The UK government is establishing a new National Centre for Information Defence to tackle disinformation and AI-enabled information attacks from hostile states, including Russia.
The Centre will bring together intelligence agencies, law enforcement and social media companies, with a remit to detect attribute and disrupt foreign information attacks, while helping communities build resilience to disinformation.
Announcing the Centre during his speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, Andy Burnham singled out Russia, citing the use of bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and forged branding from British organisations as examples of tactics used to spread disinformation. He also warned that AI will significantly increase the scale of the threat.
Andrew Bud, Founder and CEO of iProov, said: “The new National Centre for Information Defence will have an important role to play, but its success will depend on how quickly it can move from identifying threats to disrupting them.
“Deepfakes are becoming too sophisticated and too scalable for the government to rely on individuals or platforms simply spotting fake content after the fact. The Centre should be looking at the infrastructure behind these attacks, including how we verify that the people, accounts and communications we interact with online are genuine.”
Elizabeth Anderson, CEO of the Digital Poverty Alliance, said: “The Prime Minister’s recognition that inequality can leave people more vulnerable to foreign influence is an important one, but we need to be careful not to frame this simply as a problem of individual susceptibility.”
