In early October, with Europe still reeling from a summer of strange political weather, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham stepped forward and said the thing that many leaders had only hinted at: Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum. He did not produce new evidence, and he did not pretend the question was simple. Researchers who studied the Brexit vote had found armies of bots, but they could not prove exactly how much those bots changed a single vote. Burnham then widened the frame, warning that Russian disinformation was seeping into German politics. To many observers, the far-right AfD’s decisive victory in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6 looked like proof that the strategy was working. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas called it part of Russia’s increasingly brazen hybrid attacks. German officials linked the same campaign to an August drone attack on Leipzig airport, one with explosives that failed to detonate; the Russian government accused Germany of planting the evidence. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave a grim speech on German Unity Day, describing an internet where absurd nonsense is slickly presented, where every message is intrusive and omnipresent, and where you cannot tell if you are reading a person or a bot. Burnham said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had told him about the AfD’s financial and political ties to Russia. Similar alarms were sounding across the continent: France’s foreign minister said protests were being exploited by hostile narratives from Russia, China, Iran and the MAGA community; Italy’s defence minister called recent riots in Milan a manifestation of hybrid war. The message is no longer whispered. It is shouted from podiums.
What does hybrid warfare actually mean? In the European Union’s careful definition, it refers to coordinated harmful activities planned and carried out with malign intent, aimed at undermining a state or institution through varied and combined means. The goal is not just to change someone’s mind. It is to make democracy unworkable by fracturing society, breeding distrust in institutions and paralysing political decision-making. This is a new evolution of the propaganda wars of the twentieth century. The old image of a Big Brother state forcing citizens to believe one official truth is gone. What has replaced it is a decentralised machine that works from the bottom up, moving through networks of allure rather than chains of command. Online platforms do the heavy lifting, with bot farms and AI-generated images amplifying messages. The emotional fuel is grievance—a sense of thwarted entitlement, of being ignored, of losing something that should be yours. This fuel is found at both ends of the socio-economic ladder. Citizen rage is being harvested and organised for purposes most citizens would never endorse. Even tech billionaires, as journalist Kara Swisher puts it, feed the “grievance industrial complex”. Defending against this is hard because it rarely touches violence and does not directly stuff ballot boxes. It works by setting the terms of political competition and lifting certain voices above others. European leaders now talk about this in the language of defence. Burnham, in his debut speech to the UN General Assembly, announced a National Centre for Information Defence, led by security chiefs who would detect and intercept hostile state information attacks. There is no national security without a strong, cohesive society, he said, and Russia was spending roughly £1.3 billion a year on campaigns to sway electorates. But any such centre immediately meets a wall of suspicion. When the Biden administration tried to create a Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, conservative media quickly hung the label “Ministry of Truth” around its neck. Within three weeks the phrase had been repeated in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, The Hill and Newsweek; Fox News had branded the board’s director the “disinformation czar”. Burnham’s choice of “defence” and “centre” was clearly shaped by that episode. Yet Nigel Farage still had the playbook ready, posting a video that accused Burnham of setting up a “Ministry of Truth” and calling the Russian interference claims a ruse. There is no evidence that Burnham has ever contemplated cancelling elections. The accusation itself was the tactic.
There is a comforting belief that the outrage climate is a social media invention, something that will fade if we all delete our apps. The article argues that the public sphere is compromised in deeper and older ways. Politicians and traditional media remain prime movers, often playing the role of what Cold War strategists used to call “useful idiots”—people who spread propaganda without understanding its origins. Populist leaders with little governing experience borrow the language of Trump and Putin while telling domestic audiences that immigration is the greatest national threat. Journalists chasing a good story are drawn to these exaggerated personalities, because a politician who shouts gets more airtime than a parliamentarian who thinks. A Pew Research Centre finding that 67% of Americans get their news from social media is often cited, even dramatized in the film The Social Reckoning, but that news is not spontaneously generated. It originates in television and print, where the initial spin is applied. Social media amplifies what the old media have already shaped. This is where a strange trick enters the game: semantic hijacking. The idea is to take morally loaded words and transfer them from one side to another. In September, US Vice President JD Vance responded to the expulsion of major news organisations from the White House press pool by accusing those organisations of propaganda. Nigel Farage, a politician who has built his career on disruption, accuses the British government of authoritarianism. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty says words mean what he tells them to mean. That is precisely the logic of this tactic. When every side begins screaming identical accusations at the other, issuing ethical denunciations becomes useless. Moral outrage, instead of clarifying, becomes just another weapon in the same propaganda war. Those who lecture from the high ground are, in the end, pouring gasoline on flames.
The article brings the argument home to Australia, where policymakers often treat a geopolitical problem as a purely domestic one. After the attack on federal MP Helen Haines, politicians across the country talked openly about the constant threat to their safety and their families. A security expert, John Coyne of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the issue was no longer just protecting politicians; it was protecting the democratic fabric of the nation. An ASPI report from March 2026 warned that foreign interference thrives on social fractures. Fear and cynicism, the report said, make it easier to coerce, recruit and launder narratives. It recommended a “national resilience communications lead” in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and a unifying national story large enough to contain disagreement. But the report did not fully confront the role of foreign influencers or the rise of political parties that deliberately manufacture chaos. The same dynamic plays out in Europe. When protests in France turned violent, Donald Trump proclaimed “France is burning!” and blamed immigration. Emmanuel Macron responded by condemning leaders who were “in campaign mode”, pointing at Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The article’s crucial observation is that the so-called outrage economy is not primarily created by manipulating facts. Disinformation becomes truly dangerous when it is installed inside a motivational narrative—a story that makes anger feel righteous. Claims that migrants are stealing jobs, or that equity policies are designed to disadvantage white men, are forms of grievance phishing. Corrective statistics rarely work because the believer is not lost in a factual error; they are living inside a story. The recommendation is to name these narratives for what they are: attempts to steal attention, exploit resentment and corrupt public reason. That kind of naming may do more than a thousand fact-checks.
To see why fact-checks fall short, the article turns to Peter Pomerantsev, a Ukrainian-born writer and former producer for Russian Television. Pomerantsev argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the information problem. Chasing individual lies is almost useless when the entire information space has been poisoned. The goal, he says, is an abuse of the information space that makes democratic practice impossible. He describes his first visit to the new headquarters of Russian Television, a compound the size of five football fields, built by Vladimir Putin as the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda. Pomerantsev’s job was to help import Western reality TV to Russia. One project was a Russian version of The Apprentice, which failed because in Russia, as he puts it wryly, that is not how you make money. The joke cuts both ways: it is not how Donald Trump makes money either. Russian Television and Fox News, founded just four years apart, were learning from each other. Russian state TV turned propaganda into exuberant celebrity chat; Fox News built a culture of adulation around chosen political figures while presenting opponents as crazed ideologues. This is not entertainment, Pomerantsev insists. It is propaganda as a comprehensive form of information pollution, aimed at taking over the machinery of the state. Television remains the primary vehicle because it supplies personality, narrative and dramatic tension. National broadcasters should therefore be scrutinised more closely. The BBC has been accused of giving disproportionate airtime to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. In Australia, the ABC reliably covers every inflammatory statement made by One Nation. The principle of balanced coverage is being perverted into a reason to give the loudest and most divisive voices even more space. In a propaganda war, the ballot box is the front line. The loop from media coverage to opinion polls and back again is a vicious circle, and every election tightens the noose.
Amid all this gloom, the article finds a useful model in Finland. Europe’s alarm over the AfD breakthrough in Germany shows how far the slide has gone: from worrying about national security to recognising a clear and present danger to national sovereignty. Finland has lived beside a superpower that constantly tries to erode its stability, and it has responded with an unusual strategy: education. It was one of the first countries in Europe to introduce civic education programs aimed at countering political manipulation, starting in early childhood. Its national media literacy policies received a major update this year in response to the intensified risk from Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Finnish approach is built on core values of trust, openness, sustainability and equality. It treats literacy in all forms of public media as a key civic competence, taught from the earliest years to the most advanced levels of schooling. But the article warns against assuming that education is a magic pill. More than 30 percent of the AfD’s vote in Saxony-Anhalt came from university graduates, and the party was founded by two economics professors. Leading propaganda influencers in America and Russia—Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin—are masters of sophisticated critical theory. You do not need a degree in linguistics to challenge Humpty Dumpty’s claim to control meaning. You need common sense and a commitment to plain speaking. The Finnish view is that the values needed to sustain a nation are actually quite simple: don’t insult people, don’t claim what isn’t yours, don’t be greedy, don’t tell lies. Inflammatory propaganda appeals to the infantile dimensions of human personality. That is why Finland’s measures of redress begin at age six. It may sound almost too simple, but in an age of algorithmic outrage, the ability to recognise manipulation is as essential as any weapon in the national arsenal. If foreign powers can weaponise grievance, we can at least raise citizens who are harder to fool. That is how a democratic society fights back—not by building ministries of truth, but by teaching people to spot the lies.