Disinformation as a Threat to National Security

Abstract

Janis Sarts explores how the contemporary information environment has created a favourable space for the spread of hostile disinformation campaigns. He offers readers a detailed analysis of ‘state actors that use disinformation as a part of influence campaigns, to affect targeted society’, explaining how these actors exploit social weaknesses to disrupt a country’s social cohesion. Sarts highlights how state actors use military and diplomatic means ‘in conjunction with information space activities to achieve desired effects’. Although many of the tools used in hostile campaigns were developed during the height of the Cold War, there is newer emphasis on exploiting opportunities created by the digital environment, such as organised trolling (hostile social media campaigns). Sarts concludes by highlighting four ‘layers of responsibility’ in combatting hostile campaigns, adding that in order to protect societal processes like elections, ‘we need to discover ways of how the same technologies can be used in countering hostile influence and disinformation campaigns’.

The views expressed here are solely those of the author.