The report by Professor Rory Cormac and Dr Dan Lomas (Evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee, February 2025) argues that disinformation has become a central tool of modern statecraft aimed less at persuading audiences of a coherent alternative worldview and more at corroding trust, amplifying doubt, and paralysing democratic decision-making.
The authors frame disinformation as a “grey zone” instrument deployed by state and non-state actors to sow confusion, intensify polarisation, and weaken democratic institutions. The report stresses that AI and the internet have transformed the speed, scope, and scale of disinformation, while the underlying logic remains stubbornly familiar. The authors insist that disinformation often exploits pre-existing fractures rather than inventing them from scratch, which means that resilient societies cannot outsource all responsibility to tech companies or intelligence services.
The report offers a blunt reminder that successful disinformation does not always depend on the audience believing a lie. The authors describe a strategy designed to generate distrust in all information, creating a fog in which policy paralysis becomes the real prize. The authors also underline the administrative costs of disinformation, noting how campaigns can trigger leak investigations, mole hunts, and institutional paranoia that drain resources and stall action.
The historical lens in the report performs more than a pedagogical function. The authors draw on Cold War patterns associated with Soviet intelligence services to outline a familiar operational rhythm of “plant and promote,” where a line seeded in an obscure outlet gains traction through repetition, proxy groups, and influential intermediaries. The report then maps this older playbook onto a contemporary ecosystem that now includes inauthentic online networks and AI-enabled content generation.
The report introduces a caution that feels particularly relevant for democracies tempted by headline-driven threat inflation. The authors warn that exaggerating the danger can become a strategic gift to the disinformer, because public overreaction erodes trust and fosters indiscriminate suspicion. The report therefore advances a balanced posture: serious investment and coordination without theatrical panic.
The UK policy diagnosis in the report is candid. The authors depict a fragmented counter-disinformation architecture divided across departmental silos, parliamentary inquiries, and short-lived taskforces. The authors argue that disinformation cannot be treated as an isolated technical nuisance and that effective responses require tighter integration with policy desks, especially within the FCDO and the broader National Security Council machinery.
The report highlights funding as a strategic vulnerability. The authors present the BBC World Service and the British Council as vital instruments of democratic resilience and soft power whose financial pressures risk creating space for adversarial narratives to flourish. The authors conclude that Russia, China, Iran, and other actors benefit from a multi-vector environment in which the UK must match ambition with resources.
The central takeaway of the report is both practical and slightly unsettling. The authors suggest that democracies face a dual task: building institutional capacity to detect and counter hostile manipulation while also confronting the social and political divides that make disinformation effective in the first place.
