Russian disinformation is a threat that relies on UK complicity
The British prime minister’s accusation against the Kremlin only tells half the story, as domestic extremists amplified by US big tech are part of the same problem
By The Guardian Editorial
In November 2020, former US president Barack Obama warned of an “epistemological crisis” facing Western democracies. Polarization and radicalization were corroding trust in established information sources.
“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” he said.
That vulnerability has grown since then. Democracy’s enemies have become more determined to exploit it. This is the threat that British Prime Minister Andy Burnham highlighted in a speech at the UN on Tuesday last week.
He accused Russia of waging an “industrial-scale assault” on the UK’s information environment using bot armies and fake Web sites to spread falsehoods, interfere in elections, foment discord and poison inter-community relations.
The prime minister announced the creation of a National Center for Information Defense to thwart campaigns of epistemological sabotage by hostile actors. It is an overdue enhancement of the UK’s civil defense capabilities.
Burnham is right to highlight the threat, but he told only part of the story. The Kremlin would be wasting its money pumping out disinformation if large US tech platforms did not provide convenient channels for the toxin to spread, if there were not a complicit audience in the UK sharing the offending material and if the market for spreading pernicious propaganda were not so lucrative. Information warfare is only effective when it exploits structural vulnerabilities in the target society. Far-right material sowing hatred against migrants is most fruitful where the terrain has been fertilized by domestic politics.
Earlier this year, an analysis by the Guardian found that more than half of accounts on X that were posting about racially aggravated riots in Belfast and civil disorder in Southampton were based outside the UK. Seven of the most-read tweets originated in the US, including one posted by X’s proprietor, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
Musk has been assiduous in promoting a warped, dystopian idea of the UK as a failed state whose culture is being corroded by mass migration. His platform has been invaluable to far-right activists who have mustered gangs of masked men into mobs that obstruct roads, intimidate people and threaten asylum claimants at British ports. Last year, Musk addressed a rally organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson, where he called for the Labour government to be removed. Earlier this year, Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, traveled to Moscow on a trip funded by the Musk Foundation.
The purpose of the trip was to “see the beauty of a civilized society,” he said.
Burnham did not address that side of the anti-democracy equation in his speech, perhaps because he felt that it would be impolitic to impugn US big tech under the president’s nose. US President Donald Trump is also an originator and disseminator of falsehoods online, but the nature of transatlantic diplomacy prevents a British prime minister from confronting him with that record.
Under the circumstances, it made sense for Burnham to concentrate his remarks on the threat from the Kremlin, but that must not signal the limit of his policy focus. British democracy is indeed under attack from Russia, but an effective campaign to build resilience has to recognize also the complicity of domestic extremists and the digital privileges they enjoy thanks to US technology companies.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.