Russia knows how to sell a lie. Britain must learn how to stop one

I launched the teen show Skins on MySpace back when a social network still felt like a novelty, the first time it was used to market TV in the world. I spent every year since working out why one message gets carried by millions of people while another often sinks without a trace.

So when Andy Burnham stood up at the United Nations on Tuesday night and announced a National Centre for Information Defence, I listened as someone who knows how that machinery works, after a career operating it for brands.

He is right about the scale. Burnham said the Kremlin spends £1.3 billion a year manipulating information through bots, fake websites and forged branding of British organisations. The proposed centre will bring intelligence agencies, police and the platforms together to "detect, attribute and disrupt" hostile-state attacks, and I think it is overdue.

But anyone who has worked in advertising knows that finding the lie is only part of the battle. The most effective disinformation works like the best advertising, through a drip, drip, drip of the same suggestion repeated until it stops sounding like a claim and starts sounding like something everybody knows.

Psychologists have understood this since the late 70s, when researchers found that the more often we hear a statement, the truer it feels, because familiar things are easier for our brain to process; then we mistake this for accuracy. Later studies showed it works even on people who already know the right answer.

Hostile states borrowed that playbook and added the one Steve Bannon made famous, flooding the zone with so much noise from so many directions that nobody can hold on to what's true. In practice, it means one narrative arriving everywhere all at once, dressed differently for every audience.

My ageing parents might see it on the front page of a tabloid in their village corner shop from a masthead they've trusted all their lives. While my teen son could get the same story on a loop on his TikTok, cut to music, and by Sunday morning three generations of one family have been handed an identical picture without any of them choosing it. The cleverest part is that each comes away certain the feeling was their own, not that they've been sold to.

The tragic events of Southport showed how fast false information can move, even without an established link to a hostile state. Within hours of three little girls being murdered in July 2024, an invented name, "Ali al-Shakati", was circulating online, alongside false claims that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived by boat. Posts on X speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, a refugee or foreigner generated an estimated 27 million impressions. Merseyside Police confirmed the name was false and that the suspect was born in Cardiff, yet the following evening a mob attacked the town's mosque.

The correction was out there but simply couldn't compete, because the lie had never really been about a name. It played into existing fears and anti-immigration narratives. A fact-check alone may struggle to compete with a story that reinforces what people already believe. The accusation gets shared by millions and the correction turns up later, reads like small print and reaches far fewer people.

So Burnham's new centre will need to do more than detect and disrupt hostile-state attacks. It will also need to understand how those attacks gain traction, and think more like a good agency.

It should start where every decent campaign starts, with the audience, asking who is being targeted and what they feel, whether that's pride, fear or the sense of being ignored. Burnham said himself that people struggling with the cost of living, and young people out of work, are more exposed, and that is a clear brief.

It should also get there first. Cambridge researchers worked with Google on short YouTube ads that taught people to recognise manipulation techniques, scapegoating and fear-mongering among them, without arguing about any single claim. A subsequent campaign in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia aimed to get ahead of false stories about Ukrainian refugees, with research indicating viewers became better at spotting manipulation.

It should borrow trust rather than try to manufacture it, because few people change their minds on a government press office's say-so, while plenty listen to the local paper, their football coach, their GP or that friendly voice on the radio on the drive home. And it should fill the silence. At Southport, the police were legally limited in what they could say, and this blank space went to whoever shouted first, then most. Every public body needs a plan for the crucial first hour of a crisis, as this can set the entire temperature and tone.

Finding the lie matters. Disrupting the people spreading it matters. But neither is enough if we fail to understand why the message takes hold in the first place. Burnham's new centre needs to understand not just what people are being told, but why they are willing to believe it. You do not counter a flood by issuing a denial. You need to understand what is feeding it, and how to stop it from spreading.

____________________

James Kirkham is the Founder of ICONIC.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk