How disinformation attacks targeted the Scottish election

Five weeks after Scotland went to the polls, French authorities revealed an orchestrated plot that aimed to influence the outcome of the Holyrood election.

Hundreds of “inauthentic” online accounts had been mobilised to disseminate more than 1,000 comments directed at, mainly, John Swinney, the SNP and the Scottish Government between January and May. All were in English and had been orchestrated by an Israeli firm, BlackCore, French government agency Viginum said, and candidates in France, Angola, Togo and the US had also been targeted in their respective elections.

Those on the receiving end were critical of Israel’s actions in Palestine and the firm wiped its web presence as the news filtered out.

Responding from the US, where he was attending the start of Scotland’s ill-fated World Cup campaign, Swinney said the situation was “deeply concerning”. “It is clear that orchestrated disinformation campaigns and foreign election interference are issues which need to be taken seriously,” he said, and “urgent steps need to be taken to counter the threat of foreign online political interference and ensure that our democratic processes are not undermined.”

Asked several weeks later what further discussions the Scottish Government had had on the matter with its counterparts in Paris or London, a spokesperson did not say, instead reminding Holyrood of the FM’s call for “urgent steps” to be taken by the UK Government, which has powers over national security.

Viginum’s report may have been worrying, but its findings were not altogether shocking – after all, MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee had just published the findings of their inquiry into disinformation and “how malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy”. “State and non-state actors are increasingly weaponising information to influence opinions and sow division,” the committee stated. “As such, disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference should be viewed as an existential threat to the UK and its interests overseas.”

The UK Government should set up its own answer to Viginum, it said, amongst several other recommendations.

Ministers said they “partially” agreed. “We recognise these conclusions and have been working across government to strongly cohere the government’s approach to address this pressing national security challenge,” the Labour administration’s formal response stated.

The committee’s findings themselves followed the publication of the Rycroft Review, a significant piece of work centred on countering foreign financial influence and interference in UK politics. Commissioned in December, it was carried out by the former permanent secretary, Philip Rycroft, in the wake of the Nathan Gill scandal. 

The former leader of Reform UK in Wales became the first politician to be jailed under the Bribery Act in November when he was sentenced to 10 and a half years for taking money to talk up Russia.

The 52-year-old is understood to have received up to £40,000 in support of pro-Moscow politicians in Ukraine while he was still an MEP. The money came from Oleg Voloshyn, a man who the US government called a “pawn” of Russian secret services and who was acting on behalf of former oligarch Victor Medvedchuk, a “close friend” of Putin. 

Many of Rycroft’s 17 recommendations related to finance, and former prime minister Keir Starmer announced a ban on cryptocurrency donations to political parties in response, as well as an £100,000 annual cap on any donations from British citizens living abroad. “The UK will now be a world-leader in stamping out this growing threat to freedom,” said then UK local government minister Steve Reed, who commissioned the review. “We will stop hostile foreign states and others who want to weaken and exploit the UK by stoking division and hatred... It is our patriotic duty to safeguard the British people’s right to freely choose their own government.” 

But there are no easy answers to doing that. After all, even Rycroft pointed out that “politics has always crossed national borders” and “domestic politics cannot sit isolated from wider political movements and ideas”.

And yet it’s now widely accepted that ‘fake news’ is affecting domestic politics. What’s less certain is how big the impact is. 

Professor Simon Burnett, an information scientist researching ‘dark knowledge’ at Robert Gordon University, says there’s a responsibility for the Scottish Government to respond and build systems that can help citizens distinguish fact from misinformation, which is spread unintentionally, disinformation, which purposefully attempts to twist narratives, and malinformation, in which facts are deployed out of context to mislead. 

Without this, he says, we create a landscape where the actors who “shout the loudest” succeed, regardless of whether they are lying to the public. “I’d like to see Scotland taking a lot of ownership in this debate and saying we can start to set out what these things are, even if we are still looking to Westminster for a steer on the mechanisms of responding to things like BlackCore,” he says.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the creation of a Viginum equivalent, he argues – because devolution means that may not work. “Can we have a national body? We have got increasing cries for independence in Wales, for reunification in Ireland, and the Scottish independence debate carries on – so you might find the devolved governments may have serious concerns about developing that.”

Burnett is “more in favour of giving people the skills to be able to identify” forms of manipulation for themselves. That’s easier at the younger end, he says, and colleagues are working on programmes for schools. But adults can also fall prey to fake news in all its forms, he continues – something that’s less well recognised. “We are in quite a dangerous position as an information society. For many years in information science it was all about evidence, clarity, transparency, and actually what’s happening is we are seeing that information ecosystem, the bubbles that surround organisations or groups, becoming polluted.”

Rycroft said activity “financed by foreign states and non-state actors that seizes on and amplifies divisive content” was his “main concern. This includes the use of fake or misleading content to effect public debate and policy decisions or to discredit figures. Doing so using social media is a “relatively cheap way of interfering with the democratic process of other countries”, he said, and because it does not require money to spent directly within the UK, “stemming the flow of finance to this type of activity from the UK is next to impossible”. 

“The focus has to be,” he wrote, “on removing this content from social media.”
But such platforms thrive on divisive content, Burnett says, and the conflict that results from it “creates the currency” the sites need to attract users. “They thrive on it,” he says.

Distortion and manipulation “are things political propaganda has always done,” he goes on, “but the big difference is the shifts in the production of disinformation moving away from familiar state actors. Anyone can now do it, and for any reason. 

“We need to have much better awareness of what the impacts are. They have real life, very dangerous impacts. They will impact people’s voting decisions.”

The UK’s new National Security (State Threats) Act is supposed to deal with some of this, giving the home secretary new powers to act against foreign state organisations and linked groups deemed a threat either nationally or to specific communities. 

The Scottish Parliament gave its consent to the fast-tracked legislation before recess and the UK Government says it will beef-up the abilities of police and intelligence agencies to “disrupt and deter” nefarious activity.

That may not cover campaigns such as that by BlackCore, however. French authorities did not link its Scottish election activity to any government, or indeed any client. 

But last year, the director general of MI5 said the UK had experienced a 35 per cent rise in state threat activity, year-on-year. And the government’s strategic defence review published last summer said the UK is “under daily attack” via “aggressive” acts like “information manipulation”, including political interference, electoral interference, and disinformation campaigns. The national security strategy that followed warned that such actions “threaten social cohesion and seek to erode public trust”, particularly through “malign” use of social media, with the aim of “stoking tensions between generations, genders and ethnic groups”.

It is of course not only a UK issue. In a January report, the World Economic Forum listed “misinformation and disinformation” as the second worst short-term risk facing the world and one of the strongest links to “societal polarisation”.

If greater information literacy is the answer, Ofcom research published in April found that four in 10 adults aged 18 or over had encountered “false information” online, rising to 56 per cent for social media users. For the 16-34 age bracket, the figure was 65 per cent. Throw in AI and there’s ever-more potential for misleading content. 

With a year to go until the French presidential election, prime minister Sebastien Lecornu recently convened talks with political leaders there to discuss the potential threat of foreign interference. “The entire political class” could be vulnerable to this, he said. 

Authorities have stepped up responses since 2017, when Russia was said to be behind the release of emails from within the Macron campaign. The hack emerged in the final stage of the drive for votes. 

Nicolas Roche, secretary-general for defence and national security, has said activity related to recent municipal contests may have been a “dress rehearsal” for next year’s main event. Viginum, considered amongst Europe’s leading specialist agencies, is better-resourced than many of its counterparts to respond to the threat. 

In a command paper published in March, the UK Government said it would “increase and improve mechanisms for join-up across government to tackle foreign information manipulation and interference directed at the UK and our partners overseas, from whose experience we can learn important lessons”, with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to lead that work. At home, the paper said the UK Government would “need to work closely” with devolved leaderships in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Those relationships themselves may be about to change as Keir Starmer exits Number 10 and Andy Burnham’s term begins. 

There is one year before Scotland is next scheduled to go to the polls in the local government elections and it remains to be seen whether that contest will also attract external disinformation campaigns. But given recent experience, authorities would be best advised to prepare now.