Description
This paper presents a thematic analysis of findings from UK and EU news outlets, civil society and policymakers, about the extent and nature of any perceived threat from disordered information and responses to it. It argues that social and mainstream ‘news’ outlets can be both a conduit, and target, of disordered information, and that this presents a security issue on two fronts: first, it contributes to a global decline in press freedom and wider liberal democracy. Second, the ability to conduit disordered information through news and target it at journalism enables perpetrators to both manage narratives about their wider foreign policy – and use information as a foreign policy tool per se. Hence, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation can be presented as ‘factual’ news, and journalism can be discursively undermined with disordered information produced through covert surveillance, SLAPP prosecutions, cyberactivity, falsehoods and the exploitation of existing social cleavages such as gender, race and sexuality. This enables states to manage the discourse around wider foreign policies to maintain an element of plausible deniability, whilst simultaneously using liberal tools of freedom of expression and the rule of law to infiltrate the news eco-systems of other states. Such conduiting and targeting may soon be enabled further by advances in cyber-activity and artificial intelligence capability. Hence, there is a need for understanding how news outlets, civil society and policymakers respectively perceive the threat – and what their response may be.
