Imagine waking up one morning to a news article that looks exactly like something from a respected British newspaper. It has the same fonts, the same layout, the same tone. You share it with your family. You comment on it. You feel informed. Then someone tells you the whole thing was fabricated by a foreign intelligence operation, designed to make your community distrust its neighbours. Imagine a video of your MP saying something outrageous. It looks and sounds real, but it is a deepfake, generated by artificial intelligence from a tiny sample of their voice and face. You don’t know it, and you are not alone. This is the world we now inhabit: a world in which hostile states can turn our own channels of communication into weapons against us. The UK government has responded with a major new initiative: the National Centre for Information Defence. Announced by Prime Minister Andy Burnham during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the centre is designed to tackle disinformation and AI-enabled information attacks, particularly those coming from Russia and other hostile states. Burnham’s speech was a stark warning to the international community. He described how Russian operations have used bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and forged branding from British organisations to spread confusion and distrust. He warned that artificial intelligence would make the threat dramatically worse. The announcement may sound like a technical policy detail, but its real subject is ordinary life: the information we consume, the trust we place in institutions, and the relationships that hold our society together.
The new centre represents a significant departure from the old way of doing things. It will bring together intelligence agencies, law enforcement and social media companies under one collaborative framework. That is no small achievement, because these institutions do not always share the same priorities. Intelligence services want secrets; police want evidence; tech platforms want users; governments want order. Yet the threat of information warfare is so severe that these differences must be put aside. The centre’s remit is to detect, attribute and disrupt foreign information attacks. Detection is about spotting false content and hostile campaigns early, before they go viral. Attribution is about determining who is responsible, with confidence and accuracy, so that the public can be told the truth and governments can respond. Disruption is about stopping the attacks: removing fake accounts, shutting down bot networks, exposing manipulated content and warning people before they share it. But the centre is not purely defensive. It also has a mission to help communities build resilience to disinformation. That means working with local groups, schools, faith organisations, charities and journalists to improve media literacy and critical thinking. It is a recognition that the ultimate defence is not a firewall or a law enforcement operation, but a population that is difficult to deceive. This matters because disinformation exploits existing fractures in society: racism, inequality, political polarisation and fear of change. A society that is connected and confident is far harder to destabilise than one that is isolated and suspicious. The centre’s success will depend on how well it understands this human dimension, not just the technical one.
Burnham’s focus on Russia was deliberate and specific. He cited the use of bots designed to amplify divisive messages, fake websites disguised as genuine news portals, falsified newspaper articles and forged branding from British institutions. These are not harmless pranks. They are acts of identity theft against public trust. A fake letter bearing the logo of a government agency could frighten someone into giving away personal data. A fabricated front page from a national newspaper could change the outcome of a debate. A bot army could make an unpopular idea seem mainstream. And with artificial intelligence, these attacks become cheaper, faster and harder to spot. A single operator can generate thousands of unique messages tailored to individual users, complete with flawless grammar, local idioms and personalised references. They can clone a person’s voice from a few seconds of audio and make it appear that they said things they never said. They can produce synthetic video of public figures, not merely in a laboratory but at scale, in dozens of languages simultaneously. The threat is not just to elections, but to every institution that depends on shared truth: healthcare, courts, schools, banks, even family relationships. Burnham warned that AI will significantly increase the scale of the threat, and he is right. This is why the new centre is part of a wider effort to strengthen the UK’s resilience to cyber-attacks and information warfare. It is also why international cooperation matters so much. No country can defend itself alone when attacks are launched from servers in one country, financed in another, amplified through global platforms and written by operatives in a third. Democracies need to share intelligence, warn each other and agree on common standards of behaviour in the digital age.
Yet there is a crucial wrinkle in the plan. If the national response focuses only on the malicious actors, it may miss the struggles of the people they target. Elizabeth Anderson, chief executive of the Digital Poverty Alliance, made this point with clarity and urgency. She cautioned that the response should not focus solely on individual susceptibility to disinformation. In other words, it is not enough to tell people to be more careful online when many people do not have the basic tools to be careful. Anderson said: “If people lack reliable connectivity, the right devices, the skills to navigate online information safely, or the confidence to know what they can trust, they are being asked to participate in an increasingly complex digital world without the tools to do so safely.” This is a profound human truth. The internet is now the public square, but not everyone enters that square as an equal. Some people have high-speed broadband, multiple devices, formal digital education and a network of friends who can fact-check for them. Others have a single old phone with expensive data, patchy coverage, no email address, no ability to download videos and no one to ask for help. They are not less intelligent. They are less equipped. And in an information attack, it is the least equipped who suffer first and worst. Anderson therefore called for digital inclusion to be built into the UK’s resilience infrastructure from the outset. That means reliable connectivity, affordable devices, digital skills, media literacy and trusted support. It means teaching people to recognise the signs of a fake website or a manipulated image, but also making sure they can access the internet at all. Otherwise, she warned, “we risk creating resilience for some while leaving others exposed.” That would be not just a policy failure, but a betrayal of the idea that democracy is for everyone.
Building genuine resilience cannot stop at a single centre in Whitehall. It must reach into every community: schools, libraries, workplaces, places of worship, pubs, WhatsApp groups and kitchen tables. It means supporting local newspapers, which are often the first to notice suspicious stories circulating in their area. It means investing in independent fact-checking organisations and making their work visible to people who do not follow politics. It means designing school curriculums that teach children not only how to use technology but how to question it. It means helping adults who grew up before the internet understand that not every image is true, not every sender is friendly, and not every click is safe. The centre’s promise to help communities build resilience is a step in the right direction, but only if it is funded properly and rooted in local trust. The same week in New York saw another important announcement: the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the Open Data Institute launched a new international programme to help governments prepare their data systems for the use of AI in public services. That may seem separate from information defence, but it is closely connected. As governments use AI for welfare decisions, healthcare, policing and public messaging, they must ensure that data is accurate, transparent and fair. If public services are built on flawed data, they will make mistakes, and those mistakes will be exploited by hostile actors who can point to them as evidence that the whole system is corrupt. Preparedness means having clear rules about data collection, bias, accountability and appeal. It means making sure that AI is not a black box but a tool that can be explained, tested and challenged. In this sense, information defence is not just about stopping false stories; it is about making sure that the true story of public life remains credible.
The National Centre for Information Defence is, at last, a recognition that we are all on the front line. The enemy is not a missile or a tank; it is a lie that spreads faster than the truth. The weapons are not bombs; they are bots, deepfakes, forged logos and poisoned conversations. And the target is far bigger than government. It is the human mind. The centre can help by detecting and disrupting attacks, by revealing what is fake and by holding hostile states accountable. But it cannot solve the deepest problem on its own. The deepest problem is not simply that bad information exists; it is that good information is not always accessible, not always trusted and not always heard. If we want a society that can withstand information warfare, we need to build one in which every person feels they have a stake. That means delivering on digital inclusion, supporting media literacy, strengthening public service journalism and, perhaps most importantly, treating one another with patience and respect. As AI makes the fake more realistic, our demand for humanity must become more insistent. Burnham is right that the scale of the threat will grow. But so can the scale of our response: through global cooperation, through public investment, through education and through ordinary conversations among friends and neighbours. The new centre is a necessary institution, but it will not be the saviour. In the end, the defence of information is not a task for intelligence agencies alone. It is a task for every citizen who refuses to be deceived, and every community that chooses trust over fear.