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From Russia with Disinformation
The Russians meddled with the Brexit vote. Or in other news, water is wet. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirmed that the Kremlin had indeed interfered in the UK’s largest democratic vote in a generation, something that has essentially been a consensus in political and intelligence circles. Who knew the Russians loved democracy so much?
Burnham’s remarks have put the 2016 referendum back under the microscope. He said he asked officials about Russian interference after entering Downing Street and was told it had taken place. The suggestion is hardly new. The Intelligence and Security Committee’s long-awaited Russia report, published in 2020, criticised the government for failing to properly investigate the potential impact of Russian activity on the referendum.
Yet there is an important distinction between establishing that Moscow tried to influence British political debate and proving that Vladimir Putin was driving the Vote Leave bus. The former is supported by evidence of Russian information operations. The latter remains unproven.
Russia’s methods are hardly sophisticated in principle. While Boris Johnson has a colourful history of socialising with former KGB officer and media proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, there is no credible basis for concluding that the Brexit campaigner and former Prime Minister was a Russian asset. The Kremlin’s more established approach is considerably less Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Identify existing divisions, amplify them, muddy the waters and let the target population do the rest. Immigration, sovereignty and distrust of political elites were already prominent features of the Brexit debate. Moscow needn’t invent these; it merely needed to find ways of exploiting them.
Russian state-backed media, including RT and Sputnik, gave extensive coverage to divisive political issues, while The Guardian’s study showed Russian-linked social media accounts sought to influence online discussion. The Kremlin’s preferred outcome was undoubtedly a Brexit vote, but a weaker, more divided Western Europe, distracted by its own internal quarrels, was also just as appealing. On that score, Britain has hardly covered itself in glory.
The evidence is hardly reassuring. In 2017, researchers at the University of Edinburgh discovered that 419 accounts previously identified by Twitter as linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency had produced 3,468 tweets about Brexit, the EU and migration. On referendum day, these accounts shifted towards retweeting one another, helping amplify their messages. WIRED subsequently examined Russian-linked posts that mixed pro- and anti-Brexit arguments with racist rhetoric and inflammatory commentary about terrorist attacks. The objective appeared less concerned with winning a particular argument than with making the argument as toxic as possible. These findings have been in the public domain for years. The real question is why it has taken so long for the political establishment to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
That brings us to the question of what, precisely, the government intends to do about it. Burnham has backed proposals for a National Centre for Information Defence, intended to battle disinformation campaigns and bot activity. The idea has obvious merit. At present, the government machinery appears better equipped to produce reports about foreign interference than to explain what it has done to prevent it.
Nor should the problem be confined to the referendum. It is estimated that the Kremlin is spending £1.3 billion a year on misinformation campaigns. Russian influence operations have evolved alongside social media, with fake accounts, coordinated messaging and fabricated content making it harder to distinguish genuine public opinion from manufactured outrage. AI material only threatens to accelerate this process, allowing misleading material to be produced and distributed at a scale that would once have required considerably more time, money and manpower.
Another vulnerability that deserves attention is doomscrolling. Russia does not need to persuade Britain that everything is going wrong. It merely needs to ensure that Britons are continuously reminded of it. A steady diet of alarming headlines, inflammatory videos and apparent evidence of national decline can turn the ordinary act of checking the news into an endless exercise of political despair. Add to the mix coordinated accounts artificially amplifying divisive stories, and the result is an online environment in which manufactured outrage competes with genuine public concern.
A Mental Health Foundation poll published in May 2026 found that 23% of UK adults had spent more time scrolling social media and online to cope with anxiety, stress or low mood in the previous month. Among under-35s, the figure climbed to 37%. Meanwhile, in November 2024, Ofcom ( the UK’s regulator and competition authority for the communications industries) found that four in ten British adults had encountered misinformation or deepfake content in the previous four weeks. Neither statistic proves that doomscrolling makes people more vulnerable to Russian propaganda. But together, they paint a picture of a population increasingly reliant on digital platforms for information, routinely exposed to misleading material and, in many cases, turning to more scrolling when they feel distressed. For a Kremlin operation seeking to exploit public anxiety and political division, that is hardly an unwelcome situation.
Britain therefore needs more than another stern statement about Putin’s wickedness. It needs credible evidence, transparent investigations and a coherent strategy for defending democratic debate without turning legitimate political disagreement into a national security concern. That means exposing hostile operations, improving public understanding of disinformation and holding platforms accountable for the ways their systems can amplify coordinated manipulation.
Ultimately, any serious attempt to tackle Russian disinformation must involve the tech companies themselves. Governments can issue stern warnings about the Kremlin until the cows come home, but it is Meta, X and their competitors that control the platforms on which these campaigns thrive. Yet expecting these companies to police themselves voluntarily is like asking a fox to oversee the henhouse. Their business models depend on engagement and anger. Fear and division are extremely effective at holding an audience's attention. If governments are serious about defending democracy, they must move beyond polite requests for cooperation and impose meaningful transparency requirements and consequences for persistent failures. The Kremlin may be pulling the strings, but Silicon Valley is providing much of the stage.
If Burnham’s intervention achieves anything, it should be to ensure that the next time the Kremlin tries to exploit the divisions of a Western democracy, the response involves something more substantial than a belated inquiry and politicians expressing their profound concern. The time for coasting is now over. In an increasingly contested geopolitical landscape, where disinformation has become the soup of the day for authoritarian regimes, the greatest gift the West can give its adversaries is to keep leaving the door open and acting surprised when they walk through it. But I suppose who doesn’t love an inquiry?
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