Ronan Wordsworth
The concept of disinformation isn’t new; it’s been around as long as information has. The difference between then and now is that now there are more, and arguably more effective, avenues for controlling public opinion. And there are more people trying to control it. In addition to large media organizations, which can, to varying degrees, cooperate with the state, virtually anyone can try to control information. As a result, trust in institutions has been eroded, democratic processes have been undermined, perceptions have been altered, and societies have been conditioned to be disillusioned throughout the world. Governments have realized that information campaigns can be as big a threat to national sovereignty as military campaigns.
Adoption and Deployment
Foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI, has been recognized as a growing security threat. One small but significant component of FIMI is disinformation – that is, misleading content that is meant to deceive. This is not to be confused with misinformation: information that is merely inaccurate. Both, however, can affect public health, subvert attempts to address certain challenges, destabilize societies, shape narratives and undermine adversaries.
As the use of FIMI becomes more frequent, governments increasingly lack the tools to adequately counter it. It’s no easy task; education in, say, media literacy typically lags behind new forms of FIMI. But the bottom line is that as the threat matrix grows, so do the risks of inaction. Russia was perhaps the earliest and most high-profile proponent of mass-scale disinformation operations, and though they are especially useful to authoritarian regimes acting against democratic adversaries, countless
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