Let’s be honest: when someone starts talking about an “epistemological crisis,” it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over. It sounds like something from a philosophy seminar, not a conversation about the survival of democracy. But Barack Obama’s warning in November 2020 was not abstract or academic. He was describing a world where the basic ability to tell what’s true from what’s false is breaking down. And if that breakdown continues, he argued, the “marketplace of ideas” cannot work — because a marketplace only functions when buyers and sellers can trust the product. That warning has aged terribly well. Since then, the enemies of democracy have not only noticed this vulnerability; they have built entire strategies around exploiting it. That is what the recent speech by Andy Burnham at the United Nations was really about. The UK prime minister — in the article’s framing — accused Russia of waging an “industrial-scale assault” on the country’s information environment. This is not just a matter of a few trolls posting nasty comments. It involves bot armies, fake websites, fabricated stories, and coordinated campaigns designed to interfere in elections, stir up ethnic tension, and poison relations between communities. The scale is industrial, and the intent is hostile. In response, Burnham announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence, a new body meant to protect British society from these deliberate efforts to sabotage the very idea of shared truth. This is, on its face, a long overdue investment in civil defence. But as important as this announcement is, it raises a deeper question: can you defend a society from external lies when the society has already poisoned its own wells?
Burnham is absolutely right to identify Russia as a serious threat. But he told only part of the story, and the missing part matters enormously. The Kremlin would be wasting its time and money if it weren’t for a few convenient accomplices. Think about the chain of transmission. Disinformation has to be created, yes, but it also has to be spread. Where does it spread? On large American social media platforms that have decided, again and again, that engagement is more important than truth. Then it has to be received. That requires a complicit audience — people in Britain who are all too willing to share offensive material, to amplify it, to add their own spin, and to treat it as revelation. And then there is the market. Spreading pernicious propaganda is not just an ideological hobby; it is lucrative. Hate generates clicks. Clicks generate advertising revenue. Revenue keeps the platform alive. In other words, information warfare is only effective when it exploits structural vulnerabilities in the target society. A lie about migrants taking over a town lands on fertile ground if domestic politicians have already spent years talking about a migrant invasion. A fake story about a government conspiracy to suppress truth gains traction if trust in institutions has already been systematically eroded. You cannot blame Moscow alone for a fire that your own hands spent years preparing the tinder for. This is not to let Russia off the hook. It is to say that hostile foreign actors are not the whole problem. They are a virus that attacks an already weakened immune system.
The evidence for this is not hard to find. Earlier this year, the Guardian published analysis of accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that were posting about racially aggravated rioting in Belfast and serious civil disorder in Southampton. More than half of those accounts were based outside the UK. That sounds like a foreign plot, and to some extent it is. But here’s the twist: among the seven most-read tweets about these events, one came from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who owns X. Musk has spent considerable time promoting a dark and distorted vision of Britain as a failed state, a country whose culture is being corroded by mass migration. His platform, meanwhile, has become an invaluable megaphone for far-right activists. It has been used to mobilise masked men into mobs that obstruct roads, intimidate ordinary people, and threaten asylum claimants at British ports. Last year, Musk addressed a rally organised by Tommy Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — where he called for the Labour government to be removed. Earlier this year, Robinson travelled to Moscow on a trip funded by the Musk Foundation. He said the purpose of the trip was to “see the beauty of a civilised society.” Read that again. A far-right activist from Britain, funded by the foundation of a billionaire who owns one of the largest communication platforms in the world, travels to Moscow — the capital of a regime that is actively waging information warfare against the West — to admire the civilisation on display. It is almost too absurd to be believable. And yet it happened. That is not a foreign plot. That is a domestic far-right movement, an American billionaire, and a Russian state conveniently finding each other in the same dark corner of the internet.
So why did Burnham not address this side of the anti-democracy equation in his speech? The article suggests a diplomatic reason. To name the role of American tech giants under the nose of the American president would be considered impolite, or worse. The current president, Donald Trump, is himself an originator and disseminator of falsehoods online. He has no interest in holding Big Tech to account for the damage it does to democracy, and he has a history of attacking anyone who criticises his allies. Transatlantic diplomacy is a delicate game. A British prime minister cannot simply stand at the United Nations and say, “Your president’s close associate is undermining my country.” That would be a diplomatic earthquake. And so the speech focused on the Kremlin instead. It is understandable, in a narrow political sense. But it must not become a permanent pattern. If the government’s policy focus stops where diplomatic discomfort begins, then the National Centre for Information Defence will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back. You cannot build a credible information defence strategy if you refuse to talk about the single most powerful vector through which disinformation reaches the public. It’s like building a sea wall while refusing to mention the tide. Good luck with that.
The uncomfortable truth is that any serious strategy to build democratic resilience has to recognise the role of domestic extremists and the digital privileges they enjoy thanks to American technology companies. Russian bots are dangerous, but they are dangerous because they can ride on the coattails of local radicals. Russian fake websites are dangerous, but they are dangerous because people in Britain are already sharing their own versions of the same lies. The terrain has been fertilised by domestic politics, by celebrity propagandists, by talk radio shock jocks, by politicians who use the language of invasion and betrayal, by social media algorithms that reward outrage and punish nuance. A National Centre for Information Defence can track bot networks and expose foreign interference. It can publish reports and issue warnings. But unless it also tackles the domestic ecosystem of supply and demand, it will be treating symptoms. The arsonist may be paid by Moscow, but the fire is burning in our own house. You can chase the arsonist, but you also need to stop storing so much flammable material under the stairs. This is not about censoring legitimate opinion. It is about understanding that democracy depends on a shared foundation of basic facts. When a substantial portion of the population believes that migrants are being flown in to replace them, or that the government is secretly plotting to destroy the country, or that violence is a reasonable response to political disagreement, then the entire democratic experiment begins to wobble.
None of this means that Burnham is wrong. On the contrary, the threat from Russia is real, and the creation of the National Centre for Information Defence is a genuinely overdue step forward. The country needs institutional tools to detect and counter hostile influence operations. It needs better understanding of how foreign actors manipulate social media. It needs coordination between intelligence agencies, law enforcement, tech companies, and civil society. All of that is necessary. But it is not sufficient. The deeper lesson of this whole episode is that democracy cannot be defended by a single agency, no matter how well funded or well intentioned. It has to be defended by citizens who can tolerate ambiguity, who can hold two uncomfortable ideas in their heads at once, who have enough trust in institutions to reject conspiracy theories, and who are willing to argue fiercely without wanting to destroy the people they are arguing with. That is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. And it cannot be solved by building a new centre, no matter how good its name might be. So, yes, let’s build the infrastructure. Let’s expose the bots and the fake websites and the foreign interference. But let’s also look in the mirror. The truth might be uncomfortable, but that is exactly why we need to be able to recognise it. Because if we cannot tell what’s true from what’s false, then the marketplace of ideas doesn’t just fail. It becomes a black market of fears, manufactured by the few and consumed by the many, until nobody knows what is real at all.