When Andy Burnham stepped onto the United Nations stage in New York City for his first major international address as UK Prime Minister, he didn’t open with pleasantries or diplomatic platitudes. Instead, he delivered a stark warning: the world is losing a battle for truth, and Britain intends to fight back. His speech painted a chilling picture of a coordinated, insidious campaign waged by the Kremlin, one that spends around £1.3 billion every year to manipulate information and distort reality. Burnham described a digital battlefield where bots churn out lies, fake websites masquerade as legitimate news outlets, and forged articles…

Let’s be honest right from the start: the threat is not imaginary. The 21st century has turned information into a weapon of war, and the British public is standing in the trenches. You can feel it in the comments section under almost any news story, in the algorithms that reward fury, in the fake accounts that swarm every controversy within minutes. Every day brings a new barrage of malevolent online content, cooked up in the troll factories of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, and aimed squarely at the fissures in our society. This is not Whitehall paranoia, whatever the sceptics say.…