UK launches counter-disinformation agency as 'poisonous tide' of state-backed falsehoods spreads

The deepfake of Tom Cruise criticizing the Paris Olympics never happened. Neither did the BBC report blaming Ukraine for a missile strike on its own citizens in Kramatorsk. But millions of people saw them anyway, shared them, believed them—and that is precisely the problem the UK government is now trying to solve.

Russia, China, Iran, and a sprawling network of far-right influencers and profit-seeking content creators have built what amounts to an industrial operation for manufacturing and distributing false narratives across the internet. The campaigns are systematic and varied. Some deploy obvious deepfakes stamped with the logos of trusted news organizations. Others flood social platforms with divisive content designed to exploit existing tensions. Still others poison artificial intelligence systems by seeding the internet with fabricated stories—tales of Ukrainian soldiers' bodies being processed into meat, of bedbug infestations in France blamed on Ukrainian refugees—in the hope that chatbots will absorb and regurgitate them to millions of users.

The scale is staggering. A study by the Social Market Foundation found that more than a quarter of posts on X relating to news were misinformation, with a third of those focused on anti-immigration or Islamophobic themes. Analysis of Reddit accounts by King's College London showed posts describing London as dangerous and lawless rose from 874 in 2008 to 258,444 in 2024. Russia did not necessarily invent these narratives, but it amplified them relentlessly, finding points of genuine tension in British society and creating more content around them.

Andy Burnham, the UK's deputy prime minister, has announced the creation of the National Centre for Information Defence to confront what he calls a "poisonous tide." The new agency represents a recognition that the problem is not individual false claims—those are nearly impossible to police—but the infrastructure that enables coordinated networks to function at scale. Experts have long argued that chasing isolated TikTok videos or X posts is a losing game. The real work lies in understanding and disrupting the systems that manufacture and distribute them. Ned Mendez, head of research at Alliance4Europe, a nonprofit analyzing these destabilizing threats, put it plainly: "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."

The ecosystem is more complex than state actors alone. Sophie Williams-Dunning, a cyber analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, describes a "sophisticated ecosystem which exists to exacerbate provokable users for one reason or another." Russia amplifies divisive content, yes, but far-right influencers immediately seize on social flashpoints like the Southport and Belfast riots. Individuals produce highly engaging content riffing on disruption simply because it makes money. The Doppelgänger network, for instance, imitates the appearance of established media organizations including Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Fox News. The UK government sanctioned Russian entities including the Social Design Agency and ANO Dialog in May, identifying them as tools the Kremlin uses for large-scale interference campaigns.

The British government has been aware of the threat for some time. In May, the Starmer administration warned 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." After the Southport disturbances in 2024, the government launched the National Internet Intelligence Investigations unit, operated by the police, to monitor social media and help local forces manage public safety threats. MPs on the foreign affairs select committee had called for a dedicated national counter-disinformation centre, pointing to models like Sweden's Psychological Defence Agency and France's Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference service.

Burnham's announcement is, as Williams-Dunning notes, "welcome, if overdue." But it will inevitably trigger a debate about free speech and the appropriate level of government intervention. Malign networks will amplify those free-speech concerns themselves, she warns. Robert Topinka, a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London, cautions that counter-disinformation efforts should not assume people are simply being fooled by outside actors. Rather, Russia tends to find genuine points of tension—the real feeling that Britain is run-down, that institutions are failing—and then create more content around them. The new agency will have to navigate that distinction carefully, addressing the infrastructure of disinformation without dismissing the legitimate grievances that make people vulnerable to it in the first place.