The UK is constantly targeted by enemies seeking to change its politics through manipulation. It must follow the lead of France and others to take action.
By Andy Pryce, for CEPA
France’s first strategy to combat information manipulation, published in February, details four pillars: mobilizing the nation; regulating platforms; building capacity; and developing partnerships.
If fully funded and implemented alongside the European Union’s Democracy Shield proposals, the plan should stand as a model of good practice for all democracies. Not least the UK, which has seen its elections and referendums targeted by adversaries.
The age of AI-driven information manipulation means the UK government must move on from the 1990s world of “the grid” and centralized, controlled communications, and adapt so it can be more flexible, work around the clock, and decentralize its messaging.
It also has to learn from France’s clear enunciation of the ways information manipulation can be countered, and the action needed to defend free speech and democracy.
The 2025 UK national security strategy made a few specific commitments to tackle the challenge of hostile states or powerful individuals seeking to undermine the ability of voters, and society more broadly, to make informed decisions. To withstand Russia’s hybrid attacks, as described in CEPA’s Shadow War report, every country needs its own integrated strategy and a multi-year plan to tackle information threats.
In the UK, legal, institutional, civil, and individual responses need to be integrated where possible. Most importantly, it must have a credible, networked National Centre to Counter Information Threats that is resolutely non-political, transparent, and subject to the scrutiny of a well-staffed parliamentary committee.
Organizations from the Women’s Institute to the Royal British Legion, and food banks to the Society of Editors and the Local Government Association should be engaged, briefed, and supported by the Centre in their own efforts to build resilience. This would help create a localized, UK contextualized, non-political whole-of-society response.
The overarching goals for the UK in response to information threats must be to protect public debate, guarantee the ability of everyone to form an informed judgment, and defend its information space.
That defense must be tailored to meet chronic threats, such as long-running campaigns to undermine trust, as well as acute threats to elections or particular policies.
To achieve this, action is needed on several fronts. None of the proposals listed below are intended to limit free speech or the content of online conversation; they are about informing communities in democracies and countering the malign forces behind manipulative content.
Contextualize and implement a whole-of-society approach to defense against information threats, learning particularly from good practice in Ukraine and the Nordic and Baltic nations.
Empower and develop civil society to improve understanding of the role of institutions, make connections for direct engagement, and independently identify and act on hostile campaigns.
Transparently communicate the threat. In democracies, it is essential that the public understand the evidence on national security threats if they are to be countered effectively. There is a major gap between expert understanding of information threats and that of the public, and if money is to be prioritized to counter such threats, they need to be explained.
The days of government trying to command a top-down narrative through a “grid” of news releases and Ministerial announcements are gone, and countering both acute and chronic threats needs a step-change in government communications. It must work with civil society and across all platforms to re-engage the communities and demographics that have the least trust in the UK’s government, institutions, and democracy, and as a result are more likely to believe Russian, Iranian, or other hostile narratives. This engagement must include greater transparency on the threats the UK faces and person-to-person engagement of the kind that online cannot emulate.
Communicate aggressively and, whenever possible, take advantage of the first-mover advantage. Governments must recognize that the era of trying to control the narrative in regular working hours is over, and national communication-focused teams, which run social media accounts across all platforms around-the-clock and share information, are essential. The French government’s @frenchresponse account on X is a good example of one strand of this activity, with rapid responses making an impact during news cycles.
Build sovereign open-source intelligence capability. Government must work ever more closely with public good non-profits, like the Centre for Information Resilience, and universities to develop a national, non-profit, dispersed capability that can investigate the forces targeting the UK.
Rapidly legislate on transparency and take-downs, ensuring that national security decisions on foreign manipulative networks, not content, are no longer offshore. The use of AI to power information campaigns and poison Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a step-change in the threat to democracy. Nations cannot repeat the mistakes of the last two decades, when sovereign decisions on national security were outsourced to tech companies, whose primary concern is making money. All content from malign actors must be detectable, with data made available to trusted researchers, and where there is suspicion of malign activity, platforms must take it down or face severe penalties. Ultimately, if a platform is eroding democratic institutions and processes, it must be closed.
Learning lessons from Ukraine, the Nordic and Baltic Countries, and now the French, a strong response to the malign activity targeting democracies is essential. A National Centre to Counter Information Threats could undertake these five lines of action as part of a wider whole-of-society approach.
By Andy Pryce, for CEPA
Andy Pryce is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a former British diplomat and a globally recognized expert in countering information threats, cognitive defense, and strategic communications. He brings decades of leadership advising governments and organizations on crisis management, countering foreign information manipulation, and impact in contested information spaces. As a diplomat, Andy led national efforts to counter foreign information manipulation, establishing innovative capabilities to anticipate, analyze, mitigate, and disrupt malign state actors and their proxies. His senior diplomatic roles included Head of Public Diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington and at the UK Mission to the EU in Brussels.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
