Foreign Disinformation is the ‘New Warfare’ and Democracies are ‘Sitting Ducks,’ Says UK Parliament
Foreign Affairs Committee Report Tries to Maintain the Fight for Reality Amid U.S. Backsliding
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LAST WEEK, THE UK PARLIAMENT’s Foreign Affairs Committee released a report labelling foreign disinformation “the new warfare and open liberal democracies [...] sitting ducks.”
I was honored to testify—or, as the Brits say, give evidence—before the Committee last November, focusing on Russia and China’s information operations targeting the United States, and the Trump Administration’s unilateral disarmament against the threat of foreign disinformation.
When I shared the report on social media, I was a little surprised at the contrarianism in my comments. “About time,” the armchair experts quipped. Others claimed that the Trump Administration hadn’t done as much damage to America’s ability to defend reality as I asserted, or that the report was disingenuous, imperialist garbage, because the West was responsible for plenty of foreign disinformation, too. (I have never claimed otherwise or defended the West’s use of disinformation, and have, in fact, written about how it should be excised from our toolkit entirely.)
But these comments ignore the context in which the UK Parliament’s investigation on foreign disinformation was conducted. Disinformation is easier to create and distribute than ever before, democracies are polarized and viewed as largely unresponsive to the needs of constituents, and democratically-elected leaders like Donald Trump are engaging in human rights abuses and curtaili
ng free expression.
We’re not in 2016 anymore, and the UK Parliament’s report on disinformation is an attempt to maintain the fight for reality in a moment when we’re losing our grip on it.
Why the Report is Unique
The conversation about foreign disinformation in the United States has always been myopic, focused primarily on one actor (Russia) and one or two large platforms (Twitter and Facebook). Americans’ analysis of the problem was similarly navel-gazing. It rarely considered the effects of information operations outside of our borders; when I published How To Lose the Information War in 2020 it was one of the first contemporary examinations of disinformation in Europe and what we in the States could learn from our allies’ attempts to stop it.
That’s where the UK report begins. The Committee writes:
We were struck when looking at disinformation overseas at the familiar patterns we saw. The UK has been the victim of [Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, or FIMI] and although it is not of the scale we saw elsewhere, we nevertheless learnt how quickly malign actors could build up their adversarial networks. It led us to ask whether the excellent work being done overseas by the UK to counter FIMI was also happening at home.
The scope of this report is sweeping, covering four regions (Europe, the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and the Americas—including frequently overlooked Latin America), six actors (Russia, China, Iran, and non-state actors the Wagner group, Africa corps, and Daesh), and multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, and Telegram).1
What I Told the Committee
My contributions to the investigation focused on the research I’ve led The American Sunlight Project over the past two years and my own personal experience; you can see clips from my interventions above and view the written evidence I submitted here.
I walked the MPs through ASP Lead Researcher Benjamin Shultz’s work on a Russian network of more than 1,100 likely‑automated accounts, responsible for over 11 million posts in a year on Ukraine, Gaza, and the cost‑of‑living crisis in the US and UK. This narrative shaping is designed to inflame social fractures, undermine confidence in democratic and economic institutions, and move markets.
I also highlighted Sophia Freuden’s work on Large Language Model (LLM) grooming, a term we coined in early 2025, describing how Russia has changed its operations to target LLMs, pumping out millions of articles a year to launder Kremlin narratives into AI training data. This is not yesterday’s bumbling troll farm problem; in an era of accessible generative AI, we’re dealing with industrial‑scale information warfare infecting discourse from the moment a user queries a chatbot.
Critically, I told the Committee that while adversaries like Russia have upgraded their toolkit, the United States has unilaterally disarmed. Under the Trump administration, the US government’s foreign interference response was gutted, and disinformation researchers have been maligned and harassed. “Despite increased awareness of foreign-backed online influence campaigns, the United States is more vulnerable to them today than it was a decade ago,” I wrote. “Our strategic adversaries continue to actively exploit deepening fissures in our society in order to amplify discord and polarization. Social media companies have rolled back their efforts to address disinformation on their platforms and restricted access to their data, making it difficult to hold them to account. Government and public sector responses to foreign disinformation have been derided and dismantled. Our adversaries have taken note.”
What the Committee Recommended
The report lays out a broad set of recommendations under the assumption that disinformation is a form of warfare, and that the UK has to treat it like one. In short, the Committee wants the UK government to treat foreign interference as a core national security issue with the infrastructure to match. That means public‑facing campaigns to boost citizen resilience; a statutory National Counter‑Disinformation Centre similar to efforts in Ukraine, Sweden, and France; and a real increase in funding and staffing for the FCDO’s Hybrid Threats Directorate.
It also wants the UK to double‑down on media freedom and global influence, including more long‑term funding for the BBC World Service, more cooperation with European allies, and a much tougher line on social media platforms so that algorithms are transparent and platforms have to report on disinformation the way they report on other harms. On top of that, the Committee stresses that the UK needs to apply lessons from defending democracies abroad in its own territory, especially around elections, because the same playbook that targets Eastern Europe is actively being tested in the UK in smaller, but no less dangerous, forms.
Personally, I’m glad the report highlights the need for the UK to “stand up for those countering disinformation, wherever in the world it occurs.” It’s gratifying to see an acknowledgement that journalists, researchers, civic watchdogs, and local fact‑checkers are often operating in hostile environments—even in countries that are not traditional recipients of aid, cough cough—and that we have an ally in this fight.
Why It Matters
The armchair experts who think this report is too little, too late may imagine the Committee congratulating themselves on discovering the phenomenon of disinformation, but the report does more than sound the alarm. It both holds the line and emboldens it. Foreign aid—and counter-disinformation programming more specifically—have been twisted into culture war issues by the far-right autocrats they threaten. Despite that, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee calls upon the United Kingdom to work with its allies in Europe to defend its legacy of important work in fighting for the truth, and fill the leadership, strategy, and funding vacuum the United States has left.
That may feel like the bare minimum to frustrated activists around the world. But remember: the UK’s closest ally views any fight against disinformation as an encroachment on free expression and casts efforts to educate citizens to better navigate the information environment as censorship. That view has material impacts for U.S. trading partners. During tariff negotiations in early 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was encouraged to go easy on tech platforms in exchange for a better deal, while Brazil faced 50% tariffs after it blocked far-right video hosting site Rumble.
Beyond that, the Members of Parliament who conducted the Committee’s investigation themselves could face consequences for taking this common sense stance; the State Department has already imposed visa restrictions on foreign nationals it (falsely) alleges have “taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.” Jim Jordan’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has now trained its sights on foreign regulators and legislators, labeling those that are working to implement their sovereign nations’ laws as “censorship.”
And let’s not forget the long view; we’ve seen the Trump Administration obscure and erase information and resources about a range of disfavored topics, including disinformation. Preserving a snapshot of the 2026 information environment is an important contribution not only to the historical record, but to the contemporary one. Hopefully we aren’t headed toward a future where reports like this are the only ground truth available to us, but we can’t rule it out.
We’re not in the early days of this crisis anymore. Disinformation—including disinformation coming from the Trump Administration—is already changing how governments negotiate, how markets move, and how ordinary people participate in public spaces. If allies like the UK can’t sustain the fight for reality while the US walks away, the democratic playbook, now in tatters, may as well be fed to the shredder.
As I’ve told every legislature I’ve ever briefed, disinformation is not a partisan issue, but a democratic one. This report recognizes that, and these days, that’s all too rare. 🧭
Unfortunately, it does not engage much with the Middle East beyond Iran; for a good, if somewhat dated account of information operations in the region check out David Patrikarakos’s War in 140 Characters.