Friday essay: forget Big Brother, propaganda is now a form of hybrid warfare

In early October, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham made the categorical assertion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum. He did not specify whether he had new evidence. Levels of influence on actual voting outcomes are difficult to identify with any accuracy. Early studies on the Brexit vote had tracked relevant bot activity, but provided no clarity on its relationship to voter intention. Burnham also claimed that disinformation was “emanating from Russia into German politics”. Judging by the performance of extremist parties in recent elections, Russian strategies would seem to be working all too well. When the German far-right AfD Party came out far ahead of its rivals in the Saxony-Anhalt election on September 6 this year, shock waves spread across Europe. This was not just a win for a particular party, but for propaganda itself. In an address to the Lithuanian parliament the following day, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, linked the result to “Russia’s increasingly brazen and reckless hybrid attacks”. She was echoing the terms of German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who described an August 4 attack on Leipzig airport involving two drones, one armed with explosives that failed to detonate, as part of a campaign of “destabilisation, disinformation, threats, sabotage and aggression” on the part of the Russian Federation – which in turn accused Germany of planting the evidence. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, speaking on Germany Unity Day (October 3), warned of “the never-ending omnipresence and intrusiveness of every conceivable message” on the internet, and “the slick presentation of the most absurd nonsense the shrill emotionalisation, the uncertainty as to whether a human being or a machine is writing, whether a person or a bot is posting”. Burnham claimed German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had expressed concerns to him about the AfD party’s ties to Russia, including financial ties. “I think we’ve been too much on the back foot,” Burnham said, “and we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas.” Similar claims have been made about unrest in other European countries. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot claimed that the recent student protests were being “exploited by hostile narratives emanating from Russia, China, Iran, and the MAGA community”. According to Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, recent riots in Milan were also manifestations of a “hybrid war” being waged against European nations. Andy Burnham has accused Russia of interfering with the 2016 Brexit referendum. Carlos Jasso/AAP A new form of propaganda Propaganda has increasingly become a complicated transnational problem. It is more than a question of hostile foreign actors interfering in the politics of other nations. The goal of disinformation campaigns is not simply to mislead, but to generate antagonism, damage the social fabric of a nation and weaken sovereignty by undermining confidence in institutions of law and government. In the definition adopted by the EU, hybrid threats are “coordinated harmful activities that are planned and carried out with malign intent”. The aim is to undermine a state or institution through varied and combined means, threatening democracy by “targeting its core values and aiming to fracture society and undermine political decision making”. Hybrid warfare can be seen as an evolution of the propaganda wars of the 20th century. But it is no longer the top-down mind control of an Orwellian Big Brother regime. It works from the bottom up, through networks of allure rather than systems of command, gaining influence through online platforms, its disinformation campaigns amplified through bot farms and AI generated images. The hooks are grievance and a sense of thwarted entitlement, and they work at the upper and lower ends of the socio-economic ladder. Citizen enragement is being weaponized to serve agendas of which most citizens are unaware. Even tech billionaires participate in what US journalist Kara Swisher calls “the grievance industrial complex”. It is difficult to defend against because it is generally conducted at a remove from violent action and does not involve direct electoral sabotage. It works through influencing the terms on which elections are fought and assisting the voices of preferred candidates. This new evolution calls for new counter-strategies. European leaders are explicitly framing these as matters to be aligned with national defence. Burnham opened his debut speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 22 with the announcement of a new National Centre for Information Defence, led by security chiefs with responsibility to detect and intercept “hostile state information attacks”. “There is no national security without a strong, cohesive society,” Burnham said. Russia, he claimed, was spending £1.3 billion (A$2.45 billion) a year on influencing campaigns. Such interventions aimed to sway the electorate in ways that could be disastrous to its own interests. Brexit was a case in point. Politicians and legacy media There is a prevalent view that the outrage climate is created by social media, but the public sphere is compromised in other ways. Politicians and legacy media remain prime movers, often playing the role of “useful idiots” – a Cold War term to describe those who disseminated communist propaganda without any idea of the realities behind it. Populist leaders with little experience in policy and government align themselves with the views of Trump or Putin, while appealing to a domestic audience with alarmist claims about immigration as the great national threat. Journalists looking for “the story” will often prefer these exaggerated personalities over more sober parliamentarians. A finding by the Pew Research Centre that 67% of Americans get their news from social media has been widely cited, including in climactic scenes from the recent film The Social Reckoning, the sequel to Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network about the founding of Facebook. But news on those platforms is generally not spontaneously generated. It has sources in television and print media, which is often where it gets its initial spin. When Burnham announced his new centre for information defence, his advisors must have been aware that there are no free kicks in this arena. In April 2022, for example, the Biden administration announced the US Department of Homeland Security was establishing a Disinformation Governance Board, the purpose of which was to protect the integrity of the democratic political process against the threat of coordinated disinformation campaigns. Within 24 hours, a headline in the National Review rebadged it as “Biden’s Ministry of Truth”. The Orwell reference was irresistible. Over the next three weeks, it was repeated in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, The Hill and Newsweek. Fox News mounted a campaign targeting the board’s director, Nina Jancowicz, dubbing her the “disinformation czar”. Burham’s replacement of “governance” with “defence” and “board” with “centre” goes some way to heading off this kind of attack, as does the strategy of nominating unspecified “security chiefs” rather than a named individual as responsible for its direction. Nevertheless, when Burnham made his announcement, Reform leader Nigel Farage had the playbook in hand. Farage posted a video on X claiming “Andy Burnham is setting up a Ministry of Truth to clamp down on free speech”. Burnham’s allusions to Russian interference were a “ruse”, Farage asserted. What he had learned, he declared, “whether it’s funding of parties, whether it’s cancelling elections, is never ever trust this authoritarian government”. There are no grounds for suggesting that the prospect of cancelling elections is anywhere on Burnham’s horizons. The insinuation was a bid to raise the stakes. Nigel Farage described claims of Russian interference as a ‘ruse’. Tolga Akmen/AAP The specific tactic here is mirror politics: charge your opponent with your own failings, crimes and misdemeanours, and do so with such shrill insistence they are forced to waste air time on weak denials. The practice is known as “semantic hijacking”. It seeks to transfer ethically loaded terms from one side to another. In September, for example, US Vice President JD Vance defended the expulsion of several major news organisations from the White House press pool – including CNN, Politico and MS NOW – by accusing them of “propaganda”. This tactic does deeper mischief than disinformation. Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, declares that words mean what he tells them to mean. Issuing ethical denunciations becomes counterproductive in such an environment. Rhetorical weaponry almost always backfires in a propaganda war. Furious opponents point fingers at each other, shouting identical accusations. Because the grievance dynamic is born of a sense of moral dispossession, those delivering lectures from the moral high-ground are effectively throwing gasoline onto the flames. Protecting democracy In Australia, there is a tendency to treat a geopolitical problem as a domestic one. In the wake of the recent attack on federal MP Helen Haines, politicians around the country have been speaking about living with the constant threat to their safety and that of their families in a climate of intensifying political rage. Though the Haines incident itself may not be symptomatic of the larger forces at work, it has drawn attention to questions at the heart of national security. Interviewed on ABC Radio National Breakfast, John Coyne, director of National Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), said that the number of threats had drastically increased and that the challenge faced by ASPI was more than about protection of politicians, it was “about protection of the democratic fabric of our nation”. An ASPI report, issued in March 2026, flags the dangers posed by foreign interference. Social fractures provide fertile ground for manipulation and covert influencing operations, it states, “because fear and cynicism make it easier to coerce, recruit and launder narratives”. Its recommendations include the appointment of “national resilience communications lead” in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the creation of a unifying national story large enough to hold disagreement. The report is concerned with extremist views as a security and public order problem. But it does not address the role played by foreign influencers, or the rise of parties and leaders who deliberately stir up divisive hostilities in order to create the impression of a country heading towards chaos. When protests in France turned violent in October, US President Donald Trump declared “France is burning!” and blamed the crisis on out-of-control immigration. In remarks made in Kansas on the campaign trail, he widened the claims. “When I look at France, when you look at Italy, when you look at the turmoil and the hatred,” he said, “[…] that’s about people coming into the countries that hate the country.” French President Emmanuel Macron responded with a condemnation of “leaders who are in campaign mode”, referring to Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had made inflammatory comments about Hamas involvement. What the ASPI report terms the “outrage economy” is not primarily created through the manipulation of facts. Disinformation is weaponised when it is installed in motivational narrative. That, first and foremost, is where we should direct attention. Claims that migrants are stealing our jobs, or that equity and inclusion policies are designed to disadvantage white males, are forms of grievance phishing. Naming them accordingly could have more impact than serving up corrective statistics. French president Emmanuel Macron has condemned the interventions of foreign political leaders. Hannah McKay/AAP The information problem According to propaganda analyst Peter Pomerantsev, we have misunderstood the information problem. Targeting instances of disinformation, he argues, has little effect when we are dealing with “an abuse of the information space that makes democratic practice impossible”. A Ukrainian-born journalist who lived in Russia from 2000 to 2010 and worked as a producer for Russian Television, Pomerantsev is in a unique position to offer a perspective on the radical change in the culture of propaganda that accompanied Vladimir Putin’s ascension to the presidency. His recent work as a fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, and then at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, has involved working on counter-strategies with teams of journalists and focus groups in Ukraine, and providing advice to major international bodies, including NATO, the EU and the UK Foreign Office. In his 2017 book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (the title is a devastating synopsis of the new doctrine), Pomerantsev describes his first meeting at the new headquarters of Russian Television. It’s a precinct rather than a building – the size of five football fields – established by Putin to serve as, in Pomerantsev’s words, “the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda”. Pomerantsev’s job, as an English-speaking producer, was to help bring the reality show to Russia. One of the projects he worked on was a Russian version of The Apprentice. Unlike the American version, it had a star who actually understood how to run a business. Though it was a sleek production, it bombed, because “in Russia that is not how you make money”. The joke hits back: that is not how Donald Trump makes money either. Peter Pomerantsev. Jindřich Nosek, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA While Russian moguls were trying out the commercial principles of American television, American television was sliding towards the political culture of Russia. Russian Television and Fox News, founded four years previously in 1996, were learning from each other. The former was serving up propaganda narratives as exuberant social chat between glamorised celebrity presenters; the latter was creating a culture of adulation around political figures they supported, while portraying their opposition as crazed ideologues. Make no mistake, Pomerantsev warns, this is not about infotainment. This is propaganda as “an abuse of the information space to make democratic practice impossible”. The goal is “to take over the machinery of the state”. What is being spread is not misinformation or disinformation as identifiable modules of communication, but a form of comprehensive information pollution. Television remains a primary vehicle for propaganda: the source of its personality appeal, its narrative drive and its dramatic tension. The role of national broadcast organisations should come under more scrutiny. The BBC has been criticised for giving disporportionate air time to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. In Australia, the ABC is quick to report every inflammatory statement made by One Nation. The principle of according airtime to all representatives of political opinion is disingenuously applied to warrant prioritising airtime for voices that will stir up strong reaction. When foreign influence is at work, frequency and level of exposure in all media is critically at issue. The ballot box is the front line in a propaganda war, and the feedback loop from media coverage to opinion polls and back to media coverage of the polling is a vicious circle. Responding to the danger Alarm in Europe over the Saxony-Anhalt result in Germany is an indication of the slide from concerns about national security to the realisation there is a clear and present danger to national sovereignty. Finland, with a neighbouring superpower constantly working to erode its political stability, has taken a lead in recognising and responding to this danger. It was one of the first countries in Europe to introduce civic education programs to counter political manipulation, starting in early childhood. Its national policies on media literacy received a major update this year, in response to the intensified risk environment created by the ongoing Russian assault on Ukraine. Finland’s comprehensive approach is designed to build social unity and civic consciousness through core values of trust, openness, sustainability and equality. Policy statements stress that literacy across all forms of public media and communications is a key civic competence to be foregrounded from the earliest to the most advanced stages of education. The thinking is strikingly different from common assumptions about the role of education in countering political extremism. University education is no magic pill. Over 30% of the AfD vote in Saxony-Anhalt came from graduates and the party was founded by two professors of economics. Leading propaganda influencers in America and Russia, such as Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin, are well versed in the sophistries of critical theory. You don’t need a degree in linguistics to challenge Humpty Dumpty’s bid for mastery over the relationship between words and meanings. You need common sense and a commitment to plain speaking. The Finnish view is that the common values required to build and sustain a nation begin with the simpler, more fundamental, and more practical modes of social understanding. And that these are instilled over time, through a process of maturation from childhood to adulthood. Inflammatory propaganda appeals to the infantile dimensions of human personality. Don’t insult people. Don’t claim what isn’t yours. Don’t be greedy. Don’t tell lies. We should heed Finland’s insight that measures of redress must start at the age of six. Jane Goodall’s latest book is Propaganda as Dramatic Narrative (Palgrave)