National security is usually depicted as something mysterious and distant: satellites, secret agencies, encrypted messages, closed doors. But UK prime minister Andy Burnham used a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September to turn that picture upside down. He announced that his security chiefs would begin work on a new National Centre for Information Defence, an institution created to respond to what he described as Russian attempts to spread lies and disinformation. The centre, Burnham said, would “detect, attribute and disrupt” foreign information attacks. Then he added a sentence that sounded less like a strategic doctrine and more like a family conversation: “Faced with this information warfare, security starts in every home.” Think about what that really means. It means the front line is not just a border or a server farm. It is the feed you scroll through in the morning and the group chat you share things with at night. It means a headline designed to make you angry is not simply content; it can be a weapon. It means the people most responsible for democratic resilience are not only officials in London or intelligence agencies in secure buildings, but ordinary citizens trying to make sense of a chaotic information environment. Burnham did not explain exactly what the National Centre for Information Defence would look like, who would run it, or how it would work. But if the starting point is truly the home, then the public must sit at the centre of the plan—not as passive receivers of government warnings, but as active participants in their own defence. Sweden, it turns out, has been building exactly that kind of defence for generations, and its experience offers a powerful lesson to any country still trying to catch up with this strange new battlefield.
Sweden’s approach is known as psychological defence, and its central idea is that an informed public is one of the most important protections a country has against foreign manipulation. This is not a modern internet-era invention. It dates to 1954, when the Swedish government set up a board for psychological defence to study propaganda and keep people informed during the Cold War. The board’s spirit survived in a line from Sweden’s household crisis booklet, carried over from wartime editions: “All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false.” That sentence was written to inoculate people against one of the oldest tricks in warfare: the enemy’s attempt to convince you that the struggle is over, that everyone has given up, that resistance is pointless. The board was eventually abolished in 2008, after the Cold War had become a distant memory and the urgency had faded. But Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 began to change minds again. And in January 2022, just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden opened a new psychological defence agency. It is deliberately small: about 80 staff, with a budget of around 150 million Swedish krona—roughly £11.3 million—and it operates under the jurisdiction of Sweden’s defence ministry. In wartime, its job is to stop an enemy from breaking down the nation’s will to resist. In peacetime, its director, Magnus Hjort, says the main aim is strengthening public preparedness. The agency’s public position is that strong psychological defence rests on an independent media, a mutually trusting society, and a well-informed population. That is a very different definition of security from the one we usually hear, and it may be exactly the definition the modern moment demands.
The practical work of Sweden’s psychological defence agency is less like a ministry and more like a civic education programme with a substantial budget. It runs an awareness campaign called “Don’t Be Fooled,” which boils effective resistance down to four simple habits: watch out for content designed to make you angry or afraid, think twice before sharing it, check the source, and look for verifiable information. It is hard to imagine a more direct summary of what it means to be a responsible consumer of information in the digital age. The agency also publishes a handbook with practical advice on how to spot sketchy websites and identify bots. It runs regular advertisements on public transport and social media, so its lessons are not buried in a government portal but encountered on the way to work, while waiting for a bus, in the middle of an ordinary day. It tailors its work to groups that may be more vulnerable. It works with civil society on a Youth Resilience Hub to prepare young people for information attacks. It makes educational films for older people about election interference. It runs awareness campaigns in Swedish, English, and Arabic, recognising that a diverse society needs messages in the languages people actually speak. It trains councils and businesses, offered courses to municipal and regional officials ahead of Sweden’s September 2026 elections, and provides free training to journalists on how to spot influence operations. And its message reaches every letterbox in the country. In November 2024, Sweden posted 5.2 million copies of the agency’s latest national crisis booklet, which warns that disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing mistrust happen every day. It does not tell people to be afraid. It tells them to be aware, because in information warfare the citizen is the target.
This approach has been tested under pressure. In early 2022, within two months of the agency’s opening, an Egypt-based news outlet falsely claimed that Swedish social services were kidnapping Muslim children. The claim spread quickly and set off several protests across Sweden. It was precisely the kind of story designed to exploit fear and suspicion, to drive a wedge between communities and public institutions. The agency’s response was not to suppress the story or send anyone to prison. It went public about the campaign and about the weaknesses it was exploiting. According to Mikael Tofvesson, the agency’s deputy head, media outlets then investigated the claim, and many protest organisers distanced themselves from it. The manipulation was exposed, and its power was broken. More recently, staff at Sweden’s central bank spotted suspicious accounts on X after taking part in an agency-led exercise. The accounts turned out to belong to Holiday, an AI-powered network of about 1,200 fake accounts that produced more than 50,000 posts designed to worsen polarisation on subjects like immigration. The network was eventually removed from X, and the agency published its findings—not to celebrate its own cleverness, but to help the public recognise the same tactics elsewhere. These examples reveal a pattern. The agency names the manipulation, explains how it works, and lets the light do the disinfecting. It treats information attacks not as something to hide from citizens, but as something to study and teach about. The goal is not to protect people from information by controlling it. The goal is to strengthen people so they can see through it themselves. In a sense, the agency works like an immune system: it cannot stop every virus, but it helps the body recognise the next one.
There is growing evidence that this approach actually changes how people respond to disinformation. Researchers call it prebunking: teaching people about manipulation tricks before they meet them. In a large 2022 study of US residents, short videos explaining common information manipulation techniques improved viewers’ ability to recognise those techniques in other content. This is not a guarantee that everyone will become immune; disinformation is a constantly shifting threat. But it suggests that a few minutes of simple, honest education can make a measurable difference. Sweden’s own surveys point in the same direction. In the agency’s 2025 citizen survey, 58% of Swedes said they saw foreign information manipulation as a concrete threat—the highest share of any threat listed in the survey. At the same time, trust in society’s ability to withstand those threats remained high. That is a remarkable combination: high awareness and high confidence, rather than panic on one side or denial on the other. The UK is only beginning to have this conversation. Burnham’s announcement was immediately attacked by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who labelled the proposed centre an Orwellian “ministry of information” and warned that it would be used to clamp down on free speech. It is a familiar criticism, and Sweden has had to answer it too. Its agency safeguards against censorship by dealing only with foreign influence. It does not police domestic debate. It treats citizens who repeat falsehoods as people to help, not punish. As the agency itself proclaims, in a free society people have the right to be wrong. That may be the most important sentence in this entire conversation, because it shows that preparing the public does not have to mean controlling what the public thinks.
For the UK, the question is not whether to have an information defence centre, but what kind of centre it should be. Burnham has already named the groups most at risk of foreign information manipulation: young people not in work and people struggling with the cost of living. They are targets because they have reason to feel left out and unheard, and disinformation campaigns thrive on that feeling. Yet the UK’s official preparedness website currently says nothing about disinformation, and no part of government has clear responsibility for preparing the public. That is a serious gap. Sweden gave the job to a dedicated agency, and the new National Centre for Information Defence is the obvious UK candidate to follow that example. Its remit is still being settled, which means there is still time to build public preparedness into its core mandate. Detecting, attributing, and disrupting information attacks will always matter, and the centre should absolutely do those things. But Sweden’s experience suggests that the strongest defence is a public that recognises an attack when it sees one. The next time a headline makes your pulse quicken, the question is not just whether it is true. It is whether someone designed it to make you react. In a democracy, that is not a reason to shut down debate. It is a reason to give people better tools. If security really does start at home, then the first line of defence might be something as simple as a pause before sharing—a moment to think, to check, to ask who benefits from your anger. That small pause is where national security and individual responsibility meet.