Editor’s note: Ok, you may have read the headline and thought this was going to be a piece about disinformation in the US…. Plenty about that elsewhere on this blog. No, this is how one country in particular (Hungary) is being affected by disinformation coming from sources outside the country but being willingly disseminated by government-controlled sources and how to combat the effects of that. Eastern European countries are battling this every day. We’ve highlighted the work being done by the European Values Center for Security Policy and this article is yet another example of how democratic values are under siege and highlights others that are fighting against that.
The last recommendation is the one I find most interesting: “6. Block the money flow” and I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere in the context of discouraging ad dollars from being spent on sites like Facebook but this is a much more targeted recommendation and one I suspect we’ll see more of.
How to build a country’s resilience when your own government is spreading foreign disinformation? Hungary is a unique case in point to discuss what steps can be taken.
An excerpt:
Although the phenomenon of foreign-led disinformation has existed for almost a century, there is no single solution to counter it, due to the very nature of this method – and will probably never be.
Instead of trying to find a magic recipe, we should rather strive to prepare members of the public, government, defence and security agencies, journalists and others to be less vulnerable to such disinformation and to build up the resilience of society.
Read the whole thing here.