There is currently no established or agreed upon framework for measuring the impacts of foreign state information, influence and interference threats. This is despite it being a societal challenge attracting significant public and political attention. Without such a framework it is difficult for decision-makers to prioritize which events and incidents require responding to because of the harms they are causing.
This research starts to address this gap by focusing specifically upon estimating the information effects of Russian influence operations targeting the UK, and mapping some of the conceptual, methodological and empirical issues involved. Russia runs multiple different operations in parallel to one another, with different signature methodologies and targets. Focusing upon the UK, especially high-profile Russian operations seeking to elicit information effects in the UK have included:
- The Internet Research Agency’s covert accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, seeking to amplify social tensions and divisions following the 2017 terror attacks in London and Manchester;
- A ‘hack and leak’ operation in the lead-up to the 2019 General Election;
- And the Social Design Agency’s persistent Doppelganger operation seeking to smear the reputations of high-profile UK figures.
In addition to understanding what effects may have been elicited by such actions and how, the second key purpose of this report is to clarify the nature of some of the key challenges and lay out the ‘building blocks’ for configuring a methodology and framework of indicators that could provide reasonably reliable and precise estimates of the prevalence and distribution of any harms being caused in the future. There are several reasons why designing and delivering such an approach is both pressing and difficult. One key contributing factor is the de-centred institutional architecture of the UK’s response to state information manipulation threats. There are at least six different government departments and agencies contributing to this effort, with different understandings responsibilities, perspectives and postures. Consequently, there is no single point of view on the scale and scope of the present threats posed to the UK, nor how these have evolved over time.
Similarly, and relatedly, there are multiple terms of art with varying strengths and weaknesses, used to describe the different risks and threats posed by states and their use of communications to deliver malign and harmful influence. For the purposes of this research, we frame the issues of interest as ‘state information, influence and interference threats using digital, disinformation, distortion and deception.’ The advantage of this conceptualisation is that, although not especially succinct or elegant, it does capture the full spectrum of techniques and situations operationalised by adversaries and their proxies. We also prefer to talk in terms of ‘estimating’ rather than ‘measuring’ information effects, reflecting the limitations in precision and accuracy of currently available data and methodologies.
Informed by the limited available evidence, a revised approach suggested in this report is underpinned by a ‘3E model’ that distinguishes between: ‘Effort; Exposure; and Effect. This breaks down the processes by which any disinforming, distorting and/or deceptive communication generates some form of impact into distinct steps. ‘Effort’ refers to the amount and type of resources and actions directed towards an influence and interference action, associated with Russia’s established ‘conflictology’ doctrine. The analysis highlights how these are organised around Russian operators systematically identifying, amplifying and exploiting divisions, tensions and grievance narratives already circulating in media and social media in the target countries. One consequence of which, is rendering it increasingly challenging to define whether a potentially harmful narrative or messaging campaign has attributable Russian links. A key line of argument is that, notwithstanding whether we in the West can reliably estimate information effects, potentially more important is that based upon their observations of the contemporary geopolitical situation, the Russian operators likely perceive and believe their influence actions are having an impact. Consequently, they continue to invest in these efforts.
A second linked strand highlights that Russia’s information, influence and interference operations are designed to deliver strategic effects that are built via multiple active measures, over time, and across different influence vectors. Some Russian efforts are highly directed seeking effects over a narrow range, whereas others aim for a broader diffusion of effects. However, often Western analysts seek to evaluate and assess any such impacts through a more ‘tactical’ near-term lens. Consequently, we need to focus more upon strategic effects.
A key assessment consideration is the extent to which the ‘efforts’ of an adversary are translated into ‘exposures’ amongst a target audience. Ascertaining the number (or proportion) of exposures also points to some other complexities involved in what should be ‘counted’ in estimates of information effect. For example, there is an increasing prevalence of automated bot accounts on many social media platforms. But it is not clear the extent to which this is reflected in reach and engagement metrics. Variants of these issues are likely to be reinforced by increasingly sophisticated AI models ‘spoofing’ real users. Situated in an attention economy, both platforms and many users, are directly incentivised to construct the impression that their content is especially popular.
Using media reports of Russian information and influence operations as a proxy measure, suggests around 23% of all media reportage of disinformation and allied information disorders, relate to state threats attributed to Russia, China and Iran. Russia is most frequently responsible for such actions. Tracking these trends over time, suggests increased awareness of state information threats, and the challenges they pose over the past decade.
Approaching the challenge of understanding information effects caused by state efforts from a different angle, the report also discusses several qualitative case studies involving conspiracies, disinformation and other forms of digital deception about various UK institutions and interest have been engaged for and on behalf of the Kremlin. These include the health speculations following the Princess of Wales’s absence from public view in 2024, discussions of ‘two tier policing’ following the Southport attack in the same year and public disorder and violence in Ballymena. In different ways, these episodes usefully illuminate some of the complexities and nuances in terms of how foreign state assets can be leveraged to try and influence political decision-making and public understanding in the UK in some way.
Collectively, these case studies foreground a number of key considerations for designing any future approach for estimating the information effects of foreign state information, influence and interference threats. These include:
- Recognising the presence of ‘complex transmission pathways’ leading to unpredictable effects. Foreign state influence attempts are increasingly organised in ways that deliberately blend and harness both domestic and foreign contributions. Importantly, and given they are operating in largely uncontrolled information environments, the foreign state operators are not always able to predict or control the effects that their work has.
- Identifying organic ‘pain points’ in the UK population. Clear evidence is presented of the methods and data sources Kremlin backed operations use to identify suitable high-profile, politically contentious events as targets for their information manipulation activities. These could be ‘reverse engineered’ to help UK analysts direct their monitoring attention to areas at increased risk of being subject to digital influence engineering attempts.
- Context matters for impact and harm, in terms of varying levels of vulnerability and susceptibility to malign manipulative messaging across particular audience segments, social situations and moments in time.
- A vital distinction is between ‘chronic’ and ‘acute’ effects. Some forms of malign influence may build progressively over time through recurrent targeting, whereas other manifestations may be shorter-term and driven by specific events. The former are especially difficult to capture and estimate.
- Related to the above, this time-sensitive perspective orients us to think about how there can be a ‘layering’ of effects. Some foreign state operations seek cognitive effects (changing how people think or perceive the world), whereas others are intended to elicit behaviour change, work through an affective register, or perhaps shift normative values.
- Some state information, influence or interference threats have a direct effect on a target. Others, however, are designed to function more indirectly, by smearing the reputation of the UK amongst allies and partners, for example. Methodologically, this points to the challenges of trying to transpose free-flowing digital communications data, onto geographically bounded units of analysis.
- Given these complexities and the interactions between them, future frameworks could integrate micro-, meso- and macro-level indicators. The former will refer to any changes induced at an individual level. Meso-level indicators attend to group level influence, whereas the macro- ones are about tracing mass influence effects. Such considerations can become especially pertinent, for example, where an operation is able to inject its disinforming, distorting or deceptive content into mass media reporting for example, or construct it as a popular meme, which massively scales the levels of audience exposure.
The research concludes that, at the present time, there is no adequate methodology or framework for estimating the impacts and effects of Russian, or any other state information, influence and interference effects on the UK. The resort to reach and engagement metrics originally designed for marketing purposes found in much reporting, for discovered covert operations, is highly limited and likely misleading. Thus, government is highly vulnerable to both over-estimating and under-estimating any such information effects.
Given the complexities and contingencies identified, it is suggested that an improved future approach could integrate multiple methods including open-source digital and survey data, with thinking about ‘breakout scales’, all configured around a ‘harm footprint’ model. The point being that it is not possible to gauge the possible effects of different state-linked information manipulation efforts along one consistent dimension, as they are too varied for this. But by comparing and contrasting different operations across a set of common dimensions (reproduction rate; reach; resonance; reactance; and real world) it should be feasible to prioritize them for response actions in relative terms. Such an approach has been successfully modelled as part of this study, based upon several case studies, to demonstrate how some operations may be designed to deliver intense effects for a small number of targeted citizens, whereas others may seek a more subtle form of influence, but across a far larger population.
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