Hardly a day had passed after the government unveiled its initial draft of the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2023 when critics descended upon it.

‘Hey Peasants, Your Opinions Hell, your facts Are Fake News’, posted Canadian right-wing professor Jordan Peterson on X (then Twitter) in response to the announcement.

Since then, commentary on the bill has grown more intense and fervent. The bill sets up Canberra to be a ‘back-up censor’ ready to urge the big tech companies to ‘engage in the cancellation of wrong-speak’, wrote Peta Credlin in The Australian under the headline ‘“Ministry of Truth” clamps down on free expression’. For Tim Cudmore writing in The Spectator, the bill represents nothing less than ‘the most absurdly petty, juvenile, and downright moronic piece of nanny-state governmental garbage ever put to paper’.

In reality, the intentions of the bill are far more modest than the establishment of a so-called Ministry of Truth. Indeed, they’re so modest that it may come as a surprise to many that the powers don’t already exist.

Put simply, the bill is designed to ensure that all digital platforms in the industry have systems in place to deal with mis- and disinformation and that those systems are transparent. It doesn’t give the Australian Communications and Media Authority any special ability to request that specific content or posts be removed from online platforms.

If the bill were to pass, it would mean that digital platforms like WeChat will finally have to come clean with their censorship practices and how they’re applying them, or not, to content aimed at Australian users. It will also mean that digital platforms like X that once devoted resources to ensuring trust and safety on their platforms, but are now walking away from those efforts, are made accountable for those decisions.

If there’s one thing that Elon Musk’s stewardship of X has shown, it’s that even with an absolutist approach to free speech, content-moderation decisions still need to be made. Inevitably, any embrace of absolute free-speech principles soon gives way to the complexities of addressing issues like child exploitation, hate speech, copyright infringement and other forms of legal compliance. Every free-speech Twitter clone has had to come to this realisation, including Parler, Gettr and even Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

So, if all digital platforms inevitably engage in some sort of content moderation, why not have some democratic oversight over that process? The alternative is to stick with a system where interventions against mis- and disinformation take place every day, but they’re done according to the internal policies of each different platform and the decisions are often hidden from their users. What the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill does is make sure that those decisions aren’t made behind closed doors.

Under the current system, when platforms overreach in their efforts to moderate content, it’s only the highest-profile cases that get the attention. To take one recent example, a report by Credlin was labelled ‘false information’ on Facebook based on a fact-check by RMIT FactLab. The shadow minister for home affairs and cyber security wrote to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to complain, and the ABC’s Media Watch sided with Credlin.

Would it not be better if this ad hoc approach were replaced with something more systematic that applied to regular members of the public and not just high-profile commentators? Under the proposed bill, all the platforms will have to have systems in place to deal with mis-and disinformation while also balancing the need for free expression. The risk of the status quo is not just that the platforms will not moderate content enough, but that they will overdo it at times.

When digital platforms refrain from moderating content, harmful content proliferates. But as platforms become more active in filtering content without publicly disclosing their decision-making, there’s an increased risk that legitimate expression will be stifled. Meta executives admitted at a recent Senate committee hearing that it had gone too far when moderating content on the origin of Covid-19, for example.

In contrast to the Australian government’s modest approach is the EU’s Digital Services Act, which just came into effect last week. That act heaps multiple requirements on the platforms to stop them from spreading mis- and disinformation. Many of these requirements are worthwhile, and in a future article, I’ll make the case for what elements we might like to use to improve our legislation. Fundamentally, the act represents a positive step forward by mandating that major social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok enhance transparency over their content moderation processes and provide EU residents with a means to appeal content-moderation decisions.

But if critics wish to warn about Orwellian overreach, they’d do better scrutinising the EU’s Digital Services Act, not Australia’s proposed Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. In particular, they should take a look at one element of the European legislation that enables the EU Commission to declare a ‘crisis’ and force platforms to moderate content according to the state’s orders. That sets up a worrying precedent that authoritarian rulers around the world are sure to point to when they shut down internet services in their own countries.

After years of relative laissez-faire policymaking, the world’s biggest tech companies are finally becoming subject to more stringent regulation. The risk of regulatory overreach is real and critics are right to be wary. But the Australian government’s proposed solution, with its focus on scrutinising the processes the platforms have in place to deal with mis- and disinformation, is a flexible approach for dealing with a problem that will inevitably continue to grow. And unlike the European strategy, it avoids overreach by both the platforms and the government.

An urgent problem for governments around the world in the digital age is how to tackle the harms caused by mis- and disinformation, and Australia is no exception.

Together, mis- and disinformation fall under the umbrella term of ‘fake news’. While this phenomenon isn’t new, the internet makes its rapid, vast spread unprecedented.

It’s a tricky problem and hard to police because of the sheer amount of misinformation online. But, left unchecked, public health and safety, electoral integrity, social cohesion and ultimately democracy are at risk. The Covid-19 pandemic taught us not to be complacent, as fake news about Covid treatments led to deadly consequences.

But what’s the best way to manage the spread of fake news? How can it be done without government overreach, which risks the freedom and diversity of expression necessary for deliberation in healthy democracies?

Last month, Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland released a draft exposure bill to step up Australia’s fight against harmful online mis- and disinformation.

It offers more stick (hefty penalties) and less carrot (voluntary participation) than the current approach to managing online content.

If passed, the bill will bring us closer to the European Union-style model of mandatory co-regulation.

According to the draft, disinformation is spread intentionally, while misinformation is not.

But both can cause serious harms including hate speech, financial harm and disruption of public order, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Research has shown that countries tend to approach this problem in three distinct ways:

• non-regulatory ‘supporting activities’ such as digital literacy campaigns and fact-checking units to debunk falsehoods
• voluntary or mandatory co-regulatory measures involving digital platforms and media authorities
• anti-fake-news laws.

Initial opinions about the bill are divided. Some commentators have called the proposed changes ‘censorship’, arguing it will have a chilling effect on free speech.

These comments are often unhelpful because they conflate co-regulation with more draconian measures such anti-fake-news laws adopted in illiberal states like Russia, whereby governments arbitrarily rule what information is ‘fake’.

For example, Russia amended its Criminal Code in 2022 to make the spread of ‘fake’ information an offence punishable with jail terms of up to 15 years, to suppress the media and political dissent about its war in Ukraine.

To be clear, under the proposed Australian bill, platforms continue to be responsible for the content on their services—not governments.

The new powers allow ACMA to look under a platform’s hood to see how it deals with online mis- and disinformation that can cause serious harm, and to request changes to processes (not content). ACMA can set industry standards as a last resort.

The proposed changes don’t give ACMA arbitrary powers to determine what content is true or false, nor can it direct specific posts to be removed. The content of private messages, authorised electoral communications, parody and satire, and news media all remains outside the scope of the proposed changes.

None of this is new. Since 2021, Australia has had a voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, developed for digital platforms by their industry association, the Digital Industry Group (known as DIGI).

This followed government recommendations arising out of a lengthy Australian Competition and Consumer Commission inquiry into digital platforms. This first effort at online regulation was a good start to stem harmful content using an opt-in model.

But voluntary codes have shortfalls. The most obvious is that not all platforms decide to participate, and some cherrypick the areas of the code they will respond to.

The Australian government is now seeking to deliver on a bipartisan promise to strengthen the regulators’ powers to tackle online mis- and disinformation by shifting to a mandatory co-regulatory model.

Under the proposed changes, ACMA will be given new information-gathering powers and capacity to formally request that an industry association (such as DIGI) vary or replace codes that aren’t up to scratch.

Platform participation with registered codes will be compulsory and attract warnings, fines and, if unresolved, hefty court-approved penalties for noncompliance.

These penalties are steep—as much as 5% of a platform’s annual global turnover if it is repeatedly in breach of industry standards.

The move from voluntary to mandatory regulation in Australia is logical. The EU has set the foundation for other countries to hold digital technology companies responsible for curbing mis- and disinformation on their platforms.

But the draft bill raises important questions that need to be addressed before it is legislated as planned for later this year. Among them are:

• how to best define mis- and disinformation (the definitions in the draft are different from DIGI’s)
• how to deal with the interrelationship between mis- and disinformation, especially regarding election content. There’s a potential issue because research shows that the same content labelled ‘disinformation’ can also be labelled ‘misinformation’ depending on the online user’s motive, which can be hard to divine
• and why exclude online news media content? Research has shown that news media can also be a source of harmful misinformation (such as 2019 election stories about the ‘death tax’).

While aiming to mitigate harmful mis- and disinformation is noble, how it will work in practice remains to be seen.

An important guard against unintended consequences is to ensure that ACMA’s powers are carefully defined along with terms and likely circumstances requiring action, with mechanisms for appeal.

The closing date for public submissions is 6 August.

There can be little doubt Australia’s strategic environment has evolved significantly in recent years. Across the Indo-Pacific, we now face a region characterised by a broad spectrum of geopolitical influences, from conflict and contest at one end to cooperation and collaboration at the other.

Through this spectrum, we’re seeing a diversification of the circumstances where all our elements of national power will need to contribute to our national security and prosperity goals.

We’re also seeing significant changes in the way some states wield power and influence in the region. Of course, Australia continues to support an Indo-Pacific characterised by rules-based cooperation and stability. But we must also be prudent in recognising the prevalence of new forms of rivalry and competition that fall outside our preferred models.

Australia, like its friends and partners in the Pacific, needs options to challenge the threat posed by coercive statecraft. Adversarial actors including China and Russia are using agile and malign methods to secure strategically significant outcomes, often to our disadvantage.

And to date, these methods have proven both effective and relatively low cost. So, for Australia to more effectively counter this coercive statecraft it will be important to raise the costs—both economically and politically—for the antagonists.

In Chinese strategic literature, there is a strong emphasis on adopting comprehensive approaches to wielding national influence. One of the more important works on this in recent years, Unrestricted warfare, espouses a persistent campaign for advantage that:

Breaks down the dividing lines between civilian and military affairs and between peace and war… non-military tools are equally prominent and useful for the achievement of previously military objectives. Cyberattacks, financial weapons, informational attacks—all of these taken together constitute the future of warfare. In this model, the essence of unrestricted warfare is that the ‘battlefield is everywhere’.

Beijing’s purpose in applying these methods is to achieve its strategic goals below our thresholds of military response. And although China incorporates the threat of military force among the suite of its coercive measures, it nevertheless seeks to render Western military capabilities irrelevant by achieving its goals without triggering conflict.

Once we understand this, it becomes clearer why our own military capabilities, including those for power projection and networked warfighting, are necessary but not sufficient.

Whereas the West has tended to equate the possession of superior military force with deterrence, that plainly isn’t working against China’s comprehensive coercion.

And where Australia’s armed forces have focused on force projection as an essential capability, the time has come to weave these capabilities into broader options for influence projection.

Rather than narrowly focusing on dominating the battlespace with forward-deployed force elements, the military can broaden its value proposition by complementing whole-of-government efforts to out-position rival powers in economic, diplomatic and information-influence campaigns.

As China has amply demonstrated, coercion does not necessarily involve the application of physical violence. Influence comes in many forms and can apply to peacetime and wartime situations, as well as those in between.

As NATO has suggested, ‘even lethality, the ultimate penalty of physical force, is giving way to abstractions of perception management and behavioral control, a fact which suggests that strategic success, not tactical victory, is the more coveted end-state’.

Any Australian efforts to engage in constant competition and counter China’s aggressive political warfare methods will need to have both defensive and offensive elements.

In terms of deterrence, by shining a light on these actions and actively calling them out, we can begin to erase the ambiguity and uncertainty on which they rely. Since these methods depend on cultivating confusion and uncertainty, an important counter action is to establish robust, evidence-based narratives which demonstrate to the world what is going on.

But exposure alone will not always be enough. And that’s where we need to be able to move from a defensive to an offensive mindset. We will need to become tough-minded to more forcibly ensure that antagonists desist from actions that hurt us.

This will require the development of robust cost-imposing strategies to alter their calculus. Such strategies will need to convince threat actors that the price of achieving their aims through political warfare methods exceeds what they are willing or able to pay. And that means we need to signal clearly that we have both the capacity and the will to take actions that will impose these costs.

Cost-imposing approaches can be proportional or asymmetrical. Authoritarian regimes are deeply fearful of threats to their legitimacy, making them vulnerable to well-considered influence operations which might hold that legitimacy up to question.

Such influence actions might be used to inject information into a closed society that authoritarian regimes would not want disclosed. This could range from alternative perspectives on current events that differ from regime-imposed narratives to exposure of political and economic corruption. These kinds of disclosures could impose significant costs on a regime constantly worried about maintaining domestic control.

This points to a broader theme, sometimes called ideational power. Authoritarian regimes like the Chinese Communist Party depend on repression rather than democratic legitimacy to maintain control, as has been made painfully evident in Hong Kong.

Authoritarian regimes are deeply fearful of instability, rendering them brittle at home and severely limiting their appeal abroad. Australia should take a robust and comprehensive approach to emphasising and contrasting its own values and methods against authoritarian ones.

Throughout history, long-term campaigns for influence have had this ideological dimension to them—the contrast between light and dark, between inclusiveness and domination. So Australia should be emphasising, not minimising, the ideological contrast between its own values and those represented by authoritarianism.

It makes sense to develop and enhance asymmetric advantages. For example, China doesn’t have access to anything like the network of alliances and partnerships that Australia has. And although Australia’s economic size pales in comparison to China’s, our network of friendships can be a source of significant strength.

Put another way, this is about how we play our strengths against their weaknesses. Now is the time to be exploring how our creativity and adaptability can be used to identify, explore and exploit the critical vulnerabilities of authoritarian regimes, to be able to get at them in ways that hurt.

To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean the application of military force—sending people into harm’s way—although those skills will remain essential. Rather, it’s about using discrete, tailored options to go after background vulnerabilities.

The military notion of unconventionality is helpful here:

In unconventional warfare, the emphasis is on defeating the opponent without a direct military confrontation…typically, the unconventional forces act undercover, or discretely, their targets are not of an exclusively military nature, and the techniques employed are distinct from those specific to purely military operations.

This logic could be broadened to other dimensions of Australian statecraft. The actions needed to impose costs of sufficient magnitude to deter China’s coercive behaviour would likely need to hold at risk Beijing’s core interests—the things it fears and values—without necessarily engaging in physical attack.

This would likely need to involve a more holistic or unrestricted approach, much as China itself pursues. And while we need to stay within the bounds of the international rules and norms we espouse, there is nevertheless fertile ground for exploring unconventional and unorthodox means for generating costs.

And although prudent self-reliance dictates that Australia should not render itself overly dependent on external providers to guarantee our security, it will be vital to work multilaterally counter China’s malign influence. Benefits will arise from cooperation in non-traditional aspects of military operations, including in the information and economic domains.

By working with our partners in the Indo-Pacific, including the Quad, Indonesia and the Pacific island countries, to develop new and disruptive options, Australia can bolster its ability to not only expose China’s malign statecraft, but also to adopt cost-imposing strategies that will deter grey-zone political warfare.

Australia and the United States share an increasing security burden thanks to the growing sophistication of information warfare, according to Jake Wallis, a senior analyst at ASPI, and Katherine Mansted, senior adviser at the ANU’s National Security College.

In a panel discussion last week for ASPI’s masterclass on ‘The US–Australia alliance in a more contested Asia’, Mansted and Wallis explored the challenges of dealing with a strategic environment in which grey-zone actions, especially involving information, are becoming a permanent feature.

The information warfare experienced by the US and by Australia over the past half-decade has similar characteristics.

Russian grey-zone activities against the US have grown and evolved, but information warfare remains the key component. It is relatively cheap and, using social media’s unparalleled power as a propaganda vector, can be extraordinarily effective.

The most recent US intelligence assessment on foreign influence in the 2020 presidential election concludes that Russia coupled its online efforts with political influence campaigns. In some cases, Russia directly provided domestic political actors with disinformation talking points, which were then recycled through traditional media outlets.

Russian disinformation is especially geared towards discrediting powerful elements of democracy, the free press and elections, to infect every area of political, social, economic and cultural division in a society with partisanship, and to delegitimise shared truths. It works even better if domestic actors start to use the same tactics in the pursuit of profit and power.

The Australian grey-zone experience is mostly about China—although a recent ABC Four Corners report explored the extent of Russian information and intimidation operations among the Russian diaspora in Australia.

And while Russia has been a relatively noisy grey-zone actor against NATO allies, Chinese grey-zone efforts are better funded, more widespread and highly integrated, warns Wallis. China has a lot more capacity than Russia, and its grey-zone efforts span economic coercion, cyberattacks, political and media influence campaigns, science and technology talent recruitment, and direct targeting of corporations that cross Beijing’s red lines.

Wallis listed some recent examples from China’s playbook, including bans on Australian coal, beef, barley and wine, talent recruitment programs in Australian universities that aim to gain access to expertise on sensitive technologies, as well as the growth in coordinated online disinformation campaigns driven by artificial intelligence.

But Wallis also noted that China’s grey-zone activities are becoming more overt and seem to be increasingly comfortable with raw displays of dominance. Information warfare narratives are now geared towards not just creating confusion and division, but eliciting fear and compliance.

China’s cancellation of NBA broadcasts in response to a tweet by the general manager of the Houston Rockets in support of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong is instructive, as are China’s threats to banks not backing its authoritarian actions in the territory.

All of this is complemented by the so-called wolf-warrior diplomacy typified by foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who rose from being an envoy in Pakistan to his current position through his deployment of hyperaggressive anti-Western rhetoric on Twitter.

This kind of information warfare is quick to exploit any opportunity to amplify set narratives of a West in terminal decline, heirs to a wasted democratic system that can’t compete with China’s techno-authoritarianism. China’s information war on the West’s Covid-19 vaccines and troubled response to the pandemic is one example.

Effective multilateral responses to global crises are vulnerable to this kind of disinformation churn and narrative jostling. But, as Wallis pointed out, in China’s strategic calculus, it doesn’t need to convince the West. It is aiming to convince everyone else.

Therefore, Australia should also be extremely concerned about its near region, where fragile democracies and their fast-growing economies are especially susceptible to information warfare by both external actors and internal enablers.

What should Australia and its major ally be doing to counter grey-zone coercion and information warfare?

Mansted explained that after five years of disinformation wars, US Department of Justice investigations, comprehensive intelligence assessments and Senate inquiries on Russian foreign interference, the Biden administration is now viscerally aware of the threat. What’s more, President Joe Biden has made democratic resilience the centrepiece of US foreign policy.

So far, the Biden administration has responded to Russia with a suite of targeted sanctions. It is also carefully assessing the domestic propaganda environment.

Biden has been assertive about the need to actively challenge China’s and Russia’s narratives about democratic decay. In the administration’s foreign policy statements to date, Biden has continually reiterated his worldview that only strong democracies, polities that retain some notion of the public interest, can effectively address civilisational challenges such as climate change.

The administration’s public diplomacy is about consistently and clearly articulating democratic values and demonstrating their strength. Australia should be ready to do the same.

But Mansted also pointed out that we should also recognise the difference between democratic resilience—that is, getting our own house in order—and democracy promotion. In the alliance context, Australia may have an important role to play in translating Biden’s democracy agenda to our regional Indo-Pacific context—lest partners perceive it as imposing values on them, rather than working collectively to defend shared values.

Ultimately, Mansted sounded a note of cautious optimism. While China’s increasingly sophisticated coupling of economic, informational and diplomatic tools of influence and coercion is worrying, she argued that there are limits to the effectiveness of each of these tools.

The US experience with interference has shown that more public awareness of Russian tactics may have reduced their impact. Efforts by the US government to expose Russian operatives, and their proxies, have degraded their ability to operate deniably, while more timely cooperation with social media has resulted in the disruption of more state-coordinated propaganda.

Australia and the US can consolidate these gains. At an inter-government level, there’s more work to be done to establish a shared lexicon on grey-zone homeland security challenges and to continue to build domestic resilience through transparent public communications.

To adapt the deterrence capability of the Australia–US alliance to 21st-century grey-zone challenges, shared frameworks for attributing and responding to grey-zone threats are imperative. Early diagnosis and response, narrative trackers, active disruption of disinformation campaigns, and consistent public communications will be key elements of active defence in the grey zone.

Twitter suspended 16 accounts earlier this month for breaching the platform’s policies on ‘manipulation and spam’. The move followed an investigative report by The Daily Beast that uncovered a network of fake personas that had been presented as consultants or freelance journalists. These manufactured identities pushed out articles advancing anti-Iran and anti-Qatar narratives favourable to the United Arab Emirates. They were surprisingly successful and had more than 90 reports appear in 46 different publications, mainly US media outlets.

This case is merely one of many information operations emanating from the Gulf and the Middle East. Viewed together, they demonstrate how the role of the media and journalists as guardians of the public interest can be manipulated to project false content into mainstream spheres.

Journalists play a crucial role in bringing the truth to light and holding the powerful to account. Authoritarian regimes see how high-quality journalism can erode their legitimacy and support by exposing poor governance. This results in attempts to censor the free press, not only internally but also outside of autocratic states.

The Middle East provides myriad examples of autocratic leaders seeking to silence criticism from journalists overseas. The killing of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia is one of the most notable and demonstrates how far some states will go to eradicate dissent. Iran is also known for its efforts to threaten critical journalists based overseas and to harass their Iran-based family members.

However, such states also exploit public trust in journalism, and weaponise journalists and news media organisations, to amplify propaganda and disinformation favourable to their regimes. Indeed, inauthentic content doesn’t usually get much traction unless it is picked up and promoted by legitimate platforms.

A key tactic of the Iran-aligned ‘Endless Mayfly’ disinformation campaign, for example, was to publicly and privately engage journalists and activists on Twitter in an attempt to disseminate and amplify false content that advanced Iranian state interests.

Similarly, news media played a role in propagating a Saudi-based Twitter disinformation campaign following the blockade of Qatar in 2017. A researcher in Qatar says Saudi-based bots were used to amplify anti-Qatar hashtags and hashtags that painted a manipulated picture of grassroots opposition to the Qatari government and the ruling family. The campaign sought to legitimise the stance of the blockading countries, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, which have long criticised Qatar for its friendly ties with Iran and alleged funding for, and support of, terrorist groups. BBC Arabic’s ‘Trending’ service picked up the story, and then BBC Arabic reported on the trending hashtags. This example shows how easily media organisations can find themselves assisting in the spread of state-backed disinformation.

Another operation from the Gulf came in the form of a tit-for-tat hacking and leaking of emails that played out between the UAE and Qatar. After the blockade was implemented, there were numerous cases of unnamed sources providing hacked emails to journalists and media organisations. Some of these outlets went on to publish stories that stood to influence US foreign policy in the Middle East.

For instance, hacked emails from the accounts of the UAE ambassador to the US, Yousef Al Otaiba, and US businessman and Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy* sought to erode US support for the blockade of Qatar. Conversely, hacked emails and phone and text messages from an Iranian businessman and Qatari officials attempted to push an anti-Iran and anti-Qatar message to the US administration.

The ethics of publishing news based on hacked information that seeks to further a state’s geopolitical objectives has been hotly debated. David Kirkpatrick, a reporter at the New York Times has said that ‘if we were to start rejecting information from sources with agendas, we might as well stop putting out the paper’. Others have argued that there’s no issue as long as the information has been verified. Still, some commentators are concerned about the potential consequences of these practices, pointing to how hacked emails were used to derail Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Regardless, the hacking of emails and the distribution of content have continued, and efforts to utilise journalists and news outlets in the West have not ceased. It’s therefore important that all elements of news media—journalists, editors and publishers writing and vetting articles—have a high degree of literacy on the agents, tactics and infrastructure of disinformation, and are aware of best practices when reporting such content.

Being as transparent as possible without compromising sources, verifying and authenticating information, and contextualising content are all necessary for those reporting on disinformation or on information that stands to advance the interests or agenda of a state, a group or an individual. These principles were followed in reports about Al Otaiba and Broidy which noted that the information was provided by ‘those critical of Emirati influence in Washington’. The articles also provided context on the UAE–Qatar rivalry and fractious relations within the Gulf.

The ‘publish or not’ decision becomes even more fraught when material arrives on a journalist’s desk without any indication of where it came from. Dealing with that requires substantial research and careful judgement calls.

A failure to follow clear professional practices will see journalists and news outlets relegated to pawns in the geopolitical games of states, rather than performing the much-needed function of exposing these tactics.

Disinformation and information operations more broadly constitute a multifaceted problem. A wide variety of people have a responsibility to respond, including political actors, social media platforms, civil society actors and even individuals not directly involved in the process.

Journalists and media outlets can often find themselves at the coalface of information operations. While many in the field have a high degree of awareness of and resilience to such tactics, the profession must develop a clear understanding of how these operations work if journalists are to avoid being used by actors out to deceive.

* Editors’ note, 29 July 2020: An earlier version of this post identified Elliott Broidy as a ‘UAE lobbyist’. A representative for Mr Broidy has since advised The Strategist that Mr Broidy was not a lobbyist for any foreign country.