating information warfare with the seriousness it deserves. Burnham’s leadership on the issue, coming from a directly elected metro mayor, demonstrates that the threat is no longer seen as solely a matter of national security but is also a challenge for community cohesion and civic wellbeing. The announcement follows the government’s earlier establishment of the National Internet Intelligence Investigations unit after the Southport disturbances in 2024, a police-run operation that monitors social media to help local forces “manage public safety threats and risks”. But the new centre is designed to be broader than policing, encompassing education, public awareness and resilience-building. There will inevitably be difficult questions to navigate around the boundaries of free expression, the independence of the centre from party political control, and the risk that in the effort to defend democracy, the state might overreach and undermine the very liberties it seeks to protect. Burnham has acknowledged these concerns, insisting that his initiative is about information defence, not censorship. Whether that line will hold in practice remains to be seen, but the overwhelming weight of expert opinion is that doing nothing is no longer an option. The information environment has become the principal battlefield of the twenty-first century, and Western democracies are currently losing ground. As the evidence from Russia, China, Iran and a host of opportunistic domestic actors mounts, the question is not whether Britain should build an institutional response, but how quickly it can be made to work. The National Centre for Information Defence is the beginning of that answer, but the task ahead is enormous and will require a sustained, cross-society commitment if it is to make a meaningful difference against a “poisonous tide” that shows no signs of receding.