 Good afternoon. Welcome to Future Security Forum 2022 and our panel on how the US should respond to disinformation. My name is Genevieve Lester. I'm the DeSario chair of strategic intelligence at the US Army War College, and I'm joined by two fabulous guests who are experts on this particular issue. Beth Sanner, former deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, former director of the president's daily brief and senior fellow at Belfer Center's intelligence project. And Rory Cormack, professor of international relations director of research and knowledge exchange and director of the Center for the Study of Subversion unconventional interventions and terrorism at the University of Nottingham. Thank you both for joining me today. Thank you to the audience for joining all of us. I think this will be a really interesting conversation a very timely one. So not to waste any time, why don't we just start off with Beth. These issues are trending right now this has been an issue for quite some time. Can you talk a little bit about what some of the trends are that we are seeing on disinformation these days. Excuse me because I have a cold today so I may sound kind of froggy. I'm interested also in getting Rory's perspective on these things because he's a true current expert. But you know as I was looking at disinformation today I kind of pulled out three key trends that I'm watching myself. One of the things that I think China is using more aggressive confrontational and surreptitious tactics. And you know and those are really centered on its top targets Taiwan the US and UK and Australia. And I think that this is partly because their efforts to apply kind of maybe gentler influence efforts have not really borne fruit I mean in most countries in the world China is less popular today than, than for a very long time and so they are turning now to using manipulation by diplomats cyber bullying manipulation by influencers and social media and we're seeing a lot of targeted disinformation campaigns as well. And you know so so things are kind of shifting. You know compared to 2020 before the pandemic. And so one of the other things that I think is important in this year is that I know when I was really closely watching this in the 2016 and and 2020 elections China wasn't involved in election interference and there's no sign right now that they're involved in election interference but we certainly are starting to see efforts, potentially that are around influence. And, and I just would note that you know over the past month, we've had an essay and FBI put out alerts, because they've had 100 more than 100 Republican and Democratic party domains being scanned by the Chinese now you know scanning how it happens all the time it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to do something, but I think we really have to watch that. The second thing is the shift from, you know really focusing on bots you know this was you know Russia's main method was social media. In 2016 and I think that in 2020 and now more with with China, we're seeing the use of local media in different countries and local influencers by local I don't mean by cities, although that can happen I mean you know national as well. In order to propagate the information and a lot of that is just because it's a lot harder to use and manipulate social Western social media. And so these influencers and using people. And to parrot and push out their talking points is is a really significant thing. And I was just reading a China, a China report by Freedom House which I would recommend to everybody it just came out this past this month. And they talked about how China in particular is using local media, and kind of capturing local media in some cases so in 130 different outlets across 30 countries, countries. They're providing Chinese content and then they're obscuring that content and I know also, you know in 2020 we saw Iran exploiting local newspapers to in order to influence voters and then the last thing I'll pick up is, you know, this is a trend that has really been accelerating since the Russia Ukraine war. But we're seeing our adversaries picking up and amplifying the disinformation being promoted by each other. So these interconnections and overlaps between Russian and Chinese and sometimes Iranian disinformation campaigns. This kind of started I think I look back at the coven origins campaign as being one of the primary, you know, singular events where we started to see that promoted both by Russia and by China that coven or originated in a US lab. Then, you know, I think now with the war we're seeing a lot of different themes being promoted by these actors from, you know, the general idea of Russia Ukraine and the role of each in the war and who's to blame the threat of nuclear war. And so all of the anti Western messages has have just been ramped up. And those are focused, not just in kind of the usual suspects but we're seeing that promulgation throughout the global south. And you know, one of the things that have happened kind of a fourth theme is I guess is that there has been quite a bit of investment in the global south by both Russia and China over the past few years, and, and they have been pretty successful in in having their messages dominate the discourse in media in large media outlets. And I'll just stop there. Beth, turning to you Roy. Beth introduced some of the current issues that are going on with with disinformation. Can you talk about continuity and change. How has the internet era affected information operations. And this thing to say is to look at the impact in terms of scope and scale and speed of some of these operations, particularly around the social media side of things which, as Beth mentioned is being able to take a little bit by other types of operations. But this is high tempo it's brash it's louder than it might have been in the past. It's also allows a bit more micro targeting than in the past. I mean if you think about analog propaganda from the old from the Cold War, for example, this would have been inserting a newspaper article through newspaper and it would go to an entire community, whereas the era of big data and computational propaganda allows those themes to be targeted at a much more micro level playing on an individual's hopes, dreams, fears, worries, rather than more bluntly as an entire community. I think it's also quite difficult to control the narrative now in the internet era, where there are so many different channels of proliferation of accounts, bloodline between producers and consumers. There's no one now as a blogger or a blogger or a micro journalist so in the old days so to speak, if you could control a couple of key radio stations or a couple of key newspapers, then you had a captive audience nowadays, I think that's that's much more difficult. But there is, and this is the historian in me, there's as much continuity as there is change I think the means might be changing a bit. But the purpose is actually remarkably stable so many aims and the principles are remarkably stable not just over the last 70 years but but even before states use this to discredit states use this to divide states use these to try to find a existing schism in society and smash open and polarize and divide and so discord and none of this is new, the means are changing, but the some of the core principles are actually remarkably similar and I was reading some British Foreign documents in the 1960s recently, and they're talking about counter disinformation, they're using the same language we we use today and I found it, I found it really really quite striking. And of course, the shift as Beth was outlining towards local influences and real people and local newspapers. I mean this is obviously not new, again, with it's a shift since the focus on social media. But of course it is a current trend. At the same time, states have been using local media like influences to try and target and exploit local knowledge and conditions for as old states have have existed. So it's clearly an important current trend, but it's that but it's also very, very long standing and I think one of the things that we as scholars and practitioners need to do is to look back and learn some of these these lessons that we've been doing this for a very long time. Thanks you introduced my next question very nicely. Now that we're thinking we've got the trends and sort of the historical context. How do we, how does this, this media landscape this fragmented media landscape study I think you both have articulated. How does it affect our ability to counter influence operations. Beth, do you want to. Yeah, I think Rory absolutely introduced this perfectly polarization and disinformation are reinforcing concepts right. You know, we no longer have three television networks in the United States, where people get their news. Now we gravitate toward media that reflects and reinforces our preconceived notions and biases. And you know that allows as Rory was saying, the adversary to tailor made content that will exploit and exacerbate those biases and the polarization. I also think that you know because it's hard for the adversary to focus on on this really fragmented media landscape they can't hit every single one of these things and brings me back to the idea of the influencers being so important, because each influencer is present on multiple platforms. So social media and regular media as in and so, you know by going after an individual or using an individual, they can disperse that message across multiple platforms in a really effective way, and kind of hit some of the same people. And you know who would be listening to that influencer. So yeah I think that that is those are the two things that kind of come to mind. Rory, did you want to add. Yeah, I entirely agree I would just add that one of the trends I think is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to build up a state's own overarching positive narrative, because of this proliferation and multiple echo chambers and fragmented media landscape. So what we're seeing is certain states, just putting out Russia's an example of this so called fire hose of falsehoods, just spamming and putting out lots and lots of different often competing and contradictory messages, and they're not expecting everybody to believe all of those messages because you couldn't they are they are literally contradictory, but it just is the trend is becoming more negative it's about so in confusion, so in discord, and the aim I think in as a consequence of this fragmented landscape is to chip away at the West narrative, the West truth. It's kind of countering with a coherent message of his own hostile states are just making audiences question the veracity of all information just is sewing cynicism. And I think that is a consequence of the fragmented media landscape instead of being able to control everything or lots of things and build a coherent narrative it's actually easier sometimes, just to say a bit more chaos and chip away and by entrusting in the media and by entrusting democratic institutions. It's a bit more chaos theory, and, and see what happens and the, the aim is to ensure to try and make it so that audiences question other bits of information and end up in a state of polarized that polarized paralysis, which hostile states can then exploit. So I think that kind of negative angle is also a consequence of the fragmentation double edged sort of both outline but also as a more negative disruptive angle to as well the coming out of both sides. You have both established a frightening tableau here. So how do we confront this, how do we, how do we, what is the best means to confront disinformation operations is it exposure, what other tools are effective in handling or starting to grapple with the situation. Well I do think that exposure is absolutely key and I, and I do think that there is some hope in, in that people are, you compare where we are now to 2016. But people are so much more aware of this issue. And it doesn't really matter in some ways like what side of, of the debate you're on I mean people are, they may point at, at you know, the other part of the polarization landscape as being, you know, involved in it or whatever but but I think that people are looking for it. And so I think that that exposure has been, you know, in many ways very effective. I do think that one of the things we need to do much more of is regulate social media. And I, I think that, you know, they're still operating, perhaps on, you know, some of the basis of promoting the ideas that exacerbate tensions and, and I, even though they're getting better at it too. I just think that the whole idea of transparency and accountability needs to be somehow regulated a little bit more and frankly I think that the publics now are understanding enough that there's a lot of support for that. It's just really hard to do. And then, you know, for my Intel background I would say that, you know, there's, there's also the potential to confront and potentially deter through cyber operations itself. I don't know how effective these kinds of things are but I know it makes people feel good so I think we're going to see more of it. But you know I'll remind people that in 2018 cyber command blocked internet access to Russia's IRA. You know, and then sent direct messages to the different operatives who were behind influence campaigns and warned them like we know who you are and you shouldn't be doing this signaling you know that Washington was willing and able to impose some sort of cost. You know, again I'm not sure how effective that is overall but I do think we're going to see more offensive cyber responses to this sort of thing and you know and we're also seeing a lot of prosecutions from the FBI. And I, and I applaud that the sanctions personally I don't think are that useful but it makes people feel good I guess. Rory. I think there's definitely a role to play for the kind of operations which which Beth was was outlining, as long as people are aware of the strengths and limitations of what these things can and cannot achieve. I think there's a lot of people in the world here a lot about you know cyber war and cyber armageddon big red cyber buttons that can do x, y and z and people who know way more about cyber than me assure me that none of that is remotely the case. So I think there is a, there's a role for offensive and counter offensive covert operations in the information sphere and I certainly think it's an important part of the state's arsenal. I think we're used very carefully as Beth was alluding to. I also agree that exposure is the key tool I mean it's the one that is getting the most traction over the last few years and become the centerpiece of, of many states is response to just some of this, but I think that that exposure has got to be calibrated very very carefully. I think it's a bit simplistic for people to say, let's shine a light so that's kind of, kind of enough, you know, become a modernist idea of the truth will set you free. I think that we need given the given the echo chambers the polarization the people interpreting the stuff through through their own prisms and ideology and people seeing the fact checking and just thinking that it's all part of a conspiracy against them and it's part of the liberal elites and it's all, it's all, it's all working against them. I think we need to think quite carefully because many of these operations are designed, or at least as a secondary aim to be exposed. It doesn't mean that they failed, because we are exposing them. And if we expose them, we end up either drawing attention to the issue, we end up just spreading more confusion, we end up sometimes forgery and the target states issues a denial that denial can be witnessed by way more than read the actual forgery and and draw attention to the state's initial response, which is what the the the adversary wants to do. I think there's been a, one of the downsides of exposure for the last few years is, there's a risk of talking up the potency of some of these operations, a couple of British intelligence chiefs spoke publicly last year about this and they said, the bigging up Putin's influence operations was doing his dirty work for him, because everyone talking about Russian propaganda here, disinformation there, it's, it's, it gives oxygen to what otherwise might have been a pretty rubbish disinformation campaign. It risks undermining, so in confusion to do something like this going doing exactly what Putin wants to do, because suddenly, everyone's, everyone's thinking, oh, is this Russian disinformation or how can we trust this is all part of an information war at the west line. And as a risk, we don't, we don't expose it in a very carefully thought through way that it ends up potentially becoming counterproductive and people just end up becoming cynical and end up believing nothing at all, which is, you know, occasionally what the, what the adversaries want. So I think exposure is really important, but it has to be calibrated quite carefully by, I don't know, focusing on the, the actor rather than the narratives, so you're not drawing attention to the particular, particular narrative by pointing if you're going to expose it point to the the weaknesses of these operations don't portray Pio, Putin is some sort of omnipotent grand chess master playing 4D chess across Europe. I think that that image has been smashed a bit over the last year as a consequence of the, the legal invasion of Ukraine. But certainly up to that there was this image, you know, he was brilliant at covert operations and manipulating across across Europe and maybe that's, maybe that's not the case. Maybe that's a consequence of us talking things up a little bit too much on occasion. Sometimes it's important. Also, let me expose. Do we expose just one information that one operation, a bunch of operations and do we do it together. Is there a risk of doing him individually that we create a boiling frog scenario where people come and not bothered about one. The next one we're not bothered about all of them before we realize it, you know, things are. We're in deep water. And then who does the exposure. Is this done by media outlets being briefed, is it being done by governments issuing official communications, is it being done but more discreetly the briefing, I don't know industry or academia. So we're just very, very important. But we need to think very carefully about how we calibrate and who does it to ensure that we don't end up falling into traps and being counterproductive. So just one little quick thing I mean this is certainly things that the government, the Intel community and the law enforcement community and the policy community in the US, you know, has grappled with for some time and it was part of many conversations about, you know, whether we do that or not and what does it mean. And, you know, and some of the exposures I was involved with, you know, had surprising responses like when we expose the Iranian effort to influence the 2020 election. And for all these people were like, Well, you're just doing that because you want to distract from all the things rush is doing and it's like, no, we're just trying to say that there are other actors out there and, and this is a campaign that that people should be aware of. And so, you know, all these things have consequences that even when you think it through you kind of like Oh, well what happened here. To the audience out there please feel free to put your questions in the box, we'll get to those as soon as we finish our conversation. These are all fascinating points. I think there's a point to to think about which is the receptivity of the audience to these operations and so do either you want to jump in on how do we counter the popular false narratives how do we engage with the population to to affect the receptivity to these messages. Yeah, I can get I can get fast. I was just going to say, you know, whenever whenever I think about like the government role and stuff I think about Ronald Reagan's words. I'm from the government I'm here to help and he called those the nine most frightening words in the English language and of course as a super dedicated and hardworking civil servant it like pains me. The fact is that, as Rory was saying, there's, you know, people don't necessarily believe the government anymore so. So there's a role for the government to play and some of this but I also think that you know mainly it's about, you know, how do we create the societal resilience and it's got to come more from civil society and the kind of citizens and and using kind of like more trusted messengers that are that span across these polarized divides and and make sure that you know there are people who actually call out when good things the government does or bad things or whatever but we need you we need we need good journalism. We need fact checkers we need researchers we need people like Rory. And I think that there's some good examples in Finland and the Baltics of doing kind of the civic education and mobilization, but I think it's a lot easier in those smaller societies and it might be in the United States. It's, it's, it's the difficult answer isn't it it's the long, it's such a long term project to build that resilience to educate to ensure that we are probably funding education not just tertiary education but right down to primary school levels I mean it drives me mad when we're talking about the need to counter disinformation. And at the same time, we are, say we UK, cutting humanities and arts and histories in the study of music, and people don't realize that people who know is trained in musicology, for example, are very, very good at analyzing sources and being able to show critical awareness, but this is this is a decades long project which requires a whole of governments indeed whole of society approach all these things have to have to be joined up and similarly we need to As Beth was saying that there are praise on existing divisions in society, we as a society need to get our own houses in order and start to debate these divisions in a less toxic manner to try and heal some of these riffs on these divisions because hostile information operations can only be successful when they are exploiting existing toxicity and schisms. So if we in the UK and US can improve the status of this big ass to improve society really easily can improve the way in which we debate some of these issues in a less angry and toxic way, then I think I think that would help in the more immediate term because I appreciate it's very easy for an academic to sit here and say invest in the investment in humanities invested invested in history, but I do strongly strongly believe that. I think we need the partners to want to counter the disinformation and the false narratives, and particularly you know the big media agencies for the social media. I think we need to do that earlier, or whether it's major newspapers or television channels. I mean I can't comment on on the US, but over here, this is being peddled by some of the big newspapers that everyone's reading, we need to ask why are they peddling this stuff. Who's, who's funding these these people why why are a couple of non domiciled tax evaders in the UK running bunch of newspapers. It's there are questions there. So we need. I completely agree that this can't just come from government because amongst the target audience amongst people we need to cut through to other ones who probably hold the government in the lowest regard. And we'll make me very suspicious so we need partners, we need to work through different people, but we also need to make sure that these, these big agencies as big platforms are willing to do that and that's a bit of social media regulation is a bit of regulation around who funds the press around monopoly of press ownership, all those kind of things I think, I think needs to be, need to be looked at and then finally. It'll be more immediate term. We need to think about how we do the whole kind of impartial balancing acts, it's on the, you know, we're doing debates on the radio or on cable news. And I think what's important is that is the perspectives that are based, I don't know on on unequal evidence, do not get an equal airtime and almost trusted sources at home in the UK, BBC, have been guilty of this. We're obsessed with impartiality that they will have someone argue X, and someone arguing why, and one of those wise might be a, one of those might be a climate change denier, I don't know, but they get a prone airtime alongside a climate change scientist. And we need to be bolder in being able to challenge that a little bit. I think we're running scared. Some of our most trustworthy and biggest institutions on whom we rely to, to keep us informed are running so scared of being accused of a lack of impartiality that they're not challenging people they're not providing the context they're not calling out lies, and they're putting too much airtime frankly to fringe access, bring them into the mainstream and I think it's problematic. One thing I wouldn't do though, I wouldn't ban this in things that we consider to be disinformation, I think that ends up in a very difficult area which which I certainly wouldn't advocate but we need to treat these people spousing false information in a more careful, more careful manner. One last question because we've got a large list of questions from the audience to get to as well. One could argue that we're really looking at a new era of the public use of intelligence in Ukraine right now in the conflict in Ukraine. How has what I would call strategic declassification affected information operations. Beth, do you want to kick us off. Sure. I think that it has been a, you know, a really big deal. This idea of pre bumping is, is new. I think it's really unprecedented based on the, you know, the scale and duration of this campaign and it's continued beyond Russia Ukraine. And I think that it's different, you know, people compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis but that was exposing. That was exposing a falsehood that was already out there and this is designed to take, you know, in advance and say this is what you're going to hear and setting the stage then for understanding when you hear it, what it means. And, and to me, I think that this should be used for, you know, across the board as much as possible it doesn't have to just be about intelligence, but about facts about like this is how, you know, to the local election official going out and explaining on as much media as possible. This is how our elections are secured these are how your ballot counting works and trying to be very transparent and fact based before there is a crisis because once the crisis happens it's very hard to walk back or erase, you know, in people's neurons what they've already heard. It becomes rather sticky and so I love this idea of trying to get out in front of things we know are coming and also things we're just worried about. It's the preemption isn't it? There's the novelty in this and I love to try and be, sometimes I end up being that annoying smoker story and saying oh yeah actually there are precedents to all of this stuff that is all happened before and the story is going to be incredibly irritated like that. I completely agree with you about your bang on that this getting out there in front is, is new. There's a little bit of it done through covert channels back in Cold War time to preempt the time moved more slowly back then I think. So that preemption was more difficult. But there was some strategically classification of materials around various issues in the 60s and 70s and 80s to believe what they would do is create, you know, fake media agencies or fake think tanks we used to do quite a bit to get some of that out and occasionally it would be in advance, it would try and be in front of a head of a particular, I don't know, Soviet front piece conference type of thing. So there's a bit of pro-bustle going on but that was all done in an unachievable and ambiguous manner for obvious reasons. It struck me not only is not only the pre-bustle getting out in front aspect but also the owning aspect, the fact that this is openly declassified intelligence and again that is, as you know, very, very rare. I would ask you what you think, is this going to become a new normal and is there a risk that if it becomes, if it becomes a new normal, as expected, when it doesn't become forthcoming for whatever reason if the sources to classify whatever. I might end up having a negative effect where people will then start to assume governments lying or whatever because they haven't pre-butted something. Do you think it creates unrealistic and unreasonable expectations going forward? I do, I mean, I think that one of the things that's different here is that it is a policy decision to use intelligence to pre-bunk, you know, coming issues. And so that policy means that it is here to stay in my view and the success of it around Russia, Ukraine, I think, you know, is kind of understood and so they'll want to repeat it. I think people who say that it didn't succeed because it didn't stop Putin from invading don't know very much about like what Putin was going to do, nothing would have really stopped him in my view. I do think that there are dangers, multiple dangers to doing this and, you know, one is, I guess, you know, setting these expectations. There's another twist to that, which is you telegraph something's going to happen and it doesn't happen. And then people start questioning like, well, you know, how good is your intelligence or, you know, you don't know what you're talking about. And that was attempted a little bit in Russia's case, but you know, I don't think that worked because the overall idea was absolutely true even though he changed tactics. There was no false flag operation that would have served as a pretense for why he was a rationale for going into Ukraine. And the reason it didn't happen and the reason didn't happen, I think, is because it was exposed. And so sometimes actors are going to change their tact, because you've called it out. And if that happens over and over again people are going to say like you just don't know what you're talking about. There's some risk to credibility and trust. And I think that that's what you're getting at and, and that's that's a problem. I do think that they're, I'm guessing I don't know this, because I'm not in government anymore but I suspect that the processes for deciding what should be released are not as refined as they probably should be and that there needs to be in my view, a very, a very substantial intelligence community ability to say no. Because, you know, when you get a government person in who might not be as knowledgeable about the intelligence community, or, you know, doesn't care. You could have all sorts of things happening and so I would say to the intelligence community and the policy community that now is the time to really lock in a strict standard and process for how to decide what to release and what not to release. And because otherwise it could, it could be quite dangerous in different administrations. Thank you. We'll turn to the questions from the audience we have quite a number to you out there please continue submitting your questions we'll try to get through as many as possible. To throw this out to you both Beth and Rory what are your opinions about a strategic level or national mechanism to coordinate information and influence, including defense against disinformation versus current efforts. Beth, do you want to try that one first. This has, you know, has required mandated that online influence center be set up in the office of the director of national intelligence to coordinate, you know, all the analysis and that's going on and and to work with the policy community on that. So if you're talking about a government like misinformation czar, you know, like the drugs are or whatever. I, I do think, I mean, I'm wary of bureaucracies having served in them. You know, I think that they are, they're dangerous beasts, and they're hard to tear down. But, but the point here is that this is a whole of government effort is required but not just for each individual country. It's really a whole of Western societies that needs to be thinking about sharing information collaborating. And even progress on that certainly NATO is is working on that I visited in Finland, the EU led effort there, which they're fantastic. I thank German Marshall fund for sponsoring that study trip that I went on it was fabulous. So there are things that are happening there but I think we're still kind of at a nascent period and that is where we should go. I agree. International sharing and collaboration around this is so important, particularly as certain countries and centuries in Europe have a long track record of dealing with this stuff and countering this stuff and, and we should be working with them and learning from them. The, the thing I would warn against is any kind of bureaucracy that looks like it's some sorts of truth police or it can be framed as some sort of truth piece nothing should be nothing to have a remit where it gets to say what is and what is not this information because that can become politicized so so quickly it turned up very quickly becoming counterproductive so any kind of mechanism which coordinates a whole of government or international response is a good thing. Anything called counter disinformation unit with a remit to do this I think is is dangerous. To add to that too I really think that we need to look beyond kind of the usual suspects of allies and dealing with this the countries that need help the most are, you know, in the global south. Some of them are, you know, closely allied to us. Some aren't, but I mean, I really think we need to be thinking about. As Rory said not like being the truth police and like always wagging our finger and saying that you know Russian China are lying about X, Y and Z, but maybe it's about more training and recognition and how do you develop civil society and, and all of that, but I really worry because we are seeing how effective that campaign has been in many ways in the Russia Ukraine war. And there's been a lot of investment over many many years that have brought them to this position. Great here's another question. Does corporate acquisition of local news impact vulnerability of local news outlets to being used in disinformation campaigns. I think absolutely, you know the sorry state of local newspapers in this country. It's very bad. They're all in financial trouble. And when they're obtained by these large corporations, they are turned into, you know, debt manufacturing organizations and, and so you know they fire people and they become even more desperate and they don't have capacity. Right, they don't have beat reporters and investigative journalists and, and so there's, there's a real problem in our country with the degradation of local news and these big corporate buyouts by by companies that don't have public interest in mind or these are businesses. And so I am, I don't know what we do about that maybe where he knows but I'm definitely agree with that question. I think it goes even bigger than that I think that the entire model of journalism is is undermining the role of decent investigative journalists but that's a local level or even at national level. I think so much of journalism now is about clickbait headlines and any anything that is is particularly when it's online people don't pay for your print media anymore. And then the, the funding model is you know you're paid by number of clicks that your website or your, your news story gets because that's where the adverts are that is automatically going to skew how one is reporting a particular story. And the headline will be sensationalist to get you to click. And I, you know, we see that not just a local level, like I completely agree with all your points about local level stuff, but I think it also increases to expand up to national level sometimes as well where this is about, it's a business it's about how, how we can make up for the fact that newspapers, even good ones are losing money. And some of the best newspapers, one of the reputations to great investment journalists holding people to account telling the truth etc are struggling in this day and age because of the disruption caused by caused by internet to their financial structures. And that is having a very negative impact on their ability to do the kind of stuff that we need them to do in order to counter some of this, some of this stuff. And also, with the buyouts of local newspapers, we're seeing increasing syndicalization where it's going to be over here called journalism is churn out stuff over and over again, and every single news local newspaper just picks up the same thing and repeats it without fact checking it without doing anything. And again because it's quick it's cheap it's easy. And I think that, again, it's problematic so it's the, it's the financial model of the entire newspaper industry, unfortunately, and it's been declining since the 1970s. So there's again there's no, there's no quick easy fix. So often the discussions about disinformation and we've discussed this here in this in this panel focus on public as a target. Can you speak to what's happening with efforts that target the government military intelligence community, those types of targets. Beth this may be a good one for you. Well, I mean, clearly in 2020 we had a situation where, you know, influencers around the Trump administration were targeted. And, you know, they didn't necessarily know it. And then they became, you know, the people who said all this stuff. So, you know, we definitely have some examples of that I mean, it has been a Chinese playbook to go after officials to influence them regarding China policy at all levels of the US government from local local government to, you know, state and local government I mean this is just a an absolute playbook and China has the resources and the personnel to do the kinds of targeting, and then exploitation and they invest very early in someone's career, sometimes and follow people for And so, you know, this has been going on for a long time and I, you know, I would suggest that every Intel organization in the world goes after military people. So, starting to me the way this kind of discussion away from disinformation and information type operations towards wider covert political influence operations where, and what you're outlining that isn't it is it's the political influence stuff rather than spreading disinformation. Because they are different points on a, on a similar scale of covert actions. I'm just, I've made one conceptual academic point which may or may not be of interest which is that oftentimes a covert operation, including information operations. They have different audiences, they might be intended to be untraceable to public audiences, but they might well expect the government account intelligence agencies of the target to be aware of what's, of what's going on. And there's a bunch of academic literature out recently which I think is really interesting talking about these different audiences and saying that states can covertly communicate with each other sometimes using covert operations knowing that the counter intelligence will pick it up and it's a way of signaling of expressing preference, a bit of leverage, but trying to keep it backstage, trying to keep it away from the cameras and away from escalation ramps. And thinking about what we mean by secrecy, what we mean by exposure, what we mean by audiences is obviously, as you well know, but it's much more, much more nuanced than it's something secret or not secret. It's something, you know, over as in case there's a whole spectrum here, and in the, at least in the popular understanding of this that gets overlooked quite a lot in favor of truth versus lie, open versus secret, and actually there's a whole range of different points on that, graph, if you like. So here's a rather dark question. Do you think that that many people have already been lost, they can no longer be reached by arguments on disinformation, or is there a way back. Either one of you. Sure. Listen to best great answers and then just signal that's great. I'm enjoying myself. I would say that you're never going to, you know, you're never going to reach everybody and all the fact checking in the world, the amounts of tailored individual approach, long term individual approach to talk someone around it takes a long time. And I was reading research recently about bringing people back from the depths of conspiracy theories and it takes a lot of me, it's got to be family members doing it over a long, long time in a way that is inclusive and not berating or belittling it, it's very difficult. So I think for a government to be able to do that on mass is not on impossible. We can offer guidance built to society, trying to offer the tools, but I think it's impossible to to reach everybody. It's impossible. The aim should be to work with who the influences that the states can reach. How can we kind of chip away, chip away people we, we, we, we, we, who are sufficient and not sufficiently down the rabbit holes to be brought back and just kind of do it gradually just chipping away at that massive audience, knowing that some of them will always be unreachable. We've got to be realistic about this. And there's some cases Rory that you've looked at in terms of terrorism, and, you know, the de radicalization campaigns or programs and some have been effective and some have, you know, pretty effective Singapore I think is one that I would point to, and some have been really very effective and certainly there have been controversies in the UK about about some specific cases where people say like what the hell happened here as person went out and shot more people. I, you know, I do think that there, there is potential there but like the success of the Singapore program in my view was that it is so specific tailored, you are with an individual just like you were saying Rory and it's like, you know, you can't do that at scale. So again it gets back to kind of society, and, and, and hopefully growing smarter people from elementary school on primary school. I don't know what grade that is in America but they just, they're just starting to do online safety and they're learning about you YouTube algorithms and the dangers of letting it play because it can end up taking you down dark rabbit warrens, which I thought was super interesting at six years old it's good. So one last question. Should we and how can we educate influencers about this topic and about how to spot when they're being pushed to promote an idea. Rory do you want to start it first again. Yeah we should. I think that's this thing is going to be done without the heavy hand of government putting an arm around somebody and making it as it was back to the Reagan, the Reagan quote. I think it's part of building up that general awareness and responsibilities and regulating social media a little bit so that when people are influencing, we have to know that they are influencing. The advertising debates just because settled ish now about how we tag influencers who advertising. I think there's a similar debate around if you how increasing awareness of these people and where they may or may not get their money from. And, but it's it's part of the broader approach around increasing awareness amongst influencers and amongst the audience. It's about increase building civil society it's given people the tools and the capacity to be able to spot an influencer and think I'm being influenced. And that comes back to the long term education and all that kind of thing. I think it would be my office to take a government training courses on this information for influencers because I didn't know work. It's an easy option, but it's the longer term or difficult things that are going to make a difference, eventually. I think about Elon Musk and his recent peace proposal around Russia and then there was quite a backlash and then there was an exposure by someone saying like he talked to Putin before he put this out and so we are seeing reactions by civil society. And in calling people out when it's somebody important. I think that someone prominent like that but there's a lot of influencing going on with our kids and, and, you know, the demographic of, of kind of 20s and 30 somethings, and I'm not sure that there are enough people who are kind of engaged to like no and, and, and, you know, there's a lot going on. So, I think it's possible and I do think that it's about vigilance of civil society to do to do a lot of that work. I think the government should for major people go behind the scenes and pull people aside and say like, you realize that what you're doing is, you know, the dirty work for so and so do you understand that they're feeding you lies. Because they don't always, you know, or sometimes they're just cynical so I don't know. Thank you both for your great contributions. Rory congratulations on your new book he's just published a book on covert action called how to stage a coup for our listeners out there. Thank you both again and thanks to our audience out there for the fantastic questions I'm sorry we couldn't get to them all. We've covered quite a lot of the major issues so thank you both thank all of you for joining us today.