In his first speech to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on 22nd September, Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, announced the formation of a National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) to combat disinformation spread by the United Kingdom’s (UK) adversaries. With the prevalence of social media in the lives of British citizens and the expanding capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), information warfare is an increasing challenge for the UK’s national security.
The NCID will bring together intelligence agencies, government departments, police, and social media companies, aiming to ‘detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks…to support and defend our democracy’. This forms the crux of this week’s Big Ask, in which we asked six experts: What should the new National Centre for Information Defence look like?
Professor of War in the Modern World, Department of War Studies, King’s College London
The NCID should not exist.
The UK does not lack institutions for supervising what the public may hear, say, and believe. It has too many of them. Online speech is already policed at a rate that would have embarrassed a late-Soviet censor: arrests for posts judged offensive, regulators and platforms enforcing approved language, and public broadcasters and advertisers managing the moral temperature of what passes for news and entertainment. The habit is no longer to argue. It is to administer opinion, in the vocabulary of compliance, cohesion, and harm. A National Centre for Information Defence is another office in that apparatus, not a defence of democracy.
The announcement gives the game away. The threat is described as an assault that ‘twists what people feel about their own country’ and produces a ‘narrative of decline’. Foreign information operations are a real, narrow problem, already covered by the intelligence services and the National Security Act. What is being built here is something else: a body entitled to treat discontent, pessimism, and unapproved accounts of the country as hostile activity.
This is the logic of a system that talks about democracy while narrowing the ground on which it can be practised. Hostile services amplify grievances. They do not create the conditions that make those grievances plausible. A centre charged with disrupting the feeling of decline will spend its time on the public, not on the Kremlin.
We have seen this film before. Late-stage systems cling on by managing appearances. They do not correct the causes of distrust; they police the expression of it, and call the policing defence. Adding a quango to detect, attribute, and disrupt ‘information attacks’, working with police and platforms and briefed on community cohesion, will not make Britain more secure. It will make the approved-news regime a little more explicit.
The democratic answer to a brittle information environment is competent government and open argument. It is not a further licence for the state to decide which accounts of the UK are safe to hold.
Professor of International Relations, University of Nottingham
A look through the history of British attempts to counter hostile information activity suggests three recommendations for the NCID and one thing to avoid.
Firstly, it should be a strategic decision hub determining when and how to intervene, but also – crucially – when not to intervene. Predecessors quickly learned that attribution and exposure could be counterproductive, especially if done by the wrong person, if the line was gaining little traction, or if it perhaps had too much of a kernel of truth for comfort. These are delicate decisions to be thought through carefully, rather than a reflexive response.
Secondly, the Centre should sit at the heart of a network bringing together wide expertise. Effectiveness of attribution and disruption depend heavily on local context and the credibility of the messenger on the target audiences. The Centre should build and sustain networks across academia, media, technologies companies, civil society, and international partners.
Thirdly, it should be part of a unified strategy. Convincing attribution sometimes depends on intelligence that cannot be fully disclosed, and disruption can involve counterattacks on hostile infrastructure at source. The Centre will therefore require a close relationship with other branches of His Majesty’s (HM) Government, not dissimilar perhaps to the relationship between the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Cyber Force.
And to avoid? It should not be – or be seen to be – some sort of public arbiter of truth, or even of what constitutes disinformation (and of who, domestically, is peddling it). This will lead to politicisation and exploitation, at best grinding the Centre to a halt, and at worst backfiring horribly.
Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy
The NCID should be modelled on the NCSC – a public facing and accountable body to protect British civil society from a range of hybrid and cognitive attacks. Although it should be strictly politically neutral, its aim should be to prevent, disrupt, and attribute acts of cognitive aggression.
Here, proactivity is key: the best defence against AI-driven disinformation campaigns is a population educated – and institutions trained – to identify and filter inauthentic online behaviour. This could include, for example, weekly bulletins to schools, universities, local authorities, and police forces identifying and pre-empting key themes of disinformation from the ‘CRINK’ nations (the People’s Republic of China [PRC], Russia, Iran, and North Korea); free online courses for public servants; and a public information campaign to establish the state’s right to conduct cognitive self-defence.
As with the NCSC, the new Centre should be backed by the coordinated and legitimate efforts of the UK’s intelligence community to protect the country’s populace from harm. The Centre should be explicit: it does not monitor UK citizens, we monitor attempts to manipulate their cognition. We do not transgress the information rights of fake accounts and disinformation swarms because machines do not have such rights.
Independent Technology Consultant, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Department of War Studies, King’s College London
Information influence, interference, and operations are a defining security challenge of our time. Russia’s activity targeting the UK is but one example of a broader and growing risk. AI increases that risk further.
HM Government is right to create an NCID. The Centre’s task should be continuous monitoring of the information environment for signs of malicious interference, including coordinated behaviour, artificial amplification, cross-platform activity, and supporting infrastructure. It should then act on the detected signal, understand and investigate the threat, and ultimately disrupt it.
Such analytical and practical actions should be considered primarily as a technology and security problem. Disinformation reduced to a media or journalistic framing will not succeed. The Centre needs strong technical and security expertise, supported by proper analytical systems, software, compute, and access to both frontier closed and open AI models.
AI changes conventional staffing assumptions. Capable teams can use it to combine technical, linguistic, communication, public relations, human science, and regional knowledge without requiring rigid divisions between backgrounds. This is the model that the Centre should adopt.
The analytical objective should be campaign-level attribution. The Centre should link incidents, malign activities, and the infrastructure used into coherent threat assessments that can inform policymakers and lead to warning society. Disruption should be handled by existing authorities, such as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) for technical infrastructure and MI5 where hostile-state influence or malign influencer-for-hire activity is suspected.
AI-powered information operations are redefining the landscape, and will make the Centre’s mission challenging by lowering costs and enabling more persistent, adaptive campaigns – and this will be a quickly evolving field.
Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy
In the words of Jonathan Swift in 1710: ‘Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect’.
Hostile CRINK states, especially Russia and the PRC, are waging political warfare against the UK. From coordinated flurries of tweets on X designed to inflate domestic division, to Facebook campaigns reinforcing narratives of national decline, these efforts are deliberately designed to turn Briton against Briton, ultimately weakening the country.
If the NCID becomes merely another reactive fact-checking body, it will fail. Misinformation will always outpace official corrections – which will be lost, in any case, in the drumbeat of the modern media.
Instead, the NCID must become an agile, proactive, and cross-sector entity – part of a broader transformation towards asymmetric statecraft. Rather than chasing individual lies, it should operate as an intelligence-led horizon-scanning unit – combining threat intelligence, behavioural science, discourse analysis, and technological expertise to map covert state campaigns, expose adversarial infrastructure, and build institutional resilience before hostile narratives take root.
Operationally, it should go on the offensive by championing critical thinking and cyber-literacy in schools, as well as public education campaigns targeting older people who may be more prone to nostalgia.
It should also focus on binding the nation together and regenerating national self-confidence. Hostile narratives prey on national self-doubt; a confident, unified British nation provides the strongest shield, ensuring that foreign deception and misinformation meet immediate scepticism and resistance.
Executive Director of the China Strategic Risks Institute
Britain may not be the PRC’s prime target for information operations, but it is still firmly within its sights. Here, two objectives stand out.
The first is neutralising dissent within diaspora communities, particularly the UK’s large Hong Kong population – many of whom moved to Britain fleeing political repression. The second is weakening public support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the transatlantic alliance more broadly.
Beijing pursues these through a broad toolkit, from state media such as China Global Television Network (CGTN) platforming anti-NATO voices to networks of directed social media accounts amplifying preferred narratives. Increasingly, it also uses AI to design and execute information operations. YouTube channels run by bots post AI-generated content praising the PRC’s rise, while UK-based Hong Kong activists have been targeted by deepfake videos. Leaked GoLaxy documents suggest that Chinese state-backed actors are seeking to automate the entire cycle of information operations: monitoring narratives, profiling targets, generating tailored content, and distributing it through humanised bot accounts.
To succeed, the new Centre must first engage directly with the diaspora communities most exposed to these operations. Much of this content circulates in Chinese-language spaces on platforms such as WeChat, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin, outside the view of mainstream monitoring. The Centre will only detect and attribute these campaigns if it builds trusted, regular channels with these communities, and integrates diaspora members into government working groups.
Secondly, Britain should engage with Taiwan. No country has faced Beijing’s information operations more intensely, and Taiwan has often been a testing ground for tactics later deployed elsewhere. Its government has pioneered rapid ‘pre-bunking’ techniques to dispel misinformation before it circulates widely, and numerous civil society groups have set up fact-checking and media literacy training at the community level.
Regular dialogue with the Taiwanese government and civil society would give the Centre an early warning of the type of tactics that may be deployed in the UK. Only by listening to those at the frontline of the PRC’s information operations – both at home and in Taiwan – can the new Centre succeed.
If you enjoyed this Big Ask, please subscribe or pledge your support!
What do you think about the perspectives put forward in this Big Ask? Why not leave a comment below?
Not another committee, pl;ease. There is a National Security Committee which should be sufficient, within which key topics should be clearly identified and dealt with. The recent crop of PMs had little personal knowledge on the whole topic, which is broad; if they had such knowledge, solid investment would have been found to increase security in all of its component areas.