One year ago, disinformation and misinformation led to the violent attack on the Capitol that nearly succeeded in toppling US democracy. And all over the western world, fake news has turned countless peaceful citizens into violent anti-vaxxers. Falsehoods are demonstrably no longer just an inconvenience. Talk has, in fact, become so dangerous that this month Sweden launched a government agency for psychological defence. It is time for other countries to consider if they should do the same.
“Careless talk costs lives,” Britain’s government tirelessly reminded its citizens during the Second World War, on posters that have since become iconic. But as popular as the posters are, the message has clearly not sunk in. “I heard Omicron is spreading in the building, so I know what I have to do,” a receptionist recently told me. As she’s unvaccinated, I thought that perhaps the new Covid variant had convinced her to get the jab. But no. “I’ll go home and take vitamin D,” she informed me.
My receptionist acquaintance is a comparatively benign victim of disinformation. But falsehoods about the jab’s alleged harm have triggered such anger among many others that they harass officials and health workers, conduct self-described “citizens’ arrests”, and vandalise vaccination centres. Others, meanwhile, share falsehoods about allegedly stolen elections. The rioters who attacked the Capitol on 6th January last year did not set out to destroy US democracy: on the contrary, they were convinced they were defending it. But as both anti-vaxxers and the 6th January insurrection demonstrate, falsehoods mindlessly shared online and in real life can be devastating. Careless talk has led to countless other preventable crises. Just consider various deadly TikTok challenges or conspiracy theorists’ attacks on 5G antennas.
Sweden has decided to tackle this poison with a new agency for psychological defence. When announcing the planned creation of the agency last year, the Swedish government explained that it would be in charge of coordinating the response to false information across the state machinery, and that it would “directly contribute to strengthening the population’s resilience when it comes to psychological defence.” The threat in question involves disinformation unleashed by hostile countries including Russia and China, but can of course be home-grown as well. Considering that disinformation campaigns often target elections and that even marginal success can have a disproportionate effect, nipping such efforts in the bud is essential—especially since Sweden will be holding parliamentary elections later this year.
Sweden was already conducting important counter-disinformation work as part of its general effort to increase national resilience, building on a highly sophisticated Cold War system known as total defence that involved the armed forces, the wider government, the private sector and civilian volunteer organisations seamlessly working together to protect the country’s national security. The Civil Contingencies Agency, MSB, where psychological defence was located until the end of last year, monitored disinformation directed against Sweden and trained government agencies in how to handle it. In 2018, the MSB published the “If Crisis or War Comes” leaflet, which was sent to every household in the country and, among other things, instructed the public on how to find reliable information.
Sweden, like most other western countries, has a history of psychological defence, whether it involves domestic posters, patriotic films or propaganda directed against the enemy population, but since the end of the Cold War such defence has unsurprisingly been an afterthought. Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 US election campaign through disinformation, though, served as a dramatic reminder that information can be used to harm another country. Today some other national and regional governments are trying to increase their populations’ resilience to disinformation, mostly by including “information literacy” in school curricula. This may have had some effect, but considering the proliferation of dangerous falsehoods among adults, teaching children is clearly not enough.
Consider the UK. What if Russia unleashed a disinformation campaign against, say, certain British banks that caused savers to, en masse, withdraw their savings? What if previously unknown Chinese news outlets began spreading reports about a deadly new virus? Or what if mysterious TikTok accounts started telling teenagers in western democracies about conspiracies at the heart of their countries’ systems? What if a mysterious group spread news, QAnon-like, of a secret society out to enslave ordinary citizens? Without information literacy skills, members of modern society don’t stand a chance against the disinformation constantly directed their way. Governments, in turn, risk seeing their very substantial investments in military defence undermined by a population disastrously misled and divided by falsehoods. That means psychological defence must include two parts: information-literate citizens and governments able to detect disinformation campaigns and perhaps even strike back against the offending country. (I call the latter second-strike communications.)
Like Sweden, the UK should clearly be prioritising psychological defence of the realm. Considering the government’s recent promise to embrace a whole-of-society approach to national security, the establishment of such a psychological defence agency seems entirely logical. With the UK lacking Sweden’s history of total defence, it is, alas, unlikely. But how about offering information literacy classes at public libraries? Such courses could end with an exam, with successful participants receiving a certificate. Considering how badly disinformation affects not just individuals but organisations, having an information literacy certificate would make applicants extremely attractive to employers. And the courses would be attractive to citizens in their own right. In an information economy, who wants to stand out as information-illiterate?
