Picture this: Russian missiles are striking British cities. A convincing fake audio recording has driven a wedge between London and Washington. Far-right mobs are gathering in the streets. The Prime Minister’s answer is to shut the whole Internet down. That is the scenario in Sky’s recent series The Wargame, created by experts who have spent years studying how Russia fights conflict. It is gripping television, but it is also a warning. The experts devised it to show something uncomfortable: disinformation would be central to any real Russian attack, not a sideshow. The missiles matter, but the confusion that follows them matters just as much. In fact, the confusion may be the real target. What makes The Wargame so effective is that it does not rely on movie-style violence. It shows how quickly a modern society can be turned against itself. Yet for all its cleverness, the series leaves out something even more disturbing. We have not been caught off guard; we have been living inside a quieter version of this story for a decade. The Russian playbook did not just appear after 2016. Ladislav Bittman, a Czech intelligence officer who defected to the West, wrote in detail about Soviet “active measures.” The KGB did not bother trying to persuade everyone; it targeted smaller, strategically important audiences and looked for any hypocrisy it could exploit. A planted story in one influential newspaper could do more work than a million leaflets. Western countries did propaganda too, but the old Western style was built for mass reach, broadcast through trusted newspapers, radio and television. Vladimir Putin took the old KGB doctrine, kept the cunning, and updated it for the digital age. Instead of planted articles and forged documents, we now have fake social media accounts, coordinated bot armies, algorithmic manipulation and a thousand ways to make a minority view look like an inevitable landslide. This is not a hypothetical threat from a TV show. It has been running in plain sight for years, and we have only just started to pay attention.
I saw the first signs in 2013, while I was on the Syria desk at the Foreign Office. In August, the Assad regime used chemical weapons against civilians in Damascus, and we prepared for an American military strike. David Cameron promised Parliament a vote before British forces would be committed. The Government lost that vote, the planned action was called off, and the Assad regime survived. When I later asked MPs why they voted against action, every single one mentioned “overwhelming popular opposition” to “another Iraq.” Many also remembered a photograph of a US Marine holding a sign that read: “I didn’t sign up to fight for Al Qaeda.” I remember that photo too. I remember seeing it, and the whole Iraq narrative, being pushed hard by social media accounts that behaved in curious and suspicious ways. They were too fast, too coordinated, too eager to pile onto the same emotional button at precisely the right moment. At the time, we did not have the vocabulary for what we were seeing. We called them trolls, or bots, or just assumed they were angry people. I have thought about that vote many times since. It was not a conspiracy; it was a convergence. Those accounts did not manufacture public opinion from nothing, but they poured petrol on existing fears. The same kinds of accounts appeared during the Brexit campaign, advocating Leave. In the 2019 general election, they seemed to be channelling support for Boris Johnson. Without tools to track these accounts at scale, it was impossible to measure how much they changed public opinion. But even where tools existed, the will to use them was lacking. In 2020, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee found that ministers “had not seen or sought evidence” of successful interference in the referendum. The United States produced an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election within two months. Britain did not even want to look. That refusal to see the problem is part of the problem.
In 2020 I left government and set up Valent, a company building specialist technology to respond to a problem I knew would only get worse. One of our first projects was mapping disinformation in Sudan, which had just emerged from military rule. We found the same suspicious accounts there, but this time we dug deeper than anyone had before. They were not floating around randomly. They worked inside networks, commenting on and reposting one another constantly, tricking platform algorithms into treating their content as popular. Whatever they chose to promote was seen by millions. Whatever they chose to suppress became invisible. We called these Coordinated Influence Networks, or CINs. Then we asked the obvious question: are these networks active in Britain? We found eight. Three were obviously Russian, routinely promoting content from Pravda, RT and their arm’s-length subsidiaries. The rest were predominantly far-right. But the Russian networks frequently jumped on the messaging of their far-right counterparts, amplifying it and adding their own hateful fuel. These were not just nasty comments; they were organised, methodical and difficult to spot unless you knew exactly what to look for. Some of them had hundreds of accounts, others thousands. They posted at carefully spaced intervals to look human. They quoted real news stories but spun them into fear and anger. They followed each other so that the platform algorithms, seeing a burst of sudden activity, would treat their content as breaking news and push it to millions of people who had no idea it was manufactured. It was like discovering a machine built to flood the town square with fake crowds, and then real people start to think the fake crowd represents everyone else. The platforms were not designed for this. They are the largest and most powerful communication machines ever built, and they are being weaponised. That is the moment I decided this had to be my work.
By 2023, the infrastructure had changed again. The UK CINs had largely moved to what we call a “pay-to-play” model. The administrators ran their networks like businesses. Customers paid to have their content amplified, so a single network would happily push conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine falsehoods, commercial scams and partisan attack lines all at once. There was no political purity test; it was about profit and influence. Alongside these networks came a new breed of “influence-for-pay” creators. They earn money through platform revenue-sharing schemes, which pay them based on views and engagement. The easiest route to that revenue is toxic, polarising content, because outrage is what spreads fastest online. We calculated that Britain’s CINs now reach around six million people, mostly older men in economically deprived areas. Combined with the influencers for hire, they can make the views of 10 per cent of the population look like the views of 70 or 80 per cent. The result is a kind of manufactured common sense: people begin to believe that everyone around them is thinking the same angry thoughts. This is how someone can stand on a television studio and call themselves “the silent majority.” Tommy Robinson and parties like Restore do exactly that. Broadcasters, seeing large follower counts, take them at their word and invite their spokespeople onto programmes, completing the final stage of their journey from the fringes into the mainstream. The problem is not just British. Similar networks operate across Europe and the Middle East. The worst affected is the United States, where platform guardrails have been removed and Russian and MAGA narratives now amplify each other in a feedback loop. Britain is dealing with a transnational problem, and pretending it is a matter of a few Russian bots is dangerously outdated.
A welcome step came in September, when the Prime Minister announced the creation of the National Centre for Information Defence (NCID), with a remit to detect, attribute and disrupt hostile state information attacks. There is no doubt the centre is needed. The question is whether it is equipped for the threat as it actually operates today, not as a Whitehall diagram would like it to be. Influence operations are a knotty problem. Detecting them requires the instincts of a journalist and the skills of a data scientist. Responding requires AI capability alongside deep psychology and cultural knowledge. Then come the questions that have no tidy answer: what is legal, what is proportionate, what actually deters an adversary who does not fight in uniform? Some of these skills sit inside government, in intelligence agencies and the civil service. Others live in the private sector, where companies like Valent have spent years tracking networks for banks and other organisations that do not want to see their customers manipulated. We need people who can read a network map and people who can read a room. There is a useful lesson from the armed forces after the Second World War. Land, sea and air power had largely operated as separate worlds, each doing its own job and hoping the results would mesh. Getting them to plan together meant bridging very different institutional cultures, and that thinking is still taught at places like Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, where information is now treated as a domain of warfare in its own right. NCID should absorb that lesson. It must not become a silo. If it concentrates only on hostile states, it will miss an uncomfortable reality: the line between domestic and foreign threats has blurred to the point of invisibility. As we know from tracking the evolution of UK CINs, the underlying model is commercial and serves the highest bidder, whether that is UK insurgents, Russia, or another state that wishes us harm. Disrupting the threat therefore means going after the business model, including the platform revenue schemes that reward influence-for-pay creators. That cannot be done alone. It requires an economic force-multiplier effect, attainable only through collaboration with international partners, especially the European Union. The threat is transnational; the response must be too.
In The Wargame, the government is ultimately left with no option except hitting the Internet kill switch. It is a dramatic, frightening image, and it is exactly the kind of choice that no real British government should ever have to face. The good news is that we are not forced to choose between being manipulated and destroying the open Internet. A properly resourced NCID can protect and disrupt, but it cannot be the only answer. Companies working in the rapidly developing information dynamics space have the ability to help every sector of society—industry, civil society, ordinary citizens—proactively defend their own corner of the information environment. We can build tools that make manipulation visible. We can train people to spot the patterns. We can support credible voices and give good information a fighting chance. Instead of waiting to be hijacked, we can outcompete the hijackers. That is the real battleground: not censorship, but resilience. Russian state propaganda has repeatedly targeted me and Valent for doing this work. They do not want people looking at these networks, and that tells me we are looking in exactly the right place. Bittman, the defector who died in 2018, wrote that active measures were intended to destroy Western societies from within. After a decade of watching Russian influence activity and its local imitators, I believe we are living through the results. But the story is not over. The same understanding that lets me map these networks can be turned to defending against them. We should not be naive: the manipulators are constantly adapting, and there will always be new technologies to exploit. Yet the Wargame is fiction, and it is a warning, not a prophecy. We can see the threat clearly and build the defences, or we can sleepwalk towards the kill switch. That is no choice at all. The quiet work of exposing manipulators, protecting the public square and making good information attractive again is not glamorous, but it is the work that matters. If enough of us do it, we will not need a kill switch—and that is a future worth fighting for.