ABSTRACT
The digital information environment features new platforms on which a range of actors can operate. Social media has an immediacy and accessibility that other media lack, and it can be designed to appeal to very specific sections of society. Digital information campaigns are limited as strategic instruments because of the difficulty of calculating in advance the effects that messages will have, either individually or as a series. Social media was expected to pose a challenge to the ability of authoritarian governments and leaders to control the information and ideas available to their populations. Governments should expect that even if damaging online narratives supporting the policies of hostile powers have little basis in reality, they will sometimes take hold. New technologies enabled by artificial intelligence, such as ‘deepfakes’ and large language models, may make disinformation easier to produce and harder to identify.
