Decades ago, I became a journalist because I wanted to tell the story of South Africa’s long and painful journey toward democracy. I joined the BBC with a simple conviction: people deserve access to facts they can trust. Not facts handed down from on high, but facts that help ordinary people make important decisions, hold power to account, and nourish the kind of public conversation that democracies depend on. I believed in that mission then, and I still do. But I never imagined we would land up here. We are now living through an age of organised deception, where hostile states and shadowy actors are building what amount to propaganda factories. Iran stands accused of creating a “stable of fake journalists” to spread lies online. OpenAI says a Russian influence operation recruited unwitting researchers in Latin America to run a front think tank. Britain is planning a new national centre to fight disinformation from hostile states, and Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, puts it bluntly: this weaponised information “reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel… stoking division and sowing despair.” These are not abstract threats. A recent report showed how, in Latvia, a real military exercise was used as a seed of truth in a malicious fake video of a shooting that never happened. The video falsely claimed that a Ukrainian soldier had shot three Nato colleagues and then killed himself. There were at least eight different versions of that video, in fifteen languages, each one sharpened by AI to cut through to audiences across the world. Bot farms in Africa amplify harmful content, and AI models can now run entire social media accounts. The real-world damage is mounting: elections are being influenced, institutions are being undermined, and trust is eroding. South Africans, of all people, need no lesson on where the road through broken oversight institutions leads, nor on how vital free, independent, trusted journalism is to keeping a democracy alive.
When I launched the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative, I thought we were doing something genuinely cutting-edge. We brought together big technology companies and global media organisations, including Daily Maverick as a founding partner, to create filters and alarm bells for potentially harmful content. We were trying to flag the bad stuff before it spread, to give platforms and newsrooms early warning systems. Looking back, that curation feels almost quaint now. We were dealing with a problem that could be managed with headlines, fact-checking partnerships, and moderation protocols. What we are seeing today is something far more serious: full-blown information warfare, supercharged by AI. This is not just about viral hoaxes or misleading memes. It is about coordinated campaigns designed to destabilise societies, manipulate public opinion, and make people doubt the very idea of objective truth. It has been more than thirty years since my producing assignment in South Africa, where I covered Nelson Mandela addressing jubilant crowds in the election that finally consigned apartheid to history. The technology around us has changed beyond recognition, but my belief in facts-based information has not. That is why I founded Athena, a publication that maps out the terrain in this fast-moving information war. By speaking to experts on the frontlines of the conflict, we are starting to piece together solutions: ways for nations, companies, and individuals to reinforce their armour against disinformation. The battle may be new, but the principle is old. If we do not defend truth, something dangerous will take its place.
So how do we actually defend ourselves? In the UK, there is growing talk of “whole-of-society resilience” against attempts to manipulate us. That phrase can sound like bureaucratic jargon, but it means something simple: the entire country, not just the government or the military, needs to understand the threat and know what to do about it. Norway, sharing a long border with Russia, has long understood that truly effective defence starts with ensuring that everyone in the country is aware of the threats and of their own role in countering them. Defence in the age of hybrid warfare, which blends physical attacks, cyber operations, and information campaigns, has to be a national effort. Ukraine learned that lesson very quickly and very painfully. When a country is fighting for its survival, everyone becomes part of the defence: the teacher who notices propaganda in the classroom, the engineer who spots a suspicious vulnerability in the power grid, the pensioner who questions why a social media post is trying to make her angry at her neighbour. We cannot leave this to experts alone. The threat is too diffuse, too personal, and too embedded in our daily lives. If we want our democracies to withstand the pressure, we need to build resilience from the ground up. That means moving beyond the idea that disinformation is something that only happens to other people, or that it is a technical problem that platforms can solve with better algorithms. It is a social problem, a psychological problem, and a political problem. And it demands a response that reaches every corner of society.
Let me put forward three possible ways of bringing the whole society into this conversation. The first is to speak about the unspeakable. That was a great line from Deborah Haynes, the defence and security editor at Sky News. She was talking about Britain’s reluctance to discuss the “w-word”: war. Her point was that a national conversation needs to happen, but for that to happen, a government needs to have the confidence to share information with the media and the public. She called for more intelligence to be made available to drive out malevolent disinformation. That is a bold suggestion, because governments are naturally secretive, especially about matters of national security. But the alternative is worse. When official information is scarce, conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void. When people feel that they are being kept in the dark, they become vulnerable to whatever story is told with the most confidence, however false it may be. An effective press must be free to scrutinise intelligence, and government in general, including when that scrutiny is uncomfortable. We need to normalise difficult conversations: about the reality of the threats we face, about the limits of our own resilience, and about the sacrifices that may be required. We cannot counter disinformation if we are too afraid to tell the truth to each other. The more honest and transparent our public institutions can be, within the legitimate bounds of national security, the harder it will be for hostile actors to twist reality.
The second way forward is through disinformation wargames. Critical infrastructure: power, water, banking, airports, hospitals, is run by a mix of public and private bodies. Far more work needs to be done linking those operators with government authorities at both local and national level. Together, they need to wargame different attack scenarios, and they need to tell the public about it. This is not a matter of fearmongering. It is about preparedness. When a power station is knocked out by a cyberattack, or when a fake video goes viral claiming that a hospital is deliberately turning away patients, the response has to be coordinated and rapid. If the public already understands that such attacks are possible, and that they might see confusing information during a crisis, they will be far less likely to panic or to believe the first thing they see. Companies also need to prepare. They are vulnerable, and they need to think urgently about everything from coordinated disinformation campaigns that seek to undermine their brands to attempts by bad actors, whether state-sponsored or criminal, to pollute their data with false information. Cybersecurity has, over the past decade, become a responsibility that spans every part of an organisation. Disinformation now demands the same level of awareness. We cannot treat it as an afterthought, something for the communications team to handle when a crisis erupts. It has to be embedded in risk management, in boardroom discussions, in crisis planning. The more we rehearse for these scenarios in peacetime, the better we will be able to weather the real thing.
The third way forward is to inoculate the nation. What should public awareness of disinformation actually look like? Everybody needs to be able to recognise when they are being manipulated. Many South Africans remember the GuptaLeaks, the damaging exposés that revealed how a wealthy family was using its political connections to shape national policy. But the techniques of manipulation are becoming ever more sophisticated. They exploit our divisions, our anxieties, our legitimate grievances, and turn them against us. Social media is being flooded with so-called inauthentic material: fake accounts, fake organisations, fake news sites, all designed to make it seem as though certain views are more popular than they really are, or to push people toward extremes. AI is now so good that people can no longer rely on identifying deepfake videos or audio simply because they look or sound odd. The old advice, “check the source,” is no longer enough. People need to be given the tools to work out for themselves why someone might be trying to manipulate them, how they might be doing it, and what they can do about it. We have lots of ways of providing those tools, but it will mean harnessing the power of bodies that can reach deep into our society: journalism, yes, but also schools, local libraries, community centres. We need media literacy programmes that treat disinformation as a civic issue, not a technical one. Information warfare may feel distant. It may not feel like a priority when there are so many other problems: unemployment, corruption, inequality. But insidious disinformation campaigns distort and divide nations, paralysing desperately needed progress. The more we allow lies to spread unchecked, the harder it becomes to solve anything at all. Solving these problems takes participation across society, preparation, and reliable information. That is the fight we are in, and it is one we cannot afford to lose.